Grounds of Pragmatic Realism: Hegel's Internal Critique and Reconstruction of Kant's Critical Philosophy 9789004360167, 9789004360174

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Grounds of Pragmatic Realism

Critical Studies in German Idealism Series Editor Paul G. Cobben Advisory Board Simon Critchley – Paul Cruysberghs – Rózsa Erzsébet – Garth Green Vittorio Hösle – Francesca Menegoni – Martin Moors – Michael Quante Ludwig Siep – Timo Slootweg – Klaus Vieweg

VOLUME 20

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/csgi

Grounds of Pragmatic Realism Hegel’s Internal Critique and Reconstruction of Kant’s Critical Philosophy

By

Kenneth R. Westphal

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017958414

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1878-9986 isbn 978-90-04-36016-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-36017-4 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Dieses Buch widme ich aus tiefstem Herzen meinen lieben und verehrten treuen Kollegen, vor allem Bernd Ludwig, Andree Hahmann, Sami Pihlström, Martin Carrier, Michael Wolff und Matthias Kaufmann, die mich bei einem beruflichen Engpass in den Jahren 2011 bis 2014 durch Gastgeberschaft, Stipendien und eine Vertretungsstelle großzügig unterstützt und gefördert haben, so dass ich in dieser Zeit weiter erfolgreich philosophieren konnte. Kuruçeºme, Ýstanbul, 1. September 2017

Contents Acknowledgements Note on Sources and Citations 1 Introduction

PART I:

ix xi 1

HEGEL’S CRITICAL RECONSIDERATIONS OF METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY

2 Henry Harris and the Spirit of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology

25

3 Idealism: Transcendental or Absolute?

57

4 Hegel’s Early Critique of Kant’s Critical Foundations of Physics

77

5 The Transcendental, Formal and Material Conditions of the ‘I Think’

89

6 The Fate of ‘the’ Intuitive Intellect in Hegel’s Philosophy

109

7 Hegel’s Post-Kantian Epistemological Reorientation

127

PART II: HEGEL’S CRITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY IN THE 1807 PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 8 Hegel’s Manifold Response to Scepticism in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit

143

9 Hegel’s Pragmatic Critique and Reconstruction of Kant’s System of Principles I: The 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit

163

10 Hegel’s Solution to the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion

181

11 Hegel’s Transcendental Proof of Mental Content Externalism

205

12 Mutual Recognition and Rational Justification in Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit

231

13 Mutual Recognition and Rational Justification in Substantive Domains 265

viii

PART III: HEGEL’S SYSTEMATIC CRITICAL PRAGMATIC REALISM 14 Hegel’s Critique of Intuitionism: Encyclopaedia §§61–78

297

15 Analytic Philosophy and the Long Tail of Scientia: Hegel and the Historicity of Philosophy

319

16 Hegel’s Pragmatic Critique and Reconstruction of Kant’s System of Principles II: the Science of Logic and Encyclopaedia

349

17 Science and the Philosophers

373

18 Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: Its Aims, Scope and Significance

395

19 Cognitive Psychology, Intelligence and the Realisation of the Concept in Hegel’s Encyclopaedic Epistemology

417

20 Robust Pragmatic Realism in Hegel’s Critical Epistemology: Synthetic Necessary Truths

439

21 Autonomy, Freedom and Embodiment: Hegel’s Critique of Contemporary Biologism

471

22 Appendix

493

Analytical Contents Bibliography Index of Names Index of Subjects

495 505 539 541

Acknowledgements This book draws upon materials previously published in articles listed below, variously improved, revised, augmented and integrated into the present study. I am grateful to each of the editors, journals and presses who have permitted me to recast this material here, and thank them (and their anonymous referees) for so supporting my research. I am also grateful to the several organisers of conferences to which drafts of these chapters were presented, to their audiences for discussion and to Paul Cobben, editor of the series in which this volume appears, for his keen interest in my heterodox scholarship and helpful comments on my penultimate draft. Howard Stein’s exemplary research has been an inspiration and model from the beginning: I had the luck to find his ‘Newtonian Space-Time’ (1967) as an undergraduate, and the still better luck to have some opportunities to discuss with him our interests in Kant. Tom Nickles gave me a great start in philosophy of science. Various conversations and correspondence on related matters with Martin Carrier, Bill Harper, Paolo Parrini, Bob Scharff, Rein Vihalemm and Michael Wolff have been very helpful. As will be evident, Cinzia Ferrini’s incisive research on Hegel’s philosophy of nature has been invaluable. My new institutional home has been most welcoming and supportive in all regards; my thanks again to Lucas Thorpe for getting this ball rolling! Completing this book was partially supported by the Boðaziçi Üniversitesi Research Fund (BAP), grant code: 9761.1 Thank you, one and all, for your kind interest, generous support and ever-helpful advice!

‘Kant, Hegel, and the Transcendental Material Conditions of Possible Experience’. Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 33 (1996):23–41. ‘Harris, Hegel, and the Truth about Truth’. In: G. Browning, ed., Hegel’s Phenomenology: A Reappraisal (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 23–29. ‘Hegel’s Attitude Toward Jacobi in the “Third Attitude of Thought Toward Objectivity”’. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 27.1 (1989):135–156. ‘Hegel’s Solution to the Dilemma of the Criterion’. The History of Philosophy Quarterly 5.2 (1988):173–88; rev. ed. in: J. Stewart, ed., The Phenomenology of Spirit Reader: A Collection of Critical and Interpretive Essays (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 76–91. ‘On Hegel’s Early Critique of Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science’. In: S. Houlgate, ed., Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 137–166. 1

In Turkish, ‘ð’ is silent and stresses the preceding vowel; ‘ç’ is pronounced like the English ‘ch’.

x ‘Kant, Hegel, and the Fate of “the” Intuitive Intellect’. In: S. Sedgwick, ed., The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 283–305. „Die Vielseitigkeit von Hegels Auseinandersetzung mit Skeptizismus in der Phänomenologie des Geistes“. Jahrbuch für Hegel-Forschungen 8/9 (2002–03):145–173. ‘Hegel’s Manifold Response to Scepticism in the Phenomenology of Spirit’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103 (2003):149–178. ‘Science and the Philosophers’. In: H. Koskinen, S. Pihlström, and R. Vilkko, eds., Science: A Challenge to Philosophy? (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2006), 125–152. ‘Mutual Recognition and Rational Justification in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’. Dialogue: Canadian Journal of Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie 48.4 (2009):753–799. ‘Does Kant’s Opus Postumum Anticipate Hegel’s Absolute Idealism?’ In: E.-O. Onnasch, ed., Immanuel Kants Metaphysik der Natur. Naturphilosophie und das Opus postumum (Berlin: deGruyter, 2009), 357–383. ‘Analytic Philosophy and the Long Tail of Scientia: Hegel and the Historicity of Philosophy’. The Owl of Minerva 42.1–2 (2010/11):1–18. „Urteilskraft, gegenseitige Anerkennung und rationale Rechtfertigung“. In: H.-D. Klein, ed., Ethik als prima philosophia? (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2011), 171–193. ‘Self-Consciousness, Anti-Cartesianism and Cognitive Semantics in Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology’. In: S. Houlgate and M. Baur, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Hegel (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 68–90. ‘Substantive Philosophy, Infallibilism and the Critique of Metaphysics: Hegel and the Historicity of Philosophical Reason’. In: L. Herzog, ed., Hegel’s Thought in Europe: Currents, Cross-Currents and Undercurrents (Baisingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), 192–220. ‘Rational Justification and Mutual Recognition in Substantive Domains’. Dialogue: Canadian Journal of Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie 53.1 (2014):57–96. ‘Finitude, Rational Justification and Mutual Recognition’. In: C. Krijnen, ed., Recognition – German Idealism as an Ongoing Challenge (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 235–251. ‘Autonomy, Freedom and Embodiment: Hegel’s Critique of Contemporary Biologism’. The Hegel Bulletin 35.1 (2014):56–83. ‘Hegel’s Pragmatic Critique and Reconstruction of Kant’s System of Principles in the 1807Phenomenology of Spirit’. Hegel Bulletin 36.2 (2015):159–186. ‘Hegel’s Pragmatic Critique and Reconstruction of Kant’s System of Principles in the Logic and Encyclopaedia’. Dialogue: Canadian Journal of Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie 54.2 (2015):333–369. ‘Cognitive Psychology, Intelligence and the Realisation of the Concept in Hegel’s Anti-Cartesian Epistemology’. In: S. Herrmann-Sinai and L. Ziglioli eds., Hegel’s Philosophical Psychology (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 191–213.

Note on Sources and Citations Mixed methods are used for short, clear citations. Collected editions of primary sources and main works are cited by initials listed below. Kant’s and Hegel’s works are cited by the initials of their German titles. In general, volume numbers precede a colon, page numbers follow, and as needed line numbers follow page numbers after a decimal point. I only use abbreviations for the critical editions of Kant’s (GS) or Hegel’s (GW) works where needed to avoid ambiguity. A few secondary sources are cited by short abbreviations listed below; otherwise citations are by author (date); full details are listed in the Bibliography. For first editions or their reprints I cite the original date of publication; otherwise I cite the date of the edition used. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Multi-volume works or editions are cited by volume:page numbers. ‘§’ is used for sections of a text so numbered by its author; ‘¶’ indicates paragraph, usually numbered by an editor or translator; ‘n.’ indicates a footnote or endnote. Where one ‘volume’ divides into separately bound parts, the number of the part follows the number of the volume after a decimal point, as also journal volume, issue numbers (e.g., 2.1:289.14–28). Reliable translations provide the pagination of the critical edition of the original. Where needed, page or paragraph numbers to an English translation follow after a slash (‘/’) the reference to the original. Occasionally ‘chapter’ is abbreviated by ‘chapt.’. Where parts or chapters of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology are cited, his own numbers and sub-divisions are used.

Primary Sources SEXTUS EMPIRICUS Opera Sexti Empirici Opera, H. Mutschmann, J. Mau and K. Janáèek, eds., 3 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1912, 1954. Works Works, 4 vols., Greek/English, Rev. R.G. Bury, tr. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (Loeb Library), 1933. PH

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, in: Opera 1, cited by Book.¶ numbers; Bury, tr., in: Works 1.

AL

Against the Logicians, in: Opera 2, cited by Book.¶ numbers; Bury, tr., in: Works 2.

xi

x ii

DESCARTES AT

CSM

Oevres de Descartes, 13 vols., rev. ed., C. Adam and P. Tannery, eds. Paris: Vrin/C.N.R.S., 1964–; cited as ‘AT’ by volume:page numbers. Œuvres complètes de René Descartes, A. Gombay, et al., eds.; Connaught Descartes Project, University of Toronto. Charlottesville, Va: InteLex Corp, 2001. (Provides references to AT.) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols., J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch and A. Kenny trs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, 1991. (Provides references to AT.)

Med. Meditations on First Philosophy, with objections and replies; AT 7. Individual Meditations cited as ‘Med.’; Objections by ‘Obj.’; ‘Replies’ by ‘Rep.’. Prin. The Principles of Philosophy; AT 8. Cited by Part:§, thus: Prin. 1:23. LOCKE Es

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London, 1690; P.H. Nidditch, ed., Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975. HUME

En

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In: P.H. Nidditch, ed., Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975; cited by Book.Part. §.¶ numbers thus: En 1.4.2.21.

T

A Treatise of Human Nature, D.F. Norton and M.J. Norton, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; corrected ed. 2001; cited as ‘T’ by Book.Part. §.¶ numbers thus: T 1.4.2.21. Hume’s Appendix is cited as ‘App.’. KANT

GS

Kants Gesammelte Schriften, 29 vols. Königlich Preußische (now Deutsche) Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: G. Reimer, now De Gruyter, 1902–; cited by volume:page numbers, except for KdrV. Kant im Kontext III – Komplettausgabe, 2nd ed., K. Worm and S. Boeck, eds. Berlin: InfoSoftWare, Release 6/2009. (Provides references to GS.) The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation, 18 vols., P. Guyer and A. Wood, gen. eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992–2015. (Provides references to GS.)2

KdrV Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1st ed., 1781 (‘A’), GS 4; 2nd ed., 1787 (‘B’), GS 3. The Critique of Pure Reason. P. Guyer and A. Wood, trs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 2

To aid locating particular works of Kant’s in this edition, or specific passages in them, a comprehensive Table of Contents for this edition is available (gratis) on my website: http://boun.academia.edu/KennethRWestphal/Reference-Materials.

xiii

Prol. Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaftlich wird auftreten können. (1783), GS 4. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as Science, G. Zöller, ed.; P.G. Lucas and G. Zöller, trs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. MadN Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (1786), GS 4. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, M. Friedman, ed. and tr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. KdU Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), GS 5. Critique of the Power of Judgment, P. Guyer, tr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. FICHTE FGA J.G. Fichte–Gesamtausgabe, 42 vols. E. Fuchs, H. Gliwitzky, R. Lauth and P. Schneider, eds. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann holzboog, 1965–2012. JACOBI Werke Gesammelte Werke, 4 vols., F. Köppen and F. Roth eds. Leipzig: Fleischer, 1812–1825. DH

David Hume Über den Glauben. Breslau: Loewe, 1787; rpt: New York: Garland, 1983; author’s rev. 2nd ed. in: Werke, 2.

SB

Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelsohn. 1785; rpt. in: Werke 4, Parts 1, 2.

Briefe F.H. Jacobis Briefe an F. Bouterwek, W. Mejer, ed. Göttingen: n.p., 1868. The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, G. di Giovanni, ed. and tr.. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994. (Provides references to the above editions.) SCHELLING Werke Schellings Werke, 17 vols., M. Schröter, ed. München: Beck, 1958. HKA Werke: Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, W.G. Jacobs and W. Schieche, eds. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1976–. Heath System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), P. Heath, tr. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978. H&L The Science of Knowledge with the First and Second Introductions, P. Heath and J. Lachs, trs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

xiv

HEGEL GW

Gesammelte Werke, 31 vols. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Hamburg: Meiner, 1968–2017. (Pagination provided in reliable translations.)

Vor.

Vorlesungen. Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte, 17 vols. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Hamburg: Meiner, 1983–2007.

MM

Werke in 20 Bände, K. Moldenhauer and K. Michel, eds. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970. Hegels Werk im Kontext, K. Worm, ed. Berlin: InfoSoftWare, 5th Release 2009. (Provides references to MM.)

D

„Differenz des Fichte’schen und Schelling’schen Systems der Philosophie“. Kritisches Journal der Philosophie 1.1 (1801):111–184; rpt. GW 4:3–92. The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, H.S. Harris and W. Cerf, trs. Albany: SUNY Press, 1977.

Skept. „Verhältniß des Skepticismus zur Philosophie, Darstellung seiner verschiedenen Modificationen, und Vergleichung des neuesten mit dem alten“. Kritisches Journal der Philosophie 1.2 (1801):1–74; rpt. GW 4:197–238. ‘Relationship of Scepticism to Philosophy, Exposition of its Different Modifications and Comparison to the Latest Form with the Ancient One’. H.S. Harris, tr., in: H.S. Harris and G. di Giovanni, eds., Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism (rev. ed., Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett Publishing Co., 2000), 311–362. G&W „Glauben und Wissen oder die Reflexionsphilosophie der Subjectivität, in der Vollständigkeit ihrer Formen, als Kantische, Jacobische, und Fichtesche Philosophie“. Kritisches Journal der Philosophie 2.1 (1802):3–189; rpt. GW 4:313–414. Faith and Knowledge, W. Cerf and H.S. Harris, trs. Albany: SUNY Press, 1977. L&M The Jena System, 1804–5: Logic and Metaphysics, J.W. Burbidge, G. di Giovanni and H.S. Harris, trs. and eds. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986. PhdG Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807), GW 9. The Phenomenology of Spirit, T. Pinkard, tr. New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming (draft: 2013). Cited by consecutive paragraph numbers (¶) correctly provided by the translator. ‘The Beginning of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: Introduction (Einleitung) and Consciousness: Sense Certainty, Perception, Force and Understanding’, K.R. Westphal, ed. and tr. The Owl of Minerva 47.1 (2015–16): 1–67. Cited according to GW 9 and by consecutive paragraph numbers (¶), according to Pinkard’s translation (previous item).

xv

WdL Wissenschaft der Logik (1812–16, 21832), 2 vols.; GW 11, 12, 21 (Bk. 1, 2nd ed.); cited by Hegel’s two volumes (‘I’, ‘II’) and by vol.:page.line numbers of GW. Hegel’s Science of Logic, G. di Giovanni, tr. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Provides references to GW 11, 21.) Enz.

Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 3 editions: 1817, 1827, 1830; GW 19, 20; ‘R’ for Remark (Anmerkung), text Hegel published; ‘Z’ for Zusatz (addition), taken from student lecture transcripts. The third edition is cited, unless otherwise indicated. Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic (Enz. Part 1, 3d ed.), T. Geraets, W. Suchting, and H.S. Harris, trs. Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett Publishing Co., 1991. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (Enz. Part 2, 3d ed.), 3 vols., M.J. Petry, ed. and tr. London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Humanities Press, 1970. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (Enz. Part 3, 3d ed.), W. Wallace, A.V. Miller and M. Inwood, trs. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2007.

Rph

Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, oder Staatswissenschaft und Naturrecht im Grundrisse (1821), GW 14, 3 Parts. – Philosophical Outlines of Justice; cited as ‘Rph’ by §, with suffixes: R, Z, n. (notes are Hegel’s own).

VGP

Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, P. Garniron und W. Jaeschke, eds. Vorlesungen, vols. 6–9. Hamburg: Meiner, 1989.

H&S Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols., E.S. Haldane and F.H. Simson, trs. New York: Humanities, 1955. B

Lectures on the History of Philosophy: The Lectures of 1825–1826, 3 vols. R.F. Brown, ed., R.F. Brown and J.M. Stewart, trs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, 1994, 2006.

Briefe Briefe von und an Hegel, 4 vols., 3rd ed. J. Hoffmeister, ed. Hamburg: Meiner, 1981. B&S Hegel: The Letters, C. Butler and C. Seiler, trs. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984. PEIRCE CP

The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 6 vols. C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss and A. Burks, eds. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931–1935, 1958; cited by vol.:¶ number.

WCSP Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, 7 vols. (to date). N. Houser, gen. ed. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1982–. RUSSELL CP

The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, 29 vols. J. Passmore, gen. ed., London: Routledge, 1994; cited as ‘CP’ by volume:page numbers.

xv i

LEWIS MWO Mind and the World Order. New York: Scribner’s 1929; rpt. with author’s corrections, New York: Dover, 1956. AKV An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1946. SELLARS Sellars’ articles are cited by ¶; within his books, chapters are cited by number.¶ thus: ‘SM 3.23' designates chapt. 3, par. 23, in Science and Metaphysics. CDCM ‘Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities’, 1958.

CE

‘The Concept of Emergence’, with Paul Mehle, 1956.

EAE ‘Empiricism and Abstract Entities’, 1963. EPM ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, 1956. IM

‘Inference and Meaning’, 1953.

ITSA ‘Is There a Synthetic A Priori?’, 1953. PHM ‘Phenomenalism’, 1963. SK

‘The Structure of Knowledge’, 1971.

SM

Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes, 1968. VAN FRAASSEN

SI

The Scientific Image. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980.

ES

The Empirical Stance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

SRPP Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Secondary Sources HL

Henry S. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder, 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass., Hackett Publishing Co., 1997.

HER K.R. Westphal, Hegel’s Epistemology: A Study of the Aim and Method of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989. KTPR ——, Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction 1 HEGEL AN EPISTEMOLOGIST? Hegel is not typically regarded as great epistemologist. So much, at least, is uncontroversial; that is the first and very likely also the last uncontroversial claim advanced in this study. Hegel’s remarks on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy and in the conceptual preliminaries to his Encyclopaedia, appear inept and understandably have drawn criticism from Kant’s scholars – though a sympathetic interpretation of them is provided by Sedgwick (2012). Primarily interested in metaphysics, history, religion or politics, few of Hegel’s scholars attempt to address his epistemology, and those attempts generally are unsatisfactory.1 I submit that two ideas, common to Hegel’s devotés and detractors alike, are responsible for much misunderstanding. One idea is that Hegel’s ‘absolute’ idealism is somehow an extension or ‘radicalisation’ of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Kant’s epistemology only gained limited entré into analytic epistemology by jettisoning Transcendental Idealism; ‘radicalising’ Transcendental Idealism thus appears to be the wrong next epistemological step. The second idea is that Hegel’s alternative to Kant’s epistemology involves intellectual intuition, which is just as worrisome as radicalising Transcendental Idealism: both apparently renounce epistemological sense and sobriety. Though deeply embedded in lore about Hegel, and defended prominently in recent literature (e.g., McDowell 2001, Franks 2005), I shall argue that both ideas are false, and that Hegel had rejected them both not later than Winter 1804, which is to say, prior to composing the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. More importantly, Hegel had significant reasons for criticising and rejecting both ideas, which he developed in his Jena articles. More important still, those critical reasons clearly show that by 1806 Hegel was thinking very cogently well outside the epistemological box into which his views have been placed – if not locked – by critics and fans alike. By the end of 1804 Hegel had already rejected, for excellent reasons, many standard presumptions of his expositors, not only of the 1807 Phenomenology but also of The Science of Logic (1812, 1832). Finally, I shall argue that Hegel’s reasons for rejecting those 1

Cf., e.g., Westphal (1999), Eason (2007), de Laurentiis (2007), Ferrini (2011b), James (2009), Stern (2013), and below, §42. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_00�

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views contain genuine epistemological insights which remain informative today. The basic, philosophically significant connections between Kant’s and Hegel’s views are not metaphysical, but methodological; they concern the proper philosophical critique of rational, justificatory judgment, in both theoretical and in practical philosophy. This study focuses on theoretical philosophy, namely, on epistemology and history and philosophy of science.2 One of Hegel’s central findings is that Kant’s Transcendental Idealism is subject to a sound, strictly internal refutation. That finding poses the question, whether, how or to what extent Kant’s Critical account of cognitive judgment can be refurbished in defensible, illuminating form, independently of Transcendental Idealism? This question was addressed both by Neo-Kantians and by analytic Kantians, though with limited success. I shall argue that Hegel answered this question far better than they, because they neglected Hegel’s key critical strategy: the strictly internal critique of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Though he did not detail such a critique in the direct way which might attract the attention it deserves, by 1802 Hegel recognised two crucial defects within Kant’s Critical Philosophy which directly reveal the untenability of Transcendental Idealism. Indeed, these two defects highlight important ways in which to reconstruct Kant’s critique of rational, justificatory judgment on a realist basis. Hegel did so, starting with the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, and continuing through his mature encyclopaedic philosophy. Hegel’s epistemology is thus the first, and most sophisticated and adequate forms of pragmatic realism – the philosophical view urgently needed today. The aims of this study are philosophical and scholarly, they are systematic and historical, and they are epistemological and methodological throughout. For excellent reasons, Hegel recognised that the standard options regarding the character and scope of human knowledge are deeply flawed: empiricism, rationalism, scepticism, relativism, historicism, intellectual intuitionism and Transcendental Idealism. Accordingly, Hegel critically re-examined Kant’s Critical philosophy, disentangling Kant’s landmark insights into rational judgment and justification from his flawed Transcendental Idealism. Hegel’s critics and fans alike have presumed an inadequate, incomplete list of alternatives, thus missing Hegel’s very sophisticated Critical pragmatic realism. ‘Realism’ regarding empirical knowledge is the view that the objects of empirical knowledge – physical particulars, events, processes, structures or other natural phenomena, of whatever scale – exist and have characteristics unto themselves, regardless of what we may say, think or believe about them. The pragmatic aspects of empirical knowledge concern pragmatic, historical and social as2 This study focuses upon different relations between Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophies than those examined by Sedgwick (2012).

3

pects of our development, use, revision or replacement of the conceptual classifications we use to investigate, understand and explain natural phenomena, and the social and historical aspects of our examination, revision and assessment of our conceptual classifications of empirical phenomena, and of our use of them. Because Hegel’s reconstruction and augmentation of Kant’s Critical philosophy, sans transcendental idealism, is the central topic of this study, below I present a conspectus of Kant’s Critical philosophy (§§2, 3). To identify and assess Hegel’s Critical epistemological achievements, this study then divides into three PARTS: I

Hegel’s Critical Reconsiderations of Metaphysics and Epistemology.

II Hegel’s Critical Epistemology in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. III Hegel’s Systematic Critical Pragmatic Realism. PART I, containing chapters 2–7, examines several critical steps Hegel takes in his Jena essays which set his epistemological agenda in the Phenomenology of Spirit. His agenda results from identifying some key shortcomings of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, and discovering that any tenable account of knowledge must address the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion. Chapter 2 considers Henry Harris’ magisterial commentary, Hegel’s Ladder. So doing provides a conspectus of much of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology, and shows that my understanding of Hegel’s epistemology is not altogether heterodox. As noted in due course, my understanding of Hegel’s epistemology accords with, and also augments, findings by Burbidge, Falkenburg, Ferrini, Moretto, Rau, Renault, Stekeler, Varnier and Wolff. Considering Hegel’s Ladder also shows what aspects of Hegel’s Phenomenology I set aside in order to examine, reconstruct and defend Hegel’s epistemology, and why his epistemology deserves such attention, both for systematic philosophical and for historical, textual and hermeneutical reasons: interpreting, understanding and assessing a philosophical view or analysis is greatly facilitated by examining how its proponent proposes to justify it, and how well s/he succeeds in this crucial regard. Reconsidering Harris’ landmark achievements in Hegel’s Ladder likewise indicates many shortcomings of subsequent research, due to pervasive neglect of Harris’ magnum opus. Chapter 3 critically examines and rejects two common suppositions, that Hegel’s ‘absolute’ idealism develops out of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, and that Hegel’s mature philosophy appeals to some form of intellectual intuition. By 1802 Hegel recognised that, in its own terms, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism cannot justify Newtonian physics because Kant’s analysis fails to rule out – as it must, by its own argumentative design – the possibility of hylozoism. The grounds summarised in chapter 3 for rejecting those two suppo-

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sitions are detailed in chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4 shows that Hegel recognised that, in principle, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism can provide neither transcendental nor metaphysical ‘foundations’ for Newtonian physics. Kant’s attempts to provide such foundations requires ruling out the very possibility of hylozoism (living, self-active matter). However, Kant cannot rule out hylozoism on transcendental grounds, nor on Critical metaphysical grounds; ultimately Kant’s analysis appeals to empirical ignorance of any actual instance of hylozoism. No such empirical premiss can be admitted into Kant’s transcendental or metaphysical analyses. Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science cannot deliver the results Kant sought, as Kant himself ultimately realised. Chapter 5 shows that Hegel recognised that Kant’s transcendental analysis of the necessary a priori conditions of self-conscious human experience (apperception) contain not only formal, but also material conditions, of a kind incompatible with Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Hegel recognised that Kant’s analysis of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold, pursued to its logical conclusions, both refutes Transcendental Idealism and exposes the key fallacy in Kant’s main arguments for it. This result enabled Hegel to develop far more thoroughly than Kant, Kant’s profound Anti-Cartesian (mixed) forms of semantic, mental content and justificatory externalism. Chapter 6 demonstrates that Hegel learned what Schelling (and his devotés) never fathomed from Schulze’s (1803) brilliant, anonymous parody of intellectual intuitionism, that intellectual intuition cannot avoid the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion. To the contrary: Any appeal to alleged intellectual intuition licenses unlimited, unCritical, omnilateral petitio principii. Chapter 7 integrates these findings by characterising Hegel’s post-Kantian epistemological reorientation. PART II, comprising chapters 8–13, examines Hegel’s epistemological agenda in the Phenomenology of Spirit, first by detailing the key points of its manifold response to various forms of scepticism (chapter 8) and then examining Hegel’s critical reconstruction of Kant’s Critical Principles in the 1807 Phenomenology (chapter 9). Three core epistemological analyses are then examined: Hegel’s solution to the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion (chapter 10), Hegel’s transcendental proof of mental content externalism (chapter 11) and Hegel’s analysis of the constitutive role of mutual recognition in rational justification in all substantive (i.e., non-formal) domains; chapter 12 examines Hegel’s analysis more textually and exegetically, chapter 13 examines it in systematic detail. Chapter 13 shows how Hegel’s solution to the Dilemma of the Criterion, presented in chapter 10 in connection with theoretical philosophy, holds equally regarding practical philosophy.

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PART III, comprising chapters 14–21, shows that these same Critical epistemological aims and analyses are retained and augmented in Hegel’s mature philosophy, in his Science of Logic and his philosophical Encyclopaedia. For systematic, historical and hermeneutical reasons, chapter 14 reconstructs in detail and defends Hegel’s mature critique of Jacobi’s intuitionism in the conceptual preliminaries (Vorbegriff) to his philosophical Encyclopaedia. Because exorcising the ghost of intellectual intuitionism appears (even from recent secondary literature) to be an endless task, Hegel’s case against intuitionism generally requires detailed examination and defence. I argue that Hegel’s criticisms of intuitionism are altogether general, and hold of any aconceptual account of knowledge, and also of any plausibly human form of intellectual intuitionism. This chapter thus buttresses the findings of chapter 6. I further argue that Hegel’s critique of intuitionism raises quite general, fundamental problems about the legitimate roles within philosophical method, and within substantive philosophical inquiry, of intuitions and of conceptual analysis. Examining these points highlights how Hegel accepted and addressed the very fundamental challenges to the explication and defence of the philosophical competence of reason, the gauntlet thrown down by Jacobi in Hegel’s day, and by Richard Rorty, the later Feyerabend and Bas van Fraassen in the latter half of the Twentieth Century. Despite recent interest in ‘transcendental arguments’ (a term Kant did not use), and despite the excellent works by Watson (1881, 1908) and Caird (1889), misunderstanding of and hostility to transcendental analysis and transcendental proof remain widespread in Anglophone analytical philosophy. Strawson’s (1966, 29) surprising pronouncement that Kant’s innovations are so searching that ‘nearly two hundred years after they were made, [Kant’s key insights] have still not been fully absorbed into the philosophical consciousness’, remains true today.3 Many philosophers and many historians of philosophy continue to rely, often unwittingly, upon Cartesian or empiricist methods or taxonomies inherited from the 17th Century (C.E.). In part this results from neglecting Kant’s and Carnap’s very nearly identical accounts of the insufficiency of conceptual analysis for substantive philosophical inquiry, together with the need for, and the character and procedures of, conceptual explication. Almost uniquely amongst Anglophone philosophers, Sellars realised that Kant’s and Carnap’s case for the centrality of conceptual explication justifies and requires exacting, historically informed philosophical scholarship. These central methodological relations between philosophy and history, including its own history, are examined in chapter 15. They considerably bolster Kant’s case for a fundamentally ‘changed manner of thinking’ (KdrV, Bxviii– 3

In personal correspondence (1. May 1999) Strawson reaffirmed to me this assessment.

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xix). Hegel’s further reconstruction and development of Kant’s changed, Critical manner of thinking is examined in chapters 16–21. Chapter 16 examines how Hegel’s Science of Logic continues to reconstruct and refurbish Kant’s Critical principles. Hegel’s Critical pragmatic realism and his central aim in the Science of Logic to determine which conceptual categories ‘can be true’ further develops and exploits the methodological distinction, central to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and later to Carnap’s semantics, between ‘conceptual analysis’ and ‘conceptual explication’. Conceptual explication is methodologically decisive; whilst Carnap would not have welcomed it, it entails significant, fundamental aspects of semantic externalism. For the broad, categorial kinds of questions central to philosophy, this semantic externalism also entails that philosophical history, together with intellectual and cultural history more broadly, are methodologically fundamental to any tenable philosophical explication. One decisive episode in our cultural history is the ‘revolutionary’ development of natural sciences. How and how well philosophers responded to those developments are considered in chapter 17. These considerations inevitably raise many questions about Hegel’s own, much-maligned yet widely misunderstood philosophy of nature. In chapter 18 I argue that Hegel’s re-analysis of fundamental scientific concepts and principles is not merely intelligible, but insightful, acute – and anti-metaphysical. Chapter 19 integrates all of these considerations: epistemological, ontological and natural-scientific, by showing how Hegel integrates them in his cognitive psychology, a central phase of his encyclopaedic Philosophy of Spirit (Enz. §§388–482). Reconsidering these issues in light of Hegel’s recently published lectures on these topics (the Encyclopaedia is a very terse lecture compendium) offers good occasions to expose further misunderstandings of Hegel’s sophisticated epistemological realism, and to further corroborate central claims examined and defended in this study. Chapter 20 highlights the robust pragmatic realism central to Hegel’s Critical epistemology, by integrating these considerations into Hegel’s philosophical semantics, including ‘synthetic necessary truths’. So doing underscores the fundamental contrast between pragmatic realism and neo-pragmatism, including Robert Brandom’s sophisticated ‘modal expressivism’, and affords demonstration of the merits of the original, robustly realist Critical pragmatism Hegel developed. Chapter 21 brings these methodological and semantic issues to bear upon current controversies regarding freedom of action and contemporary neurophysiology, to show how Hegel undercut key determinist presumptions about causal explanation which have stymied these debates, and how he brings

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greater clarity to important, basic features of our embodied form of agency. Chapters 20 and 21 illustrate and corroborate the Critical importance of distinguishing between the semantic explication of the key cognitive concepts and principles (intension), and the evaluation of their cognitive significance when used to judge, explain or know any relevant particulars or their kinds and causal structure(s) and relations. Some topics recur: to provide brief synopses of key features of Hegel’s views within their broader systematic context; to provide full-scale examinations of key issues and texts; to weave Hegel’s complex, systematic insights together properly to exhibit his incisive achievements; to justify his claim and mine that his achievements are sound and superior to familiar alternatives, both contemporary and historical; and to permit chapters to be read individually. Hegel’s views are unconventional and cogent. Critical philosophy both requires and affords a fundamentally changed method of thinking! I may mention how this study relates to of my previous books on Hegel’s theoretical philosophy. Hegel’s Epistemology (2003a) is a concise introduction to Hegel’s epistemological methods and views within the context of recent analytic epistemology. Hegel’s Epistemological Realism (1989) is an exacting analysis, reconstruction, assessment and defence of Hegel’s epistemological issues and methods in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, focussing on Hegel’s methodological Introduction (Einleitung; not Vorrede, Preface), and then summarising Hegel’s epistemological analysis in the body of the Phenomenology. That overview is superceded by the present study, and in other regards by The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (2009a), which provides a comprehensive, collective commentary on Hegel’s entire book. Another study, nearly complete, complements these: Hegel’s Critique of Cognitive Judgment: From Naïve Realism to Understanding presents the full-scale examination, reconstruction, assessment and (in most regards) defence of Hegel’s epistemological analyses in the first three chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit. It includes an English translation of my book on ‘Perception’, Hegel, Hume und die Identität wahrnembarer Dinge (1998). The interpretation and critical assessment of Kant’s theoretical philosophy used herein is detailed in Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism (2004a). I frequently use Hegel’s date of publication; it remains both common and indefensible to assimilate Hegel’s (1807) Phenomenology of Spirit to the very different part of Hegel’s philosophical Encyclopaedia titled simply ‘Phenomenology’ (§§413–439); it indicates persisting neglect of Hegel’s epistemology, issues of rational justification and phenomenological method, and insistence upon compartmentalising and isolating what Hegel developed as mutually integrated aspects of his rigorously systematic philosophy. What Cassirer says

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of Descartes’ and of Leibniz’ holds all the more regarding Hegel’s philosophy. About his own book on Leibniz Cassirer states: This study aims to understand and to derive the entirety of Leibniz’s philosophy from the fundamental conditions contained in Leibniz’s scholarly researches and achievements. Initially I was led to pose the question this way by the substantial, systematic interests which first brought me to study the Leibnizian system. The question regarding the logical foundation of mathematics and mechanics first occasioned my returning to the philosophical origination of these sciences by Descartes and Leibniz. In the gradual development of these studies … I became convinced, that the entirety of the philosophical doctrines of these men is necessarily connected with their founding of modern science – in analytical geometry, infinitesimal analysis and dynamics. (Cassirer 1901, ix)

Though the present study of Hegel’s Critical philosophy is less ambitious than Cassirer’s study of Leibniz, Hegel’s views are more systematic, encompassing and broadly based than his, because Hegel had greater mathematical, scientific and also philosophical knowledge at his disposal, characterised not only by breadth but also by astonishing depth of detail and subtlety. The demands thus laid upon Hegel’s expositors are not met, but instead defied and obscured, by compartmentalising his views. I note with regret that some readers dislike my referring to my other research. I have made each book as self-contained as possible, yet attentive readers should have questions about various points which deserve more extensive analysis and documentation. When I have provided such analysis, I have cited it; where others have provided relevant analysis, I cite theirs. Philosophy – and especially Critical philosophy as Hegel reconstructs it into pragmatic realism – requires systematic, detailed and comprehensive investigations. For having examined these issues as thoroughly as I am able I make no apology, especially when so many important issues and findings are occluded by unreliable ‘received wisdom’ and by various ‘cultural circles’, so called by Logical Positivists. The ‘divide and conquer’ approach to solving or dissolving philosophical problems piecemeal died in principle in 1950 (Wick 1951), regardless of how many still cling to it in practice – or so I shall argue. As this study examines, reconstructs and defends Hegel’s robust pragmatic realist reconstruction of Kant’s Critical philosophy, I next chart Kant’s Critical philosophy. For as much as Kant’s Critical philosophy was a work in progress, as he recognised is inevitable (KdrV A834/B862), if we focus upon the character, scope and validity of forms of rational judgment and their roles within human experience, knowledge and action, the integrity of Kant’s Critical philosophy stands out in relief, and clarifies how many of Kant’s expository, and some substantive wrinkles can be ironed out.

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2 KANT’S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY: A SYNOPSIS. My central aim is to show that Hegel reconstructed Kant’s Critical philosophy sans transcendental idealism, and to reconstruct, assess and defend how Hegel did so. Hegel’s further development of Kant’s Critical philosophy has been obscured by excessive attention (pro et contra) to transcendental idealism, and insufficient attention to the aims, methods and substance of Kant’s systematic Critical philosophy. This imbalance is not due to lack of good information (cf. Watson 1881, 1908; Caird 1889). Here I first summarise basic features of Kant’s methods and strategies (§2), then review his key questions (§3.1), his main Critical writings (§3.2), his main issues and theses (§3.3) and his systematic Critical philosophy (§3.4), which comprises Kant’s systematic critique of rational judgment, its character, scope and limits, throughout his three Critiques and his Critical metaphysics of natural and of moral sciences. 2.1 Kant’s Critical Falliblism. Kant’s Critical philosophy develops a sophisticated alternative to what remain today the default options regarding cognitive justification: empiricism, rationalism, intuitionism, coherentism, reliabilism, conventionalism or scepticism, none of which are sufficient, whether in epistemology or in moral philosophy, and most of which are demonstrably false. My focus here is epistemology.4 Kant recognised the insufficiency of conceptual analysis for obtaining philosophical knowledge (KdrV B755–8). One aspect of this problem concerns the Paradox of Analysis: If, in order to avoid petitio principii against scepticism, epistemology is to be purely a priori, then it must seek to analyse and understand human knowledge by analysing the concept of human knowledge, and hence its three constitutive sub-concepts: belief, truth and justification. If the analysis of these concepts is to be informative, it must be possible to learn or understand something new by sufficiently analysing these concepts, their relations and their proper use. However, if conceptual analysis is informative, how is it possible to determine whether that analysis is accurate, complete or adequate? If we can determine whether a conceptual analysis is complete and accurate, how can it be informative? If we can determine or assess the success of a conceptual analysis, so doing apparently would require complete and adequate antecedent understanding or mastery of the concept(s) analysed. This ‘Paradox of Analysis’ was a central methodological concern from Moore up to about 1990, after which it fell off the philosophical agenda. In effect, the best solutions to this Paradox recognise it is insoluble, and maintain instead that the proper philosophical method is conceptual explication (e.g., Hare 1960). This is Kant’s method 4

A concise summary of basic concepts, principles and views in epistemology is provided by Westphal (2016c); for concise summary of Hume’s epistemology, see Stroud (2010). The counterpart issues in moral philosophy are examined in Westphal (2018d).

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(KdrV B755–8), and also (e.g.) Carnap’s (1950a, 1–18). Conceptual explication cannot claim to be complete; it aims to improve upon the concept explicated, in part by clarifying that concept, or augmenting it or replacing some of its features. Conceptual explications can only be assessed within their actual contexts of proper use, not in merely imaginary contexts of their purportedly possible use. Conceptual explication thus involves significant aspects of semantic externalism; it also directly entails significant aspects of fallibilism regarding philosophical justification. Kant espoused fallibilism about empirical knowledge (KdrV A766–7/B 794–5), and also about his philosophical method (KdrV B862), which he called ‘transcendental reflection’ (KdrV A260–1/B316–7). According to the justificatory alternative, ‘infallibilism’, justification sufficient for knowledge entails the truth of what is known. Infallibilism was not bequeathed to philosophy by Descartes, but instead much earlier by Étienne Tempier, who in March 1277 acted upon Papal authority as Bishop of Paris to condemn 220 neo-Aristotelian theses as heretical (Piché 1999, Boulter 2011).5 This is when, where and how Aristotle’s avowedly flexible model of a proper science, modelled on Euclidian geometry but fitted to the degree of precision afforded by any range or domain of phenomena, became converted into infalliblist deductivism, which entered the empiricist and mainstream epistemological traditions by dissatisfactions with Descartes’ attempt to outwit the possibility of a malign deceiving spirit, and by Hume’s doctrine of impressions and ideas. Tempier’s condemnation expressly states and repeatedly implies that knowledge requires demonstrating the logical impossibility of any and all alternatives to whatever one claims to know. Accordingly, he declares that natural philosophers may only propose ‘possible explanations’ of natural phenomena. This may be a brilliant ploy to exalt faith over human reason, but is an epistemological disaster. The infalliblisist-deductivist model of a ‘proper’ science remained profoundly influential from Descartes through the Twentieth Century (C.E.), e.g., in Kelsen’s model of a ‘pure’ theory of law and in varieties of philosophical ‘formalism’. Kant, too, was enthralled by this model; it drives his Transcendental Idealism, and it drives his increasingly ambitious, increasingly implausible claims for Transcendental Idealism in his late, ‘post-Critical’ manuscripts (see below, §§18–20). 2.2 Key Features of Rational Judgment. Central to Kant’s critique of our human powers of judgment are five basic yet widely neglected points:

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Piché identified a previously unrecognised thesis condemned by Tempier, making 220. For concise summary in English, see Piché (2011). The 1277 condemnation remains widely neglected by historians of Modern philosophy; e.g., Nadler (2002), Sorell et al (2010).

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1. Reasoning using rules or principles always requires judgment to guide the proper use and application of the rule or principle to the case(s) at hand (KdrV B169–75). Specifying rules of application cannot avoid this, because using such rules of application also requires judgment. 2. Rational judgment is inherently normative, insofar as it contrasts to mere response to circumstances by forming or revising beliefs, because judgment involves considering whether, how or to what extent the considerations one now draws together in forming and considering a specific judgment (conclusion) are integrated as they ought to be integrated to form a cogent, justifiable judgment (KdrV A261–3/B317–9, B219). 3. Rational judgment is in these same regards inherently self-critical: judging some circumstance(s) or consideration(s) involves and requires assessing whether or the extent to which one assesses those circumstances or considerations as they ought best be assessed (KdrV A261–3/B317–9, B219). 4. Rational judgment is inherently social and communicable (KdU §40), insofar as judging some circumstances or considerations rationally involves acknowledging the distinction in principle between merely convincing oneself that one has judged properly, and actually judging properly by properly assessing the matter(s) and relevant considerations at hand. 5. Recognising one’s own fallibility, one’s own potentially incomplete information or analysis and one’s own theoretical or practical predilections requires that we each check our own judgments, first, by determining as well as we can whether the grounds and considerations integrated in any judgment we pass are such that they can be communicated to all others, who can assess our grounds and judgment, so as also to find them adequate (KdrV A829/B857); and second, by actually communicating our judgments and considerations to others and seeking and considering their assessment of our judgments and considerations (GS 8:145–7). Our rational powers of judgment can be honed by training and practice, but cannot be acquired by learning or study; they are thus, Kant noted, suitably called ‘mother wit’ (KdrV A133/B172). 2.3 Judgment and Cognitive Reference. Kant’s positive alternative to infallibilist deductivism develops the implications of some basic points regarding specifically cognitive reference to particulars. Kant noted, that is, that thinking requires only logical consistency; knowing something requires identifying relevant particulars by individuating or discriminating them (KdrV Bxxvi n.). In just this regard, Kant adopted from Tetens (1775) this sense of the verb, to ‘realise’ (realisieren): to ‘realize’ a concept or principle is to demonstrate by example that we can locate, individuate or discriminate relevant instances of that concept or principle (KdrV B186–7). Localising relevant instances requires demonstrative reference to them, whether by sensory perception, or

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also by using observational instruments (in technical or scientific contexts). If this may sound anachronistic, it is not; it is explicit in Tetens, whom Kant expressly and consistently follows in this terminological and substantive regard.6 Moreover, what philosophers of language call ‘demonstrative’ reference to particular individuals is known in other fields as ‘deixis’ (Bohnemeyer 2015), the transliteration of the Attic Greek term, deixiH, central to Stoic accounts of indexical or demonstrative reference (Mates 1961, 30, 96; Barnes 1997, 98, 101–2, 137–8).7 (If Kant likely did not know these Stoic views, Hegel did; they are discussed critically by Sextus Empiricus.) These Stoic sources are secondary in respect to the philosophical issues, yet they caution against contemporary philosophers’ tendency to dismiss historical philosophy, and Hegel’s devotés against their tendency to dismiss issues of justification, epistemology and cognitive reference. Kant’s express distinction between merely thinking something, and thinking something about any particular(s), which requires localising and referring to it (or to them), is crucial in several philosophical regards. First, this distinction provides the basis for a quintuple distinction utterly fundamental to epistemology between: 1. Thinking some specific thought, or entertaining some specific prospective judgment, proposition or belief. 2. Ascribing what one thinks, believes or judges to some particular(s). 3. Ascribing accurately or truly what one thinks, believes or judges to some particular(s). 4. Justifiedly ascribing accurately or truly what one thinks, believes or judges to some particular(s) (where the relevant justification is cognitive). 5. Ascribing accurately or truly what one thinks, believes or judges to some particular(s) with sufficient cognitive justification to constitute knowledge. Per (1.), merely thinking something consistently does not suffice to know anything, other than perhaps what one happens to be thinking at that time. Per (2.), ascribing features or characteristics, including shape, size and location, to some (putative) particular(s) is necessary for there to be any issue about truth, falsehood, accuracy or inaccuracy. Per (3.), sufficiently accurate or true ascription of features to some particular(s) is necessary for knowledge, yet insufficient. Knowledge further requires, not merely some cognitive justification (per 4.), but sufficient cognitive justification (per 5.). 6

Melnick (1989), KTPR, Bird (2006). I am very grateful to Mauro Nasti de Vincentis (2018) for directing my attention to Stoic deixiH, and for sharing his research with me prior to publication. 7

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These distinctions allow considerable latitude regarding tolerable (in)accuracy or precision, and what extent or degree of accuracy or cognitive justification suffices for knowledge, in contrast to reasonable belief. Nevertheless, they suffice to rebut Russell’s (1911) doctrines of ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ and ‘knowledge by description’, and to rebut both rationalism and experience-transcendent metaphysics. Indeed, Kant’s semantics of singular cognitive reference achieves one of the key aims of verification empiricism, without invoking verificationism about meaning, nor about semantic or mental content (intension)! Hegel capitalised on this insight when disentangling Kant’s sound critique of rational judgment from his Transcendental Idealism.8 Kant’s (and Hegel’s) semantics of singular cognitive reference puts them in accord with a remarkable series of later-day philosophers, including: Frege, J.L. Austin, Wittgenstein, David Kaplan, John Perry, Howard Wettstein, Nathan Salmon, Gareth Evans (1975), Charles Travis and Ilhan Inan. They stand together against what has become ‘mainstream’ epistemology and philosophy of language, from Russell (1911) through Quine, Davidson, Putnam, van Fraassen and beyond into contemporary ‘analytic metaphysics’.9 This quintuple distinction sets one parameter for any sound epistemology. 2.4 Kant’s Three-fold Strategy. Kant observes: That which is presupposed in any and all knowledge of objects cannot itself be known as an object. (KdrV A402)

Empiricism denies there are any such cognitive presuppositions. However, empiricists routinely assert this denial; only three have developed the fundamentals of concept empiricism and empiricist semantics in detail: Hume, C.D. Broad and Carnap. Their attempts are enormously important and instructive, not least because they reveal just why, how and where empiricism fails.10 Kant’s strategy is three-fold: First, to inventory our most basic cognitive capacities, then to construct the minimum sufficient principles of cognitive judgment afforded by our cognitive capacities to enable us to think, experience or know anything at all. In brief, Kant’s fundamental inventory – the first phase of his strategy – consists in our two forms of sensory receptivity, which are spatial and temporal, and the twelve formal aspects of our forms of judgment. Though Kant did not detail his completeness proof for his Table of Judgments, he provided many important indicators, which suffice to reconstruct and to justify his completeness claim (Wolff 1995, 2017). The second phase of Kant’s strategy is to identify the most fundamental concepts affor8

On Kant’s semantics of singular cognitive reference, see KTPR §§60–64. On Quine, see Westphal (2015b); on van Fraassen, see below, §119, and Westphal (forthcoming b); on Davidson, see Westphal (2016b); on Putnam, see Westphal (2003b). 10 See, respectively, Westphal (2013a), Turnbull (1959) and Westphal (2015b). 9

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ded by those twelve formal aspects of judgment: our Categories, plus the concepts of ‘time’ and of ‘space’, and then to identify the minimum sufficient set of schemata and cognitive principles required for us to be able (sub-personally) to integrate sensory information over time and through space, so as to be able to be aware of some appearances appearing to occur before, during or after others (Guyer 1989, Brook 2004, Westphal 2018b). The third phase is to use these results to provide a systematic diagnosis of persisting philosophical disagreements, both in theoretical and in practical philosophy. 2.5 Kant’s Methodological Constructivism. Kant’s method is expressly constructivist (KdrV B735; O’Neill 1992). Constructivist method is a method for identifying and justifying concepts or principles; it is consistent with realism about particulars within the domain(s) of those concepts or principles. The constructivist strategy has four steps: Within some specified domain, 1. Identify a preferred domain of basic elements; 2. Identify and sort relevant, prevalent elements within this domain; 3. Use the most salient and prevalent such elements to construct satisfactory principles or accounts of the initial domain, by using 4. Preferred principles of construction. This constructivist method is fallibilist. Kant acknowledged this, and recognised that the most fundamental idea of a new discipline, including Kant’s very idea of Critical philosophy, is subject to re-assessment and often to reformulation and re-articulation in the course of developing that discipline (KdrV B862). Carnap, too, was a constructivist in philosophy of science, though he made this explicit only in 1950, when he explicated his method of conceptual explication (Carnap 1950a, 1–18). Carnap’s (1950b) ‘linguistic frameworks’ are conceptual explications writ large, as language fragments designed to perform some designated task within some branch of scientific inquiry. Kant expressly distinguished between general logic and various specific forms of logic, most centrally: transcendental logic as the study of the legitimate and illegitimate use of fundamental concepts and principles in making (putative) cognitive judgments. Kant’s distinction is sound; general logic is exhausted by a careful reconstruction of Aristotle’s squares of opposition (Wolff 2009a). Only within that domain are conclusions provable by formal considerations alone. All further formalised domains can be specified and developed only by appeal to further, non-formal semantic and existence postulates. (This holds too for mathematics, which requires sets, for mathematical logic and for predicate calculus.) Their accuracy, adequacy or soundness cannot be assessed by purely formal techniques alone. Only within pure axio-

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matics is justification constituted by formal deduction (provability). Within all other domains, deductive validity can be necessary for justification, though in principle it cannot suffice for justification. Accordingly, infallibilism is only appropriate to purely formal axiomatics; all other domains afford only fallibilist accounts of justification. However, Kant’s semantics of singular cognitive reference suffices to show that mere logical possibilities – expressed by any logically consistent thought – altogether lack cognitive standing, and so cannot serve to undermine or to ‘defeat’ cognitive justification in any non-formal domain! In non-formal domains, infallibilism is not too strict; in principle it is instead irrelevant! In non-formal domains, deduction may contribute to cognitive justification, it may be necessary to it, but in principle it is not sufficient for cognitive justification, nor does it constitute cognitive justification. Only alternatives which can be deictically (ostensively, demonstratively) referred to identified, localised particular(s) are cognitively relevant. Cognitive relevance is inherently domain-specific; which domain(s) are relevant and how they are relevant must also be assessed critically, on the basis of continuing use, inquiry and self-critical reflection. A further consequence of these insights is that rationality is not identical to deductive validity; rationality affords the critical assessment of evidence, principles, reasons, reasoning and judgments, in any specified context, and over time and across space through other relevant contexts. In these regards, rationality – both in cognition and in morals – is fundamentally (though not exclusively) practical reasoning (O’Neill 2004). If Kant’s Critical philosophy successfully develops and integrates its three strategic phases (above, §2.4), it justifies his claim that none of the traditional alternatives: empiricism, rationalism, intuitionism, coherentism, reliabilism, conventionalism or scepticism, are tenable accounts of human knowledge; and provides excellent grounds to contend, as he did, that there is only one genuine philosophy: the Critical philosophy (MdS, Preface; 6:206–7; quoted below, §14). Despite many extensive and often illuminating attempts to revive prospects for one or another of those standard alternatives, I have over the past three decades argued repeatedly en detail that they are indeed instructive, yet in principle and in practice irreparably flawed. 2.6 Transcendental Proof and Transcendental Idealism. Does Critical philosophy require Transcendental Idealism? Kant claims that transcendental analysis and proof require Transcendental Idealism.11 Kant’s critics and devotés alike have accepted this claim, and often compounded their perplexity by presuming that anything which counts as ‘synthetic a priori ’ must invoke a priori intuitions of reality itself. This presumption assimilates Kant’s Critical 11

KdrV B41, A23/B37–8, A26–8/B42–4, A195–6/B240–1, A101–2, A113–4, A121–3, A125–6; Prol. §36.

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philosophy to the kind of rationalism Kant Critically rejected – as did Hegel. Kant’s analysis and a priori justification of many fundamental synthetic claims and principles involves no intuitionism of any kind, much less rationalist intuitions of some allegedly ultimate reality (cf. Toulmin 1949). Far more instructive is to inquire whether transcendental analysis and proof require Transcendental Idealism, by examining whether Kant’s own analyses and proofs in the Critique of Pure Reason substantiate this claim. Hegel’s central method of developing strictly internal critique and assessment of philosophical views requires such an examination. Hegel’s early Jena writings identify central points of such a strictly internal critical assessment of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. These points help to show how Kant’s own transcendental analyses and proofs in the Critique of Pure Reason directly undermine his own arguments for Transcendental Idealism, and reveal key aspects of sound transcendental proofs of mental content externalism. With these strategic, methodological and substantive features of Kant’s Critical philosophy in view, I now catalogue Kant’s key questions (§3.1), his Critical writings (§3.2), his core issues and theses (§3.3) and then chart his Critical system of philosophy (§3.4). So doing suggests how Kant’s semantics of singular cognitive reference suffices to justify his key epistemological conclusions without appeal to Transcendental Idealism. Hegel’s key Critical insight is that everything summarised in §3 can be re-founded, justified and augmented sans Transcendental Idealism. 3 KANT’S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY OUTLINED. 3.1

Kant’s Key Questions. Kant states his key Critical questions succinctly: ‘The field of philosophy in this cosmopolitan sense can be brought down to the following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope? 4. What is man? (Was ist der Mensch?) Metaphysics answers the first question, morals the second, religion the third, and anthropology the fourth. Fundamentally, however, we could reckon all of this as anthropology, because the first three questions relate to the last one’. (Jäsche Logic, GS 9:25; cf. KdrV A805–6/B832–3)

Kant answers in these Critical works: What can I know? 6 KdrV, MAdN What ought I do? 6 KdpV, Gr, MdS What may I hope? 6 KdpV, KdU, Rel. What is it to be human? 6 all the above + Anthropology + Pädagogik + essays on politics, history.

MdS RL

Critique of the Power of Judgment.

Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science.

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

Metaphysics of Morals (2 parts):

Metaphyiscal First Principles of Justice

Metaphyiscal First Principles of Virtue

I

II

KdU

MAdN

Gr

MdS

Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.

Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.

Rel.

Anth.

Anth.

Rel.

TL

Gr

MAdN

KdU

KprV

Critique of Practical Reason.

2nd rev. edition

KdpV

KdrV

Critique of Pure Reason,

1st edition

1798, 1800

1793, 1794

1798

1797, 1798

1785

1786.

1790

1788

1787

1781

§

p.

§

§

§

p.

§

§

§

‘B’

‘A’

(to A405)

7:119–333

6:1–202

6:373–493

6:203–372

6:203–493

4:387–463

4:467–565

5:171–485

5:3–163

3

4:3–251

Kants Gesammelte Schriften, 29 vols. Königlich Preußische (now Deutsche) Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: G. Reimer (now de Gruyter), 1902–. vol.:pp.

KdrV

GS

3.2 Kant’s Main Critical Writings:

17

11. I.e., (using ‘6’ for ‘entails’), is this polysyllogism justified:

Universal natural causal determinism 6 (no freedom of action) 6 (no imputability) 6 (no moral responsibility) 6 (no morality) ?

3.3 Kant’s Main Critical Problems. Empirical knowledge: How is empirical knowledge at all possible for us? Scepticism: Sextus Empiricus: The Dilemma of the Criterion. Whether our sensory presentations relate to physical objects? Hume: Causality = (merely) 1:1 correlations + habitual expectations. The Problem of Induction. Mathematics: How is mathematics as a system of synthetic propositions known a priori at all possible for us? Natural Science: How is Newtonian physics as a science at all possible for us? Space and Time: Absolute vs relational theories of space and time. additionally (later) How is natural science of organised matter – e.g., crystallisation, chemical bonding, organic life – at all possible for us? Morals: How is moral obligation at all possible for us? Moral empiricism, utilitarianism, eudaimonism. The ‘naturalistic fallacy’ of inferring ‘ought’ from ‘is’ (Hume, Moore). Moral duties are categorical, universal and necessary; none of these characteristics can be justified merely empirically. Freedom of action vs natural causal determinism?11 Aesthetics (Taste): How are universally valid judgments of taste (and of the natural sublime), which are not based on any determinate concept of any object, at all possible for us? __________________________

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12. I.e., any indirect theory of perception, which affirms our self-knowledge, but makes dubious our experience of our surroundings.

__________________________

KANT’S CENTRAL THESIS: All the above metaphysical questions are in principle unanswerable by human reason, for systematic reasons. Systematic examination of these reasons provides sufficient basis for conclusively answering the main questions of each of these four topics: scepticism and natural science, moral philosophy and freedom, aesthetics and taste, theology and faith.

)

How is metaphysics as a system of synthetic propositions known a priori at all possible for us? The soul is a substance. The soul is simple. The soul is numerically unitary, self-identical. Possibly (perhaps), the soul perceives physical objects in its surroundings.12 t.s.: None of these theses can be proven (rationally justified). [‘t.s.’ = ‘to show’ = to be proven] 2. Rational cosmology: Whether the world has an origin in space & time. Whether matter is infinitely divisible. Whether natural causal determinism excludes freedom of action. Whether there is a necessary being (cosmological proof of God). t.s.: Equally conclusive proofs support both the affirmative and the negative theses; this is an inevitable, necessary selfcontradiction of reason, if it seeks knowledge transcending experience. 3. Rational Theology: The ontological The cosmological Proof of God’s existence. The teleological t.s.: In principle, all of these purported proofs are invalid.

Metaphysics: 1. Rational Psychology:

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(KdrV A260–1/B316–7)

KdrV Space, Time Analytic of Concepts Analytic of Principles Transcendental Dialectic: Transcendental Ideas The Antinomy of pure theoretical reason The Ideal of pure theoretical reason Regulative use of Ideas of pure theoretical reason Discipline of pure theoretical reason Canon of pure theoretical reason Architectonic of pure theoretical reason History of pure theoretical reason KdpV Regarding systematising our knowledge of nature KdrV Trans. Dialectic Regarding purposiveness KdU regarding free beauty and natural sublime KdU 1 Taste regarding naturally organized matter: KdU 2 Teleology non-living self-organised nature: crystals, chemical compounds organic life regarding nature as a whole or as created KdU Doct. of Method Transcendental Aesthetic: Transcendental Analytic:

Cognitions a priori from concepts and principles Method: transcendental reflection

Critique of pure practical reason: Critique of reflecting power of judgment:

Doctrine of Method:

Critique of pure theoretical reason Doctrine of Elements:

3.4 Kant’s System of Critical Philosophy. I. Critique of Reason:

20

MAdN — KdU 2 Teleology — KdpV, Rel.

KdrV Tr. Analytic

Gr, MdS MdS 1 Rechtslehre MdS 2 Tugendlehre

KdrV B873–613

__________________________ 13. Cf. KdrV (Meiner 1998), 959. 14. Kant often uses the term ‘physiology’ in its ancient Greek sense, from fysis, a study of something’s nature (physis). 15. Here Kant uses ‘transcendental’ in its traditional metaphysical (experience-transcendent), not in his Critical (immanent) sense.

II. Critical Metaphysics A priori analysis of a logically contingent concept of a basic kind of being: 1. embodied rational agent: º critical metaphysics of morals first principles of justice first principles of virtue 2. matter = ‘the movable in space’: º critical metaphysics of nature transcendental philosophy (not ontology) rational physiology14 of pure reason immanent: rational physics rational psychology rational doctrine of natural organisation (crystals, chemicals; life): transcendent: transcendental15 cosmology transcendental theology

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PART I Hegel’s Critical Reconsiderations of Metaphysics and Epistemology

CHAPTER 2

Henry Harris and the Spirit of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology 4 INTRODUCTION. To introduce some significant reasons to re-examine Hegel’s epistemology – and to reject persisting Hegel mythology (Stewart 1996) – I first highlight some important strengths of H.S. Harris’s (1997) magnum opus, Hegel’s Ladder, and how these strengths highlight weaknesses of previous studies of the Phenomenology, weaknesses exacerbated by Hegel scholars’ unfamiliarity with epistemology (§5). The point is not that epistemology is first philosophy, but rather that rational justification is crucial to philosophy, and that critically examining a philosopher’s attempts to justify his or her views is a crucial, critical and also hermeneutical strategy – and requirement. §6 summarises Harris’s surprising account of Hegel’s unconventional epistemology. §7 shows that, though Harris identifies instances of Hegelian logic in the Phenomenology, he does not address its role or legitimacy. §§8 and 9 criticise Hegel’s Ladder on three counts stemming from Harris’s disinterest in epistemology: Harris recognises neither the importance of Hume for Hegel’s account of perception (§9.1), nor the importance of Hegel’s critical refutation of Kant’s moral world view (§9.2), nor Hegel’s critical engagement with Pyrrhonian scepticism (§§10, 11). I argue that Hegel’s Ladder excels at reconstructing Hegel’s Kulturkritik but falters with philosophical (especially epistemological) issues, and thereby falters on important matters regarding the substance, method and justification of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit – in ways having important further implications for Hegel’s philosophical system and its justifiability (if any), several of which are identified in §§12–14. 5 HARRIS, HEGEL AND PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY. One central achievement of Hegel’s Ladder is to show that Hegel’s Phenomenology is far more historical, and that its logic of cultural history is far more complete and incisive, than had been recognised. Harris’s reconstruction of Hegel’s treatment of the period from Augustus to Napoleon is magnificent. Harris also shows how Hegel can make extensive theological references whilst repudiating transcendent entities (cf. di Giovanni 2009). Harris also © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_003

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shows why the 1807 Phenomenology is crucial for Hegel’s mature philosophy (HL 2:142 n. 59, 723–4). Harris notes that spirit’s development out of nature has two aspects: the biological organism Homo sapiens (contributed by nature), and the enculturation (Bildung) through which Homo sapiens become actually sapient (HL 2:747). Life forces us as language-using social animals to remake the conscious goals of our lives, primitively given to us as self-preservation and selfreproduction (HL 2:774). Harris stresses that philosophy cannot be understood apart from its history and explains how Hegel’s ‘science of experience’ shows that philosophy and religion must be comprehended together within actual human history (HL 2:721). Whoever heeds the command ‘know thyself!’ must strive to know the world which has nurtured each of us, within which alone one becomes whatever one is best able to achieve (HL 2:739). This enculturation is the self-creation of spirit proper: Spirit transforms both the organic and inorganic environments, so that absolute knowing ultimately recognises that nature as a whole is its substance. As the cognisant, self-mediating aspect of the development of absolute spirit, this self-creation forms and informs our communal self-consciousness in history (HL 2:747). Religion, Harris points out in fascinating detail, is the (often figurative) consciousness of the community’s relation to the world, and of its own selfcognitive structure. When this structure is consistent with itself as cognition, the community is rational. Absolute knowing is found in the religion of a community that arrives at a rational relation with the world and with itself. Hegel’s ‘science of experience’ is possible only when the human community’s religious consciousness becomes completely rational, as the logical consciousness of what human rationality (theoretical and practical) actually is, and of what the natural boundaries and social conditions of its realisation are. The structure of the community – our consensus about how we ought to act and interact and about the good and the institutions by which that consensus is maintained and enforced – is the substance of reason (HL 2:709). ‘God’ merely names the categorical structure of self-consciousness that is communally recognised as necessary. In religion the community knows (on the orthodox view that faith is a kind of knowledge; HL 1:112, 2:691) or portrays to itself its own basic interpretation of life in the world. Thus the whole perspective of ‘theological’ language is inverted.1 Hegel’s ‘manifest’ religion is the form of world-consciousness which corrects this inversion. ‘Creation’ indicates mythically our freedom in interpreting the world, although the world as such has its own necessary structure. Hegel’s view of religion is based upon reason as the universally self-conscious scientific community interpreting the 1

HL 1:64, 192–3, 409–10, 417–8; 2:125–30, 252–3, 344–6, 367, 448, 533–4, 537–40, 678, 738, 746.

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world rationally. Christianity is the ‘absolute’ or ‘manifest’ religion because the incarnation grounds an interpretation of religious language which coheres with Hegel’s scientific account of religious experience (HL 2:681–2). Harris’s subtle reflections on time and recollection provide an important sense in which substance is also subject.2 The future is not yet, the past no longer is; there is only the present. Some things presently are older than others. Thus, to know something as temporally extended requires constructing it as such by reconstructing its historical phases, its past states and circumstances and its interactions. If substance persists through time, then sapient memory is a crucial element through which substance exists. This is one way in which Hegel conceives substance also as subject. His prime advance, Harris claims, over previous commentators is to articulate why the period from Augustus to Napoleon forms a basic logical cycle of experience which must be covered repeatedly. He notes that only when we know what actual world Hegel interprets can we assess the ‘logic’ of his interpretation. Harris does not claim that Hegel’s logic is perfect. But he shows that it is far better than most previous interpreters have thought, and far more concrete and historical than has been previously demonstrated (HL 2: 725–6). Harris rightly notes that we must interpret and test Hegel’s account by what we now know about history (HL 2:262), and that we may disagree with Hegel’s selection and evaluation of historical views or episodes. However, these disagreements provide no basis for criticising Hegel until we understand his own selections, interpretations and evaluations (HL 1:71–3). Harris’s claim to show why the period from Augustus to Napoleon is important is disarmingly modest. In fact, showing why this period is so important requires reconstructing Hegel’s discussion in elaborate detail. Hegel’s Ladder provides that reconstruction. Harris shows that the logical structure of Hegel’s discussion is vastly more intricate, sophisticated and integrated than anyone previously imagined. It cannot be summarised here.3 Here I can only attest that Harris substantiates his claim that Hegel is ‘the only philosophical genius who ever came near to rivalling Plato’ (HL 2:276). Many of Harris’s analyses deserve praise; two are his discussions of Gall and of Rameau’s Nephew. Harris also notes Hegel’s clear awareness of the Persian and Egyptian origins of Greek culture. Hegel’s Ladder simply must be read to be believed; it should be read widely and deeply. It is a pleasure to read, and it can be read profitably in many ways. It can be read cover to cover, or it can be consulted for insights about particular sections, chapters or even paragraphs. At a time 2

HL 2:461, 469, 533–8, 549–50, 653, 706 n. 57, 710, 719, 722, 729–37, 740, 745. See in particular HL 1:158–9 n. 64, 189–93, 261–4, 343, 358–60, 447–9, 469 n. 2, 455–8, 592, 604; 2:1–9, 32–5, 55–6, 97–9, 106–8, 153–9, 252–5, 334–5, 354–5, 526–8, 531, 534–2, 544–7, 569 n. 23, 637–9, 661–3, 696–9, 708, 732–9, 755 n. 10, 764–72. 3

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when neo-Hegelians like Charles Taylor make much of the sources of the modern self, and when post-modernists deny the tenability of any historical ‘meta-narrative’ and deconstruct the ‘self’ as a contingent conventional fiction, it is especially important that Harris enables us to see how well the original master of Kulturkritik discerned and systematised the social and historical development of our rational capacity to know both nature and our own rational cultural development. 6 HARRIS AND HERMENEUTICAL METHOD. One signal merit of Hegel’s Ladder is that it fulfills, for the first time, a basic hermeneutic requirement: it interprets systematically the whole of Hegel’s protean text. This singular achievement bears close consideration. Harris laconically remarks: In most cases – Quentin Lauer’s Reading (1976) is a noteworthy exception – I have found that it is difficult to argue constructively with Anglophone interpreters, because the relation between Hegel’s text and their interpretations is so indefinite. (HL 1:x). The prevailing habit of commentators – the way that they pick up and develop freely the themes and arguments that they find intelligible and interesting while disregarding much that they find difficult, unconvincing, or simply dull – is founded on the consensus of opinion that, whatever else it may be, Hegel’s Phenomenology is not the logical “Science” that he claimed it was. Some students think that the project is clear and interesting; others will not concede even that. But hardly anyone thinks that the project has been successfully carried out. This is the received view that I want to challenge and, if possible, to overthrow. If I am right, an acceptably continuous chain of argument, paragraph by paragraph, ought to be discoverable in the text. (HL I, xi)4

I concur. Harris’s own stunning achievement should give pause to consider carefully problems confronting proposed ‘interpretations’ lacking adequate textual documentation and analysis. Walter Kaufmann contrasted Kant and Nietzsche by contrasting the difficulty of understanding the gist of their views to the difficulty of understanding their specific statements: … it is perhaps easier to form an opinion of the general meaning of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason than to grasp the precise significance of any number of sentences in that work – while in Nietzsche’s books the individual sentences seem clear enough and it is the total design that puzzles us. (Kaufmann 1974, 72)

4 Harris recognises (HL 1:xiii n. 4) we agree there is a single, coherent, unified and unifying line of argument in Hegel’s Phenomenology (HER 149–80; rev. in Westphal 2009b).

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This remark can be made about Hegel as well as Kant. The problem with grasping the ‘whole’ without understanding the details is that one restricts a philosopher’s view to one’s own preconception of the ‘gist’ of those views. Kaufmann’s remarks about the disastrous legend of ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’ warns against any attempt to assimilate Hegel’s Phenomenology to some preconceived interpretive hypothesis sans scrupulous, detailed examination of the text itself. About that old legend Kaufmann remarked: Typically, people read a little here and there, are delighted when they find what fits in with their preconceptions, and actually assume that they have now found for themselves what they had merely assumed previously. What does not readily fit is usually discounted as being due to one’s imperfect knowledge. After all, everybody knows – well, what precisely? The truth of the legend. (Kaufmann 1965, 198–9)

However useful Kaufmann’s book has been to struggling students of Hegel, myself included, the general criticism implied in this passage also bears directly on Kaufmann’s own ‘re-interpretation’ of Hegel because Kaufmann vastly prefers Hegel’s programmatic prefaces and the ‘vision’ they express to Hegel’s actual texts.5 Kaufmann emphasises Hegel’s supposed ‘vision’ due to his own predilections and because he denies Hegel has any dialectical method. Indeed, he denies that Hegel has any intellectually responsible method: Right as Hegel is that it would be a mistake for philosophy to model itself on mathematical method, he is wrong in also departing from Descartes’ quest for the greatest possible clarity and distinctness. Above all, he fails to recognize what is really the heart of scientific and rational procedure: confronted with propositions or views, we should ask what precisely they mean; what considerations, evidence, and arguments support them; what speaks against them; what alternatives are available; and which of these is most probable. No quest for a system and no finished system can ever compensate us for the neglect of this canon – at least not scientifically; and aesthetically only if our intellectual conscience is underdeveloped and we are after all such romantics as Hegel expressly scorns. (Kaufmann 1965, 159–60)

5 ‘[Hegel’s] prefaces and introductions are so often, and so notoriously, far superior to the works that follow. In this respect, the Phenomenology is no exception at all. ‘In his prefaces and introductions, Hegel – usually with apologies and a bad conscience – dispenses with what he considers the proper method and talks as, according to him, a philosopher ought not to talk. Here he is often at his best, feeling free, albeit regretfully, to communicate his vision and his many superb insights without, in one word, dialectic’ (Kaufmann 1965, 160). Shortly thereafter he states: ‘But to return to Hegel himself: What do we find if not a usable dialectical method? We find a vision of the world, of man, and of history which emphasises development through conflict, the moving power of human passions, which produce wholly unintended results, and the irony of sudden reversals. If that be called a dialectical world view, then Hegel’s philosophy was dialectical – and there is a great deal to be said in its favor’ (ibid., 161); note the recurrence of the term ‘vision’.

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Kaufmann (1965, 162) condescended merely that ‘Hegel’s dialectic is at most a method of exposition; it is not a method of discovery’. Kaufmann misunderstood Hegel’s dialectic because he didn’t understand enough epistemology to recognise that dialectic is (first and foremost) a method for critical evaluation and justification. Briefly, dialectical arguments provide indirect proof. They justify controversial principles for a domain by criticising its simplest principle. Hegel holds that the inadequacies of a principle can be generated internally – between the principle and examples from its purported domain. Jonathan Robinson observed: The full strength of Hegel’s position [in the Phenomenology] is appreciated only when it is understood that he is arguing that bad theory makes for bad practice, and that the bad practice shows up the logical difficulties of the theory. (Robinson 1977, 2)

Hegel holds that the use of an inadequate thesis implies some contradiction that can only be avoided or resolved by augmenting that thesis. This is a logically impeccable procedure. It is internal criticism at its best, and it fulfills the intellectual canon Kaufmann claimed Hegel ignored (see below, §§60–64). An adequate interpretation of Hegel requires jointly fulfilling two aims: systematically reconstructing Hegel’s theme in view of its central issues and arguments within their philosophical and historical context, and reconstructing Hegel’s text in exacting detail to provide a maximally complete and accurate reconstruction, down to individual sentences, phrases, even terms. These two aspects of an interpretation must match: Any claim about the whole of Hegel’s Phenomenology based on anything less is at most an interpretive hypothesis. Genuine synopses can only be written after that kind of research. Interpretive hypotheses cannot, of course, be dispensed with; it is not possible simply to ‘read the text’, that is, its details, and construct an adequate interpretation piecemeal. The basic point of hermeneutics echoes a cornerstone of Hegel’s philosophy, namely, the interdependence of parts and wholes. Likewise, our comprehension of parts is interdependent with our comprehension of the whole they form. Regardless of whether this is true of the world, it is certainly true of texts. We play our understanding of the context in which specific passages or statements occur off our understanding of the passages or statements found in those contexts. If our understanding of either is acute and detailed enough, we can revise our understanding of both – but only if we attend scrupulously to detail and fit, and to our own hypotheses, biases and shortcomings. As Lauer (1976, 2) remarked: ‘The text is always there as a check on interpretation’ – though only if it is copiously and scrupulously accounted for. (One key example is detailed below, §§71–91.)

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In these important regards, Harris’s commentary completely supersedes previous work on Hegel’s Phenomenology. Harris’s example should curtail the spate of synopses of ‘Hegel’s’ Phenomenology which continue to appear, which betray the authors’ predilections more than they explicate Hegel’s issues, aims, analyses or arguments. Serious misrepresentation is the inevitable result of starting with an inspired ‘synopsis’ and then fitting selected pieces of Hegel’s text into it; the important, often defining, details of Hegel issues, text and analysis are occluded, often beyond recognition. The dangers of misunderstanding Hegel and of failing to learn from him by adhering to one’s pet interpretive hypothesis rather than to the details of the text are especially serious in epistemology, which has been neglected by Hegel scholars. Kurt Steinhauer’s (1980) massive Hegel Bibliographie lists barely half a dozen books, a handful of dissertations and very few articles discussing Hegel’s epistemology prior to 1975. Their quality is no greater than their quantity: they are too general to address the details of basic epistemological issues or Hegel’s innovative responses to them. Epistemology is perennially central to the justification of claims to knowledge. Disregarding epistemology leads to pre-Critical metaphysics and other unconstrained speculations; it leads precisely to the unCritical romanticism excoriated by Kaufmann – and by Hegel. On this count, I concur with Harris and Michael Rosen (1984) in repudiating the neo-Platonic fantasies too often ascribed to Hegel.6 Because Hegel insightfully addressed the issues involved in justifying his philosophical views, he is not subject to Kaufmann’s censure. Unfortunately this is not true of much literature on Hegel. Very little literature on Hegel is comparable to the great works on classical philosophy by, e.g., Zeller, Vlastos, G.E.L. Owen, Owens, Jonathan Barnes or Julia Annas, nor to the great works on modern philosophy by Kemp Smith (on Descartes, Hume and Kant), nor to those by Watson, Caird, Adickes, Vaihinger, Paton, de Vleeschauer or Dreyer on Kant. Hyppolite’s famous commentary on the Phenomenology – the best prior to Harris’s – is too uneven and sketchy to join those ranks. By disregarding epistemology and the crucial issues of justification it involves, Hegel’s expositors have also isolated Hegel from common philosophical problems. This isolation is hermeneutically disastrous because it seals Hegel off from the philosophical contexts crucial to understanding and assessing his problems, strategies, analyses and solutions. It condemns him pel mel to wildly divergent ‘interpretations’. Such isolation also reinforces the common impression outside Hegel studies that Hegel is the philosophical prince of darkness. The sole corrective is to treat Hegel’s issues, texts and analyses in 6

HL 1:265; 2:142 n. 59, 661, 723, 756 n. 18, 778–9. Neither Harris nor Rosen identify the most basic reason to reject such neo-Platonic interpretations: Hegel adopts from Tetens and Kant a key semantic-referential sense of ‘realisieren’; below §§55.1, 63.3, 68, 112.1, 114.

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close connection with other exemplary philosophical treatments of them. Nothing less suffices for an illuminating reconstruction – whether pro or contra – of a philosophical text. One reason for the greatness of the classic commentaries mentioned above is that their authors had the background, training and acumen to take this point for granted.7 With few exceptions, prior to Hegel’s Ladder, I have learned far more about Hegel by carefully studying the insights and oversights of Kant. That requires studying Kant in his own terms, not ‘for the sake of’ illustrating some point in Hegel. Speaking as a Kant scholar, when I find a genuine problem in one of Kant’s views, I usually then find that Hegel already saw it and made a sophisticated and well-conceived response to it (see below, §§16–46). 7 HARRIS ON HEGEL’S EPISTEMOLOGY. Epistemology is not Harris’s forté. Yet he reads Hegel’s Phenomenology with an open epistemological mind and finds many of Hegel’s rich and unusual views on human knowledge. Harris recognises that Hegel defends the discursive, conceptual nature of human knowledge by criticising supposed aconceptual knowledge in ‘Sense-Certainty’ (HL 1:217–8, 233 n. 21), and that the perception of various manifest qualities does not suffice for cognition without concepts of actual forces by which alone we reconstruct the object we know through sensory perception. Hegel’s notion of truth preserves the traditional correspondence conception of the nature of truth.8 Hegel held that nature must have sufficient empirical order such that we can be selfconscious within it, and that to be a world at all the world must have a necessary structure unto itself (HL 2:681). Hegel studied mathematics and the empirical sciences seriously (HL 1:289); indeed: the Baconian applied science of this world is the solid foundation upon which Hegel’s ladder of spiritual experience rests. (HL 2:355)

We shall see below how very important is this observation! Human beings are essentially embodied (HL 1:554; 2:431). Knowing the world requires reasoning, and we can only reason if we are educated to do so by our communities. Likewise, our communities can educate us to be reasonable only because they inherit our historically developed, communally tested rational principles and practices.9 Hegel’s analysis of ‘Evil and Forgiveness’ 7 Another merit is that their scholarship is so detailed and systematic that even if flawed, it remains extremely instructive. 8 HL 2:163, 765. See HER, 112–4 and Westphal (1997). My criticisms of Harris in this latter essay pertain mostly to Harris (1997b); he revised his views in Hegel’s Ladder. 9 HL 2:533–4, 537–40, 580–1, 595–6, 709–10, 713, 716–7, 738, 770–2.

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establishes the social basis of the mutual assessment of principles and practices.10 Harris thus recognises that Hegel held the unconventional yet illuminating view that realism can be reconciled with a socio-historical account of human knowledge. Quite independently, Harris ascribes the same basic epistemology to Hegel as do I, and we agree that, if indeed they are valid, Hegel’s views must pertain also to our own circumstances (HL 1:535). 8 HARRIS’ EPISTEMOLOGICAL SHORTCOMINGS. The fact that epistemology is not Harris’s forté also has drawbacks: He disregards how Hegel justifies his highly original and controversial views in the Phenomenology, he discounts the epistemological aspects of Hegel’s Phenomenology and he disregards many of Hegel’s specifically philosophical engagements in the Phenomenology. He thus overlooks much of the critical spirit of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Harris provides many illuminating and hard-won insights concerning how Hegel’s exposition in the Phenomenology exhibits Hegel’s logical doctrine.11 He recognises that Hegel’s use of his logical doctrine cannot simply apply Hegel’s logical principles to the topic in question (HL 1:124). However, Harris does not consider what legitimate use Hegel can make of his logical doctrine. To be legitimate, Hegel must show that the subject matter displays characteristics highlighted by his logical principles. Such a demonstration would be derived from the subject matter itself, not from his Logic. If successful, Hegel’s analysis would exhibit the logical structures analysed in his Logic without appealing to his Logic as a controversial independent premiss. Though perhaps difficult, his argument would in this important regard be exoteric. Anything less would be the unmotivated, forced application of principles Hegel denigrated as schematising formalism. Hegel used his logical terminology and doctrine in the Phenomenology of Spirit; understanding their use is crucial for understanding his intent and assessing his achievement. However, showing how the structure of any of Hegel’s texts reflects his logic does not indicate how Hegel there uses his logic. Harris says little about this. He holds that Hegel intends his logic to be a logica docens to explain, understand and expound what has happened (HL 1:118). Harris states: ‘Hegel applies the logical terms Concept, Judgment and (especially) Syllogism to all levels of real life, and to quite complex units of scientific discourse’ (HL 1:207 n. 58). Now, does Hegel use his logical doctrine simply to 10

HL 2, chapt. 9, esp. 2:482–3, 495–6, 502–8, 534–7, cf. 770–2. HL 1:32, 56, 81, 118, 162–5, 193–5, 279–80, 343, 344, 357–60, 377 n. 26, 381, 384–5, 451, 534, 604, 2:9–10, 108, 197, 208, 249, 276–8, 286, 318, 322, 335, 339, 457, 531, 539, 615, 622, 638–9, 677, 714–6, 736. 11

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order his exposition? Does he use it to guide to analytical inquiry or critical appraisal? Does he use it to determine the completeness of a proof? Or does he use it as a, if not the, principle of argumentative proof? Each of these possible uses places different, and respectively greater, justificatory weight upon Hegel’s syllogistic framework. However, the more justificatory weight rests upon that framework, the less exoteric are Hegel’s analyses and arguments. Most fundamentally, with what justification does Hegel use his logic within the 1807 Phenomenology, if the Phenomenology is to provide an exoteric introduction to Hegel’s Logic? Despite his style, Hegel insisted that philosophy be exoteric, and more than any other philosopher Hegel was sensitive to issues of petitio principii against opponents and dissenters (see below, §§11–14). Consequently, he developed methods of analysis, critique and proof which address these issues. The main point of Hegel’s dialectical strategies is to argue internally, by indirect proof, against inadequate views, including those of his philosophical opponents. My own experience in explicating Hegel’s texts is that his analyses unfold very well as rigorous, regressive argument based upon strictly internal criticism and indirect proof. That is how I set out the structure of Hegel’s epistemological argument in the 1807 Phenomenology, and also the structure and details each of its first three chapters. Analogous issues arise about Hegel’s Philosophical Outlines of Justice; I have set out the structure of Hegel’s argument in the Grundlinien in just such terms.12 We may hope that more exacting reconstruction of Hegel’s Phenomenology will preserve Harris’s hard-won, very helpful insights into how Hegel’s discussion exhibits his logical doctrine, and yet also make that doctrine incidental by developing Hegel’s grounds of proof directly out of his subject-matter. 9 SOME CRITICAL RESERVATIONS ABOUT HEGEL’S LADDER. No mere interpretive hypothesis suffices to assess Hegel’s Ladder. Here I appeal briefly to relevant results for three important sub-topics: Hegel’s solution to the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion, Hegel’s account of perception and Hegel’s critique of Kant’s moral world view. I begin with the latter two topics. 9.1 Harris, Hegel and Perception. Harris reconstructs Hegel’s analysis of perception as observed consciousness coming to recognise that intellectual activity, ultimately the understanding, is required to unite the perceived pro12 See Westphal (2017d, 2018a, forthcoming b). Pinkard (1994, 420 n. 10) claims my interpretation of Hegel’s Grundlinien (Rph) is backwards and analytic, rather than synthetic. My reconstruction is based squarely on internal critique. Pinkard’s claim neglects that Hegel’s ‘method of absolute knowing … is analytic … and also synthetic’ (WdL II, 12: 241.24–242.19).

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perties of a thing into the perception of some one thing, and that the postulation of causal forces is necessary to account for the unification of those properties within that thing. This is generally correct. However, Harris does not correctly identify the central problem in perception. He comments: The thing exists for a perceiving consciousness. It necessarily has two aspects, inward oneness and outward manifoldness of relations, or outward oneness (independence) and an inwardly inexhaustible potential. The perceptual standpoint refuses to accept this necessary unity of opposites. (HL 1:249)

Harris does not explain the refusal of ‘the perceptual standpoint’ to ‘accept’ this necessary unity of opposites; indeed he cannot explain it in the general terms guiding his analysis (‘for itself,’ ‘in itself’; ‘independence,’ ‘dependence’; ‘essential,’ ‘unessential’; ‘deception’). I have shown (Westphal 1998a) that Hegel’s chapter on ‘Perception’ replies critically to Hume’s analysis, ‘Of Scepticism with regard to the senses’ (T 1.4.2). Both discussions examine the capacity of concept empiricism to account for the concept of the identity of a perceptible thing – a crucial component of our belief in ordinary physical objects. Concept empiricism holds that all meaningful terms (or concepts) are either logical terms, names for simple perceptual qualities or can be defined solely by combining these two kinds of terms. (Conversely, any genuine, meaningful concept or term that cannot be so defined is a priori.) To extend his concept empiricism to handle the nonlogical concept of the identity of a perceptible thing, Hume must introduce psychological ‘propensities’ to generate, in effect, a priori concepts; he must confront a ‘contradiction’ in the concept of the identity of a perceptible thing between its ‘unity’ and its ‘plurality’ (or ‘number’, Hume says) of properties; and ultimately he must regard this concept as a ‘fiction’. Hegel re-examines Hume’s account to show that the concept of the identity of a perceptible thing is indeed non-logical and cannot be defined in accord with concept empiricism. This is an important point in favour of Hegel’s concept pragmatism.13 This point is also important in connection with the quite general problem of how we integrate various sensations to perceive any one object. Referring to ‘Of Scepticism with regard to the senses’ affords a complete, intelligible, sound and philosophically informative reconstruction of Hegel’s analysis in ‘Perception’. Hegel’s argument constitutes a two-pronged reductio ad absurdum of two key empiricist theses:

13 ‘Concept pragmatism’ is the view that we have or create some a priori concepts, which we can assess or revise in connection with their objects, and which thus come to have a determinate, objectively valid intension and extension; see HER 100–28, though I did not use the designation ‘concept pragmatism’ there.

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1. The concept of the identity of a perceptible thing can be reduced to the two quantitative concepts ‘unity’ and ‘plurality’ (or ‘set’ and ‘member’). 2. Human perception only involves passive sensory reception. The ‘refusal’ of perceptual consciousness to ‘accept’ the unity of the opposed moments of the unity of the thing and the plurality of its properties stems from its concept empiricism. Because Harris overlooks this central epistemological issue, his interpretation does not touch the core issue of Hegel’s chapter, ‘Perception’. Much later Harris remarks that ‘Hume’s discovery that he has no ‘idea’ of his ‘self ’ [puts us …] on the trail of “the Concept”’ (HL 2:349). Hume’s ‘discovery’ stems from his concept empiricism, on the basis of which no sense can be attached to the term ‘self ’ . That Hume’s trouble with finding him-‘self ’ should put us ‘on the trail of “the Concept”’ only indicates that Hegel is committed to legitimate a priori concepts. That Hume’s trouble merely puts us on the ‘trail’ of Hegel’s concept (Begriff) indicates that this general rationalist view doesn’t suffice to specify Hegel’s view of the concept. Harris does not examine these issues sufficiently to use Hume’s clue to explicate Hegel’s view, nor to explicate or assess its justification. Regrettably, this is not an isolated problem; Harris often refers to ‘Perception’ as the model for subsequent dialectical episodes.14 There are indeed correspondences between Hegel’s analyses in ‘Consciousness’ and many later forms of consciousness, but serious unanswered questions remain about how relevant or informative are such analogies. 9.2 Harris, Hegel and ‘The Moral World View’. In discussing ‘the moral world view’, Harris notes that Hegel’s speculative standpoint identifies the moral with the natural world-order (HL 2:429, 431). According to Harris, Hegel reaches this identity through a creative reinterpretation of Kant’s and Fichte’s denials of such an identity. Harris grants that Hegel ‘misrepresents’ Fichte, but denies this does ‘violence’ to Kant or to Fichte (HL 2:432). Much of what Harris says about Hegel’s analysis is illuminating, yet his remarks on its critical import are unsatisfactory. He states: One can drive Kant’s critical rationalism into an explicit “Philosophy of As If”; but one cannot make it fall down under its own weight.* *Hegel’s method is powerless against the “Philosophy of As If.” But we should always remember that Hegel does not want to “refute” anyone. It is part of his basic thesis that all of the Gestalten of the Spirit are self-sufficient, so that a rational self-consciousness which identifies with one of them can always mend its position in response to any critical attack. (HL 2:434, 453 n. 34).

Despite Hegel’s (alleged) disinterest in refutation, Harris also says: 14 HL 1:358, 366, 386, 416, 467, 474–5, 528; 2:99, 167–9, 184, 189, 377–8, 380–1, 424, 432, 446–7, 453 n. 34, 473–4, 531, 537, 554, 555, 600, 610, 662, 671, 673–4, 690, 714.

37 It is Fichte’s categorical claim that the whole critical philosophy must be placed in the context of the intuitive self-certainty of the dutiful self that comes to grief here. When we drag it through the “experience” of its own postulational thinking, the moral self-intuition is shown not to be an “intuition” at all. By dragging it through the whole experience (rather than by expanding directly upon the internal contradiction that has already been indicated) Hegel can get a “determinate negation” that makes further progress possible. (HL 2:434)

If Kant’s or Fichte’s views contain an ‘internal contradiction’, it is either superficial or fundamental. If the contradiction is superficial, harping upon it is otiose. If it is fundamental, then the view in question can be made to ‘fall down under its own weight’. Harris is unclear about the nature or status of Hegel’s ‘determinate negation’ of the moral world view. I have argued elsewhere that determinate negation involves refutation (HER, 125–6). Indeed, at the outset Harris says that Hegel makes a ‘logical criticism’ of the moral world view’s postulates that shows that it is guilty of dissemblance.15 Harris also describes Hegel’s analysis as providing ‘an ironic reduction of the moral standpoint to immoral absurdity by its own standards’ (HL 2:426). These claims appear far more critical than those quoted above. However, a determinate negation that only makes further progress ‘possible’ (as Harris says) doesn’t suffice to show why further progress is necessary.16 In the Introduction to the Phenomenology Hegel explicates the necessity of the transitions from one form of consciousness to the next. To show that further progress is necessary, to justify adopting a successor view, requires showing that no predecessor (and none of its plausible variants) is tenable (HER, 126–8). If the moral world view is indeed ‘guilty’ of dissembling, that may justify its supersession. I have argued (Westphal 1991) that Hegel criticised Kant’s moral world view successfully on grounds internal to Kant’s philosophy. In his introduction to ‘the Moral World View’ Hegel extols autonomy (PhdG, 9:323.31–324.4, 15 HL 2:434, compare: ‘The ‘experience’ of this Concept consists of a logical criticism by Hegel in which the postulational point of view is shown to be guilty of shifting its ground in the manner of Perception’ (HL 2:416). 16 Compare Harris’s similar remark: ‘Hegel interprets the transition from empirical to intellectual intuition in terms of the reading he has already given of Kant’s theory of the moral disposition praying for ‘grace’. I am sure this was not how Fichte saw it (though I have never been sure just how he did see it); but Hegel does not care about that, because this reading of Fichte’s Moral World-Order is the one that will allow him to return to the actual world (the imperfect, merely phenomenal world) as the true actuality of the Moral World-Order, without any need for the ‘postulate of immortality’. Any other interpretation of Fichte is covered by the blanket complaint that Fichte’s philosophy is a theory of the Ought, because the standard of ‘what is’ is taken from ‘pure thinking’ and does not properly embody the ‘actuality’ of our experience as flesh and blood’ (HL 2:431). Notice that Harris says that Hegel’s interpretation of Fichte ‘allows’ him to achieve a desired goal, despite the fact that this involves a misreading of Fichte, rather than that Hegel’s results are justified because they are the only proper solution to some shared problem.

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324.15–32/¶¶596–7). He then identifies the sharp division between sensible nature and intelligible norms and freedom both as the basis of the moral world view and as the ultimate root of its problems. Hegel suggests that, contrary to appearances, Kant’s moral world view undermines rather than defends autonomy. Given Kant’s sharp (official) gulf between the sensible spatio-temporal realm of nature and the intelligible realm of reason, freedom and normative principles, only God could bridge the gulf, but given how Kant sets up the problem, not even God can do it. In particular, Hegel shows that Kant’s problem of coördinating happiness with virtue (as worthiness to be happy) is contrived; Kant’s view of moral motivation is contrived; Kant’s idea about perfecting our virtue in an infinite (post mortem) progress is incoherent; Kant’s view of the autonomy of moral agency is inconsistent with viewing the moral law as a divine command; finally, Kant’s moral principles cannot be put into practice in concrete circumstances. In sum, Hegel raised deep difficulties within Kant’s practical metaphysics.17 I am pleased that Harris regards my treatment of ‘The Moral World View’ as ‘valuable’, ‘generally sound’, ‘far more rigorous than’ and ‘a valuable complement to’ his own analysis (HL 2:450 n. 3, 451 n. 10). I grant that Harris’s account of the over-all role of ‘The Moral World View’ in the Phenomenology, and in particular of Fichte’s role in ‘The Moral World View’, is very helpful. However, if Kant showed a tender-heartedness toward the contradictory nature of things (WdL I, 21:232.22–29), Harris shows a tender-heartedness toward the contradictory aspects of philosophical views. Hegel cannot justify his own philosophy by letting other philosophies stand on their own in the way Harris repeatedly suggests when he says, e.g., that Hegel ‘does not want to refute anyone’. 10 HARRIS, EPISTEMOLOGY AND HERMENEUTICAL METHOD. Harris so focuses on the cultural significance of Hegel’s Phenomenology that he neglects Hegel’s concerns with philosophical issues in the history of philosophy. In particular, he neglects issues central to Hegel’s phenomenological method about the assessment and internal criticism of alternative philosophical views, which are central to Hegel’s method for justifying his own view by 17 Pinkard (1994, 397–8 n. 118) ascribes to me the claim that Fichte is not the target of Hegel’s critique; he also claims that Hegel’s claim that morality requires perfect purity can only refer to Fichte. I (1991, n. 2) did not claim Kant was the sole object of Hegel’s critique; Pinkard’s claim about moral purity neglects Kant’s problems with mixed motives; see Westphal (1991), §§5.2–5.5. At least one of the two theses of the moral world view that I could not find in Kant, Hegel ascribes to Fichte (D 4:59–60). Recently I noticed a passage in Kant’s Tugendlehre which affords a coherent Kantian view of moral duties as divine commands; an Afterword on this point is appended to the ms. of my (1991) on my website.

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‘determinate negation’ of those alternatives. Harris’s neglect of these issues is manifest in three important regards: 1. Harris disregards a plethora of specific references Hegel makes to Pyrrhonian scepticism by paraphrasing from, or making clear thematic allusions to, Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism. 2. Harris’s solution to the problem of assessing our standards of knowledge is literally superficial. 3. Harris fails to address or resolve some ambiguities between what we recollect and what we imagine which are crucial to Hegel’s aim to provide a science of the experience of consciousness, rather than another Gnostic fantasy. I address these points in §§11–14, respectively. Please first consider the general disregard of epistemology among Hegel scholars. In part, I suspect, Harris’s disregard of epistemology is symptomatic of the traditional neglect of epistemology amongst Hegel’s devoted scholars. That traditional attitude is well put by Frederick Weiss (1974) in his brief foreword to Beyond Epistemology: Hegel, of course, had no “theory of knowledge” in the narrow and abstract sense in which it has come to be understood since Locke and Kant. “The examination of knowledge,” he holds, “can only be carried out by an act of knowledge,” and “to seek to know before we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim.”

Like most Hegel scholars, Weiss took Hegel’s rebuke to ‘Scholasticus’ as license to ignore epistemology and focus upon the supposed object of ‘absolute’ knowledge.18 However, Hegel’s rebuke does not discard epistemology; it repudiates only the attempt to abstract epistemology from actual cognitive activity and examples of knowledge.19 Hegel’s Encyclopaedia Logic begins with extensive conceptual preliminaries (Vorbegriff) on epistemology (cf. below, §§92–99), and Hegel’s Phenomenology warns against disregarding epistemology and engaging directly in cognition of things (PhdG 9:54.30–55.30/¶4). His Introduction (Einleitung) then provides a very sophisticated method for examining epistemological issues without succumbing to many pitfalls of modern and contemporary epistemology. Many of his most important epistemological cues Hegel took from Sextus Empiricus. Though some recent studies have paid some attention to Hegel’s epistemology, too often expositions of Hegel’s views on knowledge have been re18 HL 1:64; cf. 9–10, 14–6. Harris claims that ‘Chapter V, on “Reason”, is the one explicitly philosophical chapter in the book’ (HL 1:18). Not so; see Westphal (2009a), Stekeler (2014). 19 See HER 4–17, 96–7; Taylor (1995), vii–viii, 3–53.

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stricted to the expositor’s epistemological preconceptions. As noted, Harris reads Hegel’s Phenomenology with an open epistemological mind and identifies several of Hegel’s most important and innovative views about human knowledge. However, Harris pays insufficient attention to the role of justification in knowledge, and so pays insufficient attention to Hegel’s justification for his own views. I now focus these general issues by considering the fundamental importance of Sextus Empiricus for Hegel’s Phenomenology. Despite my detailed account of Hegel’s concern with Sextus and of Hegel’s sophisticated response to Pyrrhonian skepticism (HER; cf. below, §§60–64, 83–91), Hegel’s Ladder disregards Sextus. Harris finds my account ‘unnecessarily complicated’ (HL 1:204 n. 45). Repetition is unpersuasive; here I augment my systematic account with historical and textual details of the kind Harris finds convincing.20 11 HEGEL’S REFERENCES TO SEXTUS EMPIRICUS’S OUTLINES OF PYRRHONISM. Hegel refers to Sextus Empiricus by direct paraphrase or by clear thematic allusion at least eight times in central passages of the 1807 Phenomenology. Most prominently, in Hegel’s Introduction presents this dilemma confronting any attempt to distinguish genuine knowledge (‘science’) from merely apparent knowledge. How can we distinguish genuine from counterfeit knowledge? Hegel states: [I]f this presentation [conducted in the Phenomenology] is regarded as a relation of science to apparent knowledge, and as an investigation and examination of the reality of knowledge, it seems that it cannot occur without one or another presupposition which would serve as the fundamental standard. For an examination consists in applying an accepted standard and in determining, on the basis of the resulting agreement or disagreement with the standard, whether what is being tested is correct or incorrect. Thus the standard as such, and science too, were it the standard, is accepted as the essence or the in itself. But here, where science first arrives, neither science nor anything else has justified itself as the essence or as the in itself; and without something of this sort it seems that an examination cannot occur. (PhdG, 9:58.12–22/¶9)

In his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus posed this Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion: 20 See Harris (1998), 625–9. There Harris recognises that we agree that Hegel’s Phenomenology does present a single, continuous, over-arching chain of argument (HL 1:xii, xiv n. 4, 2:569 n. 22), and he grants that Hegel distinguishes between what is implicit and what is explicit by using dative and accusative cases (HL 1:203 n. 43). Harris (1998, 627) kindly grants that my interpretation is more rigorous than his, that HL pays insufficient attention to Sextus and to the Phenomenology as a ‘self-perfecting scepticism’ (1998, 625); that if he is mistaken about Hegel’s attitude toward Sextus then ‘a much more subtle analysis is probably needed’ (1998, 626); and that my analysis complements his own (1998, 629).

41 [I]n order to decide the dispute which has arisen about the criterion [of truth], we must possess an accepted criterion by which we shall be able to judge the dispute; and in order to possess an accepted criterion, the dispute about the criterion must first be decided. And when the argument thus reduces itself to a form of circular reasoning the discovery of the criterion becomes impracticable, since we do not allow [those who claim to know] to adopt a criterion by assumption, while if they offer to judge the criterion by a criterion we force them to a regress ad infinitum. And furthermore, since demonstration requires a demonstrated criterion, while the criterion requires an approved demonstration, they are forced into circular reasoning. (PH 2.20; cf. 1.116–7; tr. Bury)21

The congruence between Hegel’s and Sextus’s dilemmas is perfect. It provides a clear and sufficient basis for ascribing to Hegel a central concern with Pyrrhonian scepticism, and in particular, a central concern with this crucial Dilemma of the Criterion. We should expect this, given Hegel’s extended analysis of classical and modern scepticism in the Critical Journal of Philosophy, in which he notes that Sextus contested the very criterion of truth (GW 4:212.8– 10). There Hegel refers to Sextus’s formulations quoted just above (and in n. 21). However, this early piece is no guide to Hegel’s use of Sextus’s Dilemma in the Phenomenology, for two years later (in 1804) Hegel radically reassessed the problem of petitio principii (see below, §§37–42).22 Hegel states his concern about petitio principii in these terms, ending with one of his most pithy retorts: For science cannot simply reject an untrue form of knowledge as a merely common view of things and give assurance that it is a completely different kind of knowledge, for which the other knowledge is insignificant. Nor can it appeal to the intimation within itself of better knowledge. With this assurance it would declare that its force resides in its being; but the untrue knowledge also appeals

21

Sextus states the Dilemma more briefly in two passages in Against the Logicians: ‘But if his declaration of himself as criterion is accompanied by proof, it must be sound proof. But in order to ascertain that the proof which he employs in declaring himself as criterion is sound, we must possess a criterion, and one that is already agreed upon; but we do not possess an undisputed criterion, it being the object of inquiry; therefore it is not possible to discover a criterion’ (AL 1.316); ‘Again, since those who call themselves criteria of truth derive from discordant schools of thought, and just because of this disagree with one another, we need to possess a criterion which we can employ to pronounce upon their disagreement so as to give assent to the one party and not to the other’ (AL 1.317). 22 On Fichte’s concern with circularity, see Breazeale (1994). Forster takes Hegel’s (1801) essay on scepticism as his sole guide to Hegel’s concern with Pyrrhonian skepticism. Forster (1998, 131) happens to quote Sextus mentioning in passing the Dilemma of the Criterion, but does not himself discuss that Dilemma. As in his earlier book (Forster 1989), he disregards Hegel’s restatement of this problem right in the middle of the Introduction to the Phenomenology. Consequently, when Harris says in his cover blurb, that ‘it seems … that [Forster 1998] has overlooked nothing’, I must insist to the contrary that they both overlooked something very important indeed.

42 to the fact that it is, and it gives assurance that to it science is nothing – one bare assurance counts as much as another. (PhdG, 9:55.18–24/¶4)

This passage directly follows Sextus, who sought equipollence, consisting in directly counter-balancing, apparently equally justified theses, to induce sceptical suspense of judgment (epoché). Sextus states: Now each of those who claim to have discovered the truth either makes this declaration by merely asserting it or adduces a proof. But he will not utter it by assertion; for one of those who belong to the opposite side will utter an assertion claiming the opposite, and in this case the former will be no more trustworthy than the latter; for a bare assertion counterbalances a bare assertion. (AL 1.315, tr. Bury; cf. 2.464.)

A more perfect textual reference by paraphrase cannot be found. Hegel opens his Introduction by discussing the metaphors of ‘knowledge … as the instrument with which one seizes the absolute or as the medium through which one discovers it’ (PhdG, 9:53.3–55.31/¶¶1, 2, 4) He is sceptical about these metaphors and the views of knowledge they suggest; his concern stems directly from Sextus. One of Sextus’s main arguments attacks that ‘by which’ something is known, whether by the senses or by the intellect or by both in combination (PH 2.48–49; cf. AL 1.343.). Bury’s translation makes this apposition literal, but he inserts the terms ‘means’ and ‘instrument’ into his translation, e.g., in his title to PH 2, chapter 6, ‘Of the Criterion “By means of which” (or instrument)’. This translation is loaded. Annas and Barnes (1994, 79) translate the title more literally as ‘That through which’. Sextus’s Greek, ‘Peri Tou Di’ Ou’, means literally ‘Of the by which’. However, when he returns to this issue in Against the Logicians, Sextus does speak of ‘using’ or ‘employing’ (proschromenos) the senses or the intellect or both in combination as criteria of knowledge (AL 1.343). Hegel is right that the ‘by which’ need not be an instrument, it could be a medium; and he is also right that Sextus’s formulation stresses the use of something as a criterion.23 Part of Hegel’s concern is that thinking of knowledge as an instrument or a medium, as something we 23 Nothing in Sextus’s Greek corresponds to Bury’s ‘instrument’ (PH 2.48, AL 1.343). Bury’s insertion of ‘means of’ into the phrase ‘by means of which’ may make the phrase more idiomatic English, though it can mislead. I have not been able to identify which edition of Sextus’s Opera Hegel consulted in Frankfurt or Jena; yet nothing in H. Stephens’ Latin translation of Sextus (Paris, 1562) corresponds to Bury’s terms, either. J.A. Fabricius prepared a bi-lingual Greek-Latin edition of Sextus’s Opera (Leipzig 1718) that incorporated Stephens’ Latin. Mund edited Fabricius’s Greek, which was published monolingual (Halle 1796). Stephens rendered Sextus’s ‘Di’ Ou’ literally in Latin as ‘Per Quod’. Although the Latin term ‘utens’ is the root for the English ‘utensil’ (or instrument), it is used properly in Stephens’ Latin translation in its participial form, in which it means ‘using’, to render the Greek ‘proschromenos’, which Bury translates as ‘employing’ and Etheridge (1985, 146) as ‘using’ (AL 1.343). Sextus criticises the ‘by which’ because it had a prominent role in prior thought about knowledge; e.g., Plato, Theat. 185d.

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use, by which we discover the truth, already makes assumptions about knowledge which invite scepticism or even make it inevitable. These I examined previously (HER, 4–18); here it suffices to note this direct reference to Sextus’s sceptical arguments against that by which we know anything. Two examples of elementary knowledge claims found in ‘Sense Certainty’ (PhdG, chapt. I) also come from Sextus, who uses the examples ‘it is day’ and ‘it is night’ (AL 1.391; cf. 2.79–84, 89, 144). Likewise, two of the examples of polar phenomena in ‘Force and Understanding’ (PhdG, chapt. III) come from Sextus, who discusses white and black, and sweet and bitter (AL 2.455). This is no surprise in view of Hegel’s claim in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy that ancient scepticism undermines purported, merely sensory knowledge.24 Later Harris states: ‘Our own procedure in “Consciousness” was in part that of philosophical skepticism’ (HL 2:391). However, he does not develop this claim in any philosophical, historical or textual detail. Sextus also appeals to the figure of a ‘ladder’ which the sceptic can ascend to sceptical epoché, which can then be kicked away (AL 2.481). This is one likely source for Hegel’s figure of a ladder to ascend to absolute knowledge, though he thinks it need not and should not be kicked away (GW 9:23.3–4/ ¶26). Had Sextus’s use of this figure slipped Hegel’s mind, it was recalled by Schulze’s (1803) anonymous „Aphorismen über das Absolute“. Another example of Hegel’s implicit reference to classical scepticism concerns ‘the changeable’ and ‘the unchangeable’ in ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ (PhdG, chapt. IVBc). Harris writes: These terms (Unwandelbare, Wandelbare) descend naturally enough from Hegel’s account of the two sides of the skeptical self-consciousness, which “experiences its own freedom in the Wandel of all that aims to make itself firm for it” and “has itself the doubled contradictory consciousness of unchangeableness (Unwandelbarkeit) and equality, and of total contingency and inequality with itself” ([PhdG] ¶205). But I do not think they are derived from the technical vocabulary of Scepticism (either in Sextus or in Cicero). Hegel seems to have adopted them in order to avoid an explicitly religious terminology, and in order to make the parallel with the Understanding’s “realm of Law” plain. (HL 1:398–9)

Harris is right about the religious overtones of Hegel’s use of these terms, but these overtones are suited to the metaphysical context of Hegel’s concern with absolute knowing. Harris is also right that Hegel’s use of these two terms does not derive from the technical vocabulary of classical scepticism. However, these terms do refer to issues central to classical scepticism: the connection is thematic, not terminological. The Attic Greek notion of truth has an 24 MM 19:375/H&S 2:347; cf. VGP, Vor. 8:145, 147.169, 151.295–300, 152.309–11, 157.468–72. For discussion, see Düsing (1973).

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ontological aspect: something is ‘true’ only if it is constant and self-consistent, and thus dependable; compare the English idiom, ‘a true friend’. Anything changeable is ipso facto untrue and mere appearance (HER 15, 220 n. 63). Hegel is right that this notion of truth is a substantive assumption made by Pyrrhonists, one very useful for demoting any humanly possible experience or belief to untruth, to mere appearance. Hegel’s terms das Wandelbare and das Unwandelbare, pace Harris, do concern issues central to classical scepticism. Much later Harris notes Parmenides’ view that being and truth are necessarily the same (HL 2:379), without noting Parmenides’ view that being is necessarily unchanging, nor the relevance of this point to his earlier discussion of das Unwandelbare. Finally, Harris admits not locating the source of the ‘lime twig’ – a stick with a sticky substance on one end used for catching birds – as a metaphor for knowledge (HL 1:169). Hegel states: Or, were the absolute only brought closer to us by the instrument, without altering anything about it at all, perhaps like a bird is brought closer by a limetwig, it would surely ridicule this ruse if it were not, in and for itself, already by us of its own choice. (PhdG, 9:53.31–34/¶1)

This figure, too, comes from Sextus: Thus it is not without plausibility that some people compare those who join in plunging into inquiries into particulars to hunters who pursue the quarry on foot or men who fish with a line or catch birds with bird-lime on a cane; whereas those who call in question all the particulars by starting with the most comprehensive postulates, they compare to men who surround [their prey] with lines and stakes and drag-nets. Hence, as it shows much more art to be able to catch a great number with a single onset than to hunt after the game laboriously one by one, so too it is much more artistic to bring one’s counter-argument against all in common rather than to develop it against the particular tenets. (Against the Physicists, 1.3; tr. Bury, Works 3)

The conceptual and textual parallel is perfect; both Sextus and Hegel use the figure of a lime stick (in passing) as a model for human cognition. I have found no other use of this figure as a metaphor for cognition in the history of philosophy.25 These textual references to Pyrrhonian scepticism gain greater significance through the systematic importance of sceptical issues for Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. 25 Augustine (De Magistro [1995], 10.32) uses the example of a lime-stick to catcht birds, though not as a metaphor for what knowledge is. This figure may allude to Theatetus’s aviary (Theat. 197c ff.), though it mentions no lime stick. Manfred Baum first mentioned to me having found this figure in Sextus. Peter King is unaware of other philosophers who use the lime stick as Sextus and Hegel do. (The term derives from the German for glue, leim, as also English lime trees, which bear no fruit.)

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12 THE PROBLEM OF ASSESSING STANDARDS OF KNOWLEDGE. The philosophical case is as clear and conclusive as the textual and historical case for Hegel’s attention to Sextus. It turns on two basic points. First, Hegel knew the tremendous controversy over the plethora of epistemological views espoused by his contemporaries. As Beiser (1987) has shown, in addition to Kantians and neo-Kantians, there were fideists deeply sceptical about reason (Hamman, Jacobi), rationalist metaphysicians (Mendelssohn), historicists (Herder), Lockean empiricists (Garve, Seele, Tiedemann, Feder, Tittel, Weishaupt, Pistorius), Wolffians (Ulrich, Flatt, Plattner, Eberhard), neo-Humean sceptics (Schulze), and also Reinhold’s Elementarphilosophie to contend with. Hegel also knew that his views were innovative and controversial, and by 1804 he rejected the oracular claims of genius or of intellectual intuition as adequate for philosophical justification (see below, §41). These two facts justify carefully considering the problems of petitio principii and of justifying fundamental criteria of justification. The reason these problems are so central to philosophy was put forcefully by Kant, who recognised that there can be only one genuine philosophy, which must supplant its predecessors, even if it is deeply indebted to them. In a passage which must have impressed Hegel,26 Kant states: It sounds arrogant, conceited, and belittling of those who have not yet renounced their old system to assert that before the coming of the critical philosophy there was as yet no philosophy at all. In order to decide about this apparent presumption, it need but be asked whether there could really be more than one philosophy. Not only have there been different ways of philosophizing and of going back to the first principles of reason in order to base a system, more or less successfully, upon them, but there had to be many experiments of this kind, each of which made its contribution to present-day philosophy. Yet since, considered objectively, there can be only one human reason, there cannot be many philosophies; in other words, there can be only one true system of philosophy from principles, in however many different and even conflicting ways men have philosophized about one and the same proposition. … Although the new system excludes all the others, it does not detract from the merits of earlier [theorists], since without their discoveries and even their unsuccessful attempts we should not have attained that unity of the true principle which unifies the whole of philosophy into one system. So anyone who announces a system of philosophy as his own work says in effect that before this philosophy there was none at all. For if he were willing to admit 26

Rosenkranz (1844, 103) reports that Hegel wrote a commentary on Kant’s Metaphysics of Ethics in 1798; this ms. was lost. Haym (1857, 496) claims that Hegel’s ms. was composed three years later, in 1802. Fischer (1911, 2:280 n.2) notes that Haym provides no compelling reasons for his claim, and concurs with Rosenkranz. For present purposes, the exact dating of Hegel’s ms. is unimportant. Important here is having reliable testimony that Hegel had studied Kant’s Metaphysik der Sitten carefully early on, well before writing the Phenomenology. Thus he surely read the passage quoted here from Kant.

46 that there had been another (and a true) one, there would then be two different and true philosophies on the same subject, which is self-contradictory. If, therefore, the critical philosophy calls itself a philosophy before which there had as yet been no philosophy at all, it does no more than has been done, will be done, and indeed must be done by anyone who draws up a philosophy on his own plan. (MdS, Preface; GS 6:206–7, tr. Gregor)

Kant raised the issue of justifying a philosophy by demonstrating its superiority to all other philosophies as sharply as possible because, he held, the Critical philosophy supplants all others. Hegel was more charitable toward other philosophies than Kant because he sought to integrate them into the historical development of reason and to integrate their insights into his own comprehensive philosophy. However, Hegel’s comparative charity toward other philosophies still involves substantial criticism of them: he must demonstrate that no philosophy other than his own is self-sufficient or comprehensive. Hegel knew that no philosophy can be justified by deducing it from self-evident first principles, whether rational or sensory (below, §§83–91). Accordingly he recognised that philosophical justification requires detailed criticism of alternative views. Moreover, he recognised that this criticism must be internal in order to be genuine and to avoid mere polemic, petitio principii or dogmatism. Those problems were posed incisively by classical sceptics and best summarised by Sextus Empiricus in the Dilemma of the Criterion, quoted above (§12). Harris does not recognise the complexity of this problem; his attempt to dismiss it as a pseudo-problem is untenable. Harris notes this problem, at least in general terms: ‘How can we begin to relate “Science” to “knowledge as it appears” without making unjustified assumptions?’ (HL 1:181). He contends that there is no genuine problem of assessing or revising our knowledge because the distinction between appearance and reality only generates pseudo-problems: Thus the seemingly insoluble difficulty created by the fact that consciousness cannot “get behind the object as it is for consciousness” and test its knowledge of the object by the standard of “how the object is in itself” is a pseudo-problem created by our looking at things the wrong way round. We ought rather to reflect that whenever we “know an object,” the object is “the in-itself for us,” and our knowledge of the object is “for us” another moment. Experience itself has two sides: an outside, or what we are aware of as occurring in the world; and an inside, or what we are aware of as occurring in our minds. It is these two moments that are compared in our experience of “what knowing is.” We have to have a concept of knowing in which they coincide perfectly. Wherever they do not coincide, we must change our concept. But equally, whenever we change our concept both of the moments change their character with it – for both of the moments are “for us,” and our concept of experience equates them. (HL 1:185–6)

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Harris’s solution to the problem of assessing our standards of knowledge involves comparing ‘what we are aware of as occurring in the world’ and ‘what we are aware of as occurring in our minds’. He is right that if these two aspects of knowledge do not correspond, at least one must be changed to obtain a coherent form of consciousness. However, Harris’s solution concerns only what is apparent to us as going on in the world and what is apparent to us as going on in our minds. What insures that what appears to us informs us about what is going on in the world, or indeed what is going on in our own minds? This pair of contrasts between what is ‘inside’ (our awareness) and what is outside (what is in fact occurring in the world or in our minds) is basic to Hegel’s problem. That is the deeper problem Hegel addresses, in terms drawn from Sextus’s Dilemma of the Criterion. Harris’s proposed solution does not address, indeed does not even recognise, this basic problem. Harris reiterates Hegel’s claim that ‘whenever we “know an object,” the object is “the in-itself for us,” and our knowledge of the object is “for us” another moment’. Hegel’s point, however, is not obvious. If the object is ‘for us’ in knowledge, we may regard the object as ‘the in-itself’ and in that regard, the ‘in-itself’ may be ‘for us’ – but these are two ways of saying that objects appear to us in our knowing them. In what sense are these different ‘moments’? Even if the object ‘in-itself’ is our conception of the object, we cannot simply compare our conception of an object with our experience of that object, because our experience of an object is constituted in part by our conception of it. This follows from Hegel’s critical rejection of non-conceptual ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ in ‘Sense-Certainty’ (Westphal 2000, 2002/03). This generates the problem of the possibility of self-criticism. Sense can be made of Hegel’s claim (HER, 100–28; below, §§60–64, 83–91), though not by paraphrasing it. Harris’s response to the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion is literally superficial. Harris addresses the problem of the relation between our awareness and what is in fact (both in our minds and in the world) with the (alleged) ‘methodological axiom’ that ‘the actual is the rational’: The “identity of the actual with the rational” is methodologically axiomatic because no other principle will allow us to test our assumed standards rationally. If we do not grant it, then our standard of rationality, or our definition of truth, becomes an “absolute presupposition.” (HL 1:183)

Harris notes that the observed forms of consciousness need not accept or even be aware of this methodological axiom. The problem with his view is that this supposed methodological axiom is no more an ‘absolute presuppo-

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sition’ than, he says, its denial is.27 This ‘axiom’ is one of the most controversial claims in Hegel’s philosophy, and hence one most in need of justification. Genuine justification requires avoiding petitio principii. Claiming that the identity of the actual and the rational is a methodological axiom required for any self-criticism whatsoever cannot meet this basic desideratum. Hence Hegel is right to note that ‘here, where science first arrives, neither science nor anything else has justified itself as the essence or as the in itself’, i.e., as the standard of knowledge or of justification (PhdG, 9:58.20–22/¶9; quoted more fully above, §12) Hegel cannot use Harris’s alleged ‘methodological axiom’. Although Harris is aware that self-criticism is fundamental to Hegel’s method (HL 1:166; 2:535, 721, cf. 118), he does not recognise the difficulties facing its possibility. Indeed, Harris’s explicit methodological reflections on criticism and self-criticism would have Hegel beg the most basic epistemological questions of the Phenomenology. 13 DISTINGUISHING RECOLLECTION FROM MERE IMAGINATION. I hasten to stress, happily, that the substance of Harris’s interpretation is significantly better than his reflections on method. However, when Harris addresses the crucial issue of the scientific character of Hegel’s phenomenological account of religion and spirit, he once again fails to address critical issues concerning how – on the basis of what standards, with what justification – we can distinguish genuine recollection from imagined fantasy. In connection with Hegel’s unorthodox account of manifest religion,28 Harris cites Gentile’s remark that ‘The truth is that if the hymn remains, then Jove does to, for he lives in the hymn’. Harris comments directly: ‘That life is what historical knowledge actually is; and the greatest achievement of the Phenomenology is to have mediated the philosophical comprehension of this truth successfully’ (HL 2:657). Shortly thereafter Harris remarks: The Spirit that appears in the Phenomenology is the “true Gnosis” – the “absolute knowing” of the true meaning of human existence. All of our actual world, and of our cultural heritage, is a mass of signs …. Without its methodic commitment to the historical “actuality of the Rational” the Phenomenology itself would be just another Gnostic fantasy. (HL 2:661)

The greatest achievement of Hegel’s Ladder is to show that Hegel’s rich histor27

Harris also claims that this axiom is asserted in Hegel’s claim that the two tests described in PhdG ¶84 are the same (HL 1:183). I do not think Hegel’s claim provides any basis for importing this supposed ‘axiom’, and I think there is a much more straightforward way in which the two tests are the same (cf. HER 112–3). 28 The Christian heresy to which Hegel subscribes is identified and sympathetically discussed by Houlgate (2005), 242–75.

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ical and literary sources and references suffice to substantiate Hegel’s commitment to the historical actuality of the rational.29 My first point is that Hegel can justify his commitment to the historical actuality of the rational through his science of human experience; he does not need to presuppose it as ‘methodologically axiomatic’. Yet Harris appears to deflate Hegel’s account with remarks like these: The crucial point is that to “remember” something is different from the conscious knowledge that you are imagining it. What is remembered now is that God was sensibly present with us and died among us. It is remembered (rather than dreamed) because the world has come to the point where the memory is necessary. We do not know what happened historically, but our faith tells us that we are remembering a “Gospel.” The necessity of this Gospel is what we have already comprehended; and it has nothing to do with empirical truth, because no empirical event could be “necessary” in this conceptual way. In a world full of saving fantasies, a story that is reported as history emerges; and the world must believe it, because its truth is what is logically needed. (HL 2:663)

Harris does not explain whether this ‘logical need’ is to solve a philosophical problem that cannot be otherwise solved, or whether it is a longing or desire. If the former, resolving such a need may involve considerations that justify it rationally; if the latter, it would be wish-fulfilment or a ‘dream’, as Harris says, rather than rational justification. Which is it? And how can we tell which it is? Can we determine which it is? Harris notes the inherent ambiguity of recollection: The presence side by side of the myth that we cannot believe, and the story that we generally accept (though with all the controversies that must arise about evidential sources of the Gospel type), highlights for us the fact that the decision to believe either of them, was and still is a free one; and further that the free decision to believe something (to accept it as historical not imaginary) does not establish its objective validity. … It is of the essence of memory that it may be imaginary. This is a logical fact that is vital to Hegel’s doctrine of Spirit as self-creative “out of nothing” (i.e. out of the creative imagination). (HL 2:664; original emphasis.)

If it is essential to memory that it may be imaginary, then memory alone cannot justify any claims, at least not more than prima facie. That is why we must sort genuine from illusory memories as part of our general quest to sort fact from fiction in developing ‘actual knowing of what in truth is’ (PhdG, 9:53.2/ ¶73). Such sorting requires addressing problems about criteria of knowledge, in this case: criteria for distinguishing historical fact from fiction. 29

As Harris also notes, Hegel’s basic view may be substantiated despite various historical oversights or errors he may have made (HL 2:602–3). No synopsis can convey the tremendous erudition and subtlety of Harris’s reconstruction of Hegel’s Phenomenology.

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Note an important tension between these two passages: The first contrasts recollection to imagination and appears to stress the importance of recollecting historical fact. The second reiterates this contrast, but closes by stressing the ‘freedom’ involved in our collective self-creation via, not recollection of fact, but ‘the creative imagination’. Which is it? Accuracy of recollection is crucial to substance actually becoming subject. Harris and I concur with Michael Rosen (1984) in repudiating the neo-Platonic fantasies often ascribed to Hegel.30 However, to the extent that Harris stresses imaginative freedom, his account threatens to relapse into Gnostic fantasy and wish-fulfilment. This is a critical issue in Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology because Hegel twice appears to infer that, because according to his philosophy, his philosophy cannot be articulated until Geist achieves its basic historical development, since Hegel did articulate his philosophy, his philosophy must be true (GW 9:428.16–22, 429.39–430.2/¶¶800, 802)! If this be Hegel’s inference, it rescinds self-justification by indulging in self-service. Some passages in Harris’ interpretation appear to suggest a relapse into Gnostic fantasy; consider this one: The “certainty” of self is the Cartesian certainty of “pure thinking”; but by showing it to be a religious, communally shared and maintained certainty, Hegel turns that “pure insight” into the strongest psychological security that selfhood can have. The “God” of the Manifest Religion is Jesus, the other self who is completely exposed, not hidden, yet whose “Mystic Body” is all the selves there are who have ever tried (or will ever try) to be properly human. (HL 2:667)

What ‘psychological security’ is this? Harris associates it with Descartes. This suggests that this ‘security’ must be, in part, cognitive. For Descartes, this would be ‘psychological certainty’, i.e., impossibility of doubt, indubitability. Alan Gewirth developed a very careful account of how Descartes supposedly moves from psychological certainty, in the form of indubitability, to ‘metaphysical certainty’, to the impossibility of error. However, this move cannot be justified, because no amount or kind of psychological certainty guarantees justification (i.e., truth-indicativeness) of the sort required for Descartes’ ‘metaphysical certainty’ (HER 32–3). Recourse to psychological certainty or security is cognitively futile, indeed: counter-productive (see below, §§80, 89). This problem lodges in Harris’s analysis in the following passage: Hegel is (or at least he aspires to be) completely beyond Faith … he does not believe in Father, Son, Spirit, Creation or Incarnation, except as logical moments of the rational community, for whom he is interpreting these traditions. The logical moments, and the community, he does not need to believe in; for insofar as he aims to do, and thinks that he is successfully doing, the 30

HL 1:265; 2:142 n. 59, 661, 723, 756 n. 18, 778–9; Harris (1998), 628.

51 logic of rational experience, he knows these concepts to be “true.” They are the logical concepts that realize and confirm themselves in a fully coherent conception of experience …. (HL 2:678)

Harris’s parenthetical hedge about what Hegel ‘aspires to be’, in potential contrast to what he is, and Harris’s scare-quotes around ‘true’ – after hedging against what Hegel ‘thinks that he is successfully doing’ – raise but do not address the distinction between what we take to be justified and true versus what is justified and true. Harris neither recognises nor addresses these tensions, though they are critical to distinguishing historical (or logical) fact from fiction, and thus are crucial to Hegel’s attempt to reconstruct and transform religious dogma into logical doctrine. These tensions cannot be evaded by substituting what we believe to be true for what is true, nor by assimilating what is true to what we believe to be true. As Harris notes, Hegel’s science of experience and his socio-historical account of reason both require unqualified claims to truth: Hegel’s “science of experience” only becomes possible when the religious consciousness of the human community has become completely rational, i.e. when we can show that it is the objective expression of a logical consciousness of what human rationality (theoretical and practical) really is, and of what the natural boundaries and social conditions of its realization are. (HL 2:709)

Distinguishing what appears to be true from what is in fact true raises complex issues about self-understanding, which is inherently social, historical and interpretive. A crucial element of rational freedom is involved in assessing basic claims and the evidence for and against them (HL 1:254; 2:664). This is basic to rational justification and to individual enlightenment. This is also the main point of Kant’s sapere aude! at the start of his answer to his titular question, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (GS 8:35), and to Hegel’s distinguishing Ancient Greek philosophy from previous Oriental or Indian philosophy, despite the latter’s philosophically rich content: Philosophical knowledge and understanding require free individual, critical inquiry to assess and to master the cognitive justification of their views.31 Furthermore, there is an element of selectivity in our collective self-interpretation as we determine who we are through determining where we have come from and how we became who we are. Harris states: ‘Unless the manifestation of the actual concept of Spirit begins at the level of immediate sensibility, we shall have only a Gnostic fantasy’ (HL 2:671). Unfortunately, it is not clear how this claim about direct sensation of fact squares with Harris’s dismissal of historical fact or accuracy in connection with recollection cum crea31 See Hegel’s introductory remarks on Ancient Greek philosophy (VGP 2:1–5; B 1:130–3; MM 18: 1783–8; H&S 1:152–5.

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tive imagination (quoted above). However, the selections and kinds of selection we thus make require justifying our assessments of historical facts and their significance. These issues of justification include, as indicated above (§§6, 7, 10–12), issues of justifying fundamental criteria of justification. This confronts us again with issues about the possibility of legitimate criticism and self-criticism, and so underscores the importance of Hegel’s response to Sextus’s Dilemma of the Criterion. An adequate response is required for the possibility of any phenomenological science of human experience. A review of recent attempts to address Sextus’s Dilemma (below, §61) highlights the importance and difficulties of self-criticism, including these four points: 1. The basic assumptions, principles, and favoured cases of an epistemology are interdependent. This introduces some justificatory holism, and a threat of vicious circularity or petitio principii, quite aside from holistic theories of meaning. 2. Having evidence is conceptually distinct from accepting it; we can have excellent evidence which we reject, and inadequate evidence which we accept. 3. Apparent evidence is distinct from genuine evidence; unreliable evidence may appear credible, and reliable evidence may appear inadequate. 4. These last two distinctions (2., 3.) are themselves distinct. In view of these four points, can basic cognitive or epistemological assumptions be submitted to critical scrutiny? Can they be assessed without presupposing what must be justified? Solving Sextus’s Dilemma requires answering those questions (and vice versa). Though they are much more subtle about such problems than Harris, even contemporary epistemologists (e.g., Chisholm, Moser, Alston and Fogelin) have not yet realised how sophisticated a response Pyrrhonian scepticism requires. Certainly Harris does not grasp the depth of Hegel’s (and Sextus’s) Dilemma, nor the sophistication – and success – of Hegel’s response to it.32 In this regard, Harris’s disinterest in epistemology is a genuine handicap, even for Harris’s primary cultural aim of reconstructing Hegel’s phenomenological science of human experience.33

32

Hence I am unsurprised, yet disappointed, that Harris finds my reconstruction of Hegel’s solution to the Dilemma of the Criterion ‘unnecessarily complicated’ (HL 1:204 n. 45). 33 If this criticism of Harris’s epistemological shortcomings may appear harsh, I stress that it is a virtue of Hegel’s Ladder that Harris poses and attempt to address these issues. The same issues confront any exegesis of Hegel’s texts which neglects such issues yet purports to set forth Hegel’s views in metaphysics, logic, morals or whatever (cf. above, §§8, 12).

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14 DIALECTIC, JUSTIFICATION AND HERMENEUTICAL METHOD. One may wonder how I can both extol Hegel’s Ladder and yet criticise it so sharply. The answer lies in the complex aims of Hegel’s Phenomenology and the different emphases Harris and I give our work. Harris notes that Hegel’s Introduction begins with Aristotle’s sense of dialectic, reflecting on the opinions of the many and the wise (HL 1:82): ‘“The wise” are observed at their most sceptical extreme, and “the many” at the extreme of naïve confidence’ (HL 1:166). Despite this breadth of disagreement, all parties to the dispute about knowledge and its possibility share a rational capacity for critical introspection (HL 1:166). This capacity makes the self-critical examination of forms of consciousness possible (HL 2:118, 535, 721). Yet consider Harris’s description of the aim of the Phenomenology: … Hegel’s declared topic is scientific cognition. His main concern is with the transition from the religious mode of experience to the philosophical (or rational) conceptualization of the same. In the “scientific” terminology of the rationalist tradition to which he adheres, this is the transition from imaginatio to ratio. Because this transition has to be made in the universal consciousness of the community, however, the Phenomenology is more concerned with the history of religious experience (and less concerned with the history of philosophy) than is often assumed. (HL 1:64; cf. 9–10, 14–6)

Hegel’s Ladder aims, accordingly, to ‘put the [cultural and religious] pictures back into’ our understanding of Hegel’s Phenomenology, and into our understanding of ourselves (HL 1:138). This Harris does brilliantly. Harris recognises that Hegel’s Phenomenology is intended to address the whole philosophical community, and that it offers ‘arguments’ and must ‘justify’ its claims.34 Yet Harris disregards justification as an aspect of knowledge (HL 1:152 n. 7). He claims Hegel’s method is ‘non-argumentative’, and aims to show that, however embroiled in argumentative controversy the Phenomenology may become, ‘it also has a destiny of its own far above this level’ (HL 2:93; original emphasis). Harris recognises that it is impossible to argue any sophisticated sceptic out of being sceptical, and he is pessimistic about convincing non-sceptical dissenters by argumentative means.35 This, I believe, leads Harris to narrow the scope of his audience. Early he says that Hegel’s Ladder is addressed to the educated public in general.36 By the end he claims that He34 HL 1:177. Harris repeatedly uses the term ‘argument’; he also mentions the justificatory aims of Hegel’s analysis, e.g., HL 1:220. 35 Regarding the convinced sceptic, see HL 2:691; regarding dissenters (i.e. non-Hegelians), see HL 2:276. 36 ‘In any case, the present commentary is directed at the educated public in the same universal spirit – and with the same modestly sceptical expectations that Hegel expresses at the end of the Preface (par. 72)’ (HL 1:138). (Harris too cites PhdG by consecutive ¶.)

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gel’s brand of logic is optional37 and that Hegel’s Phenomenology remains essential for those who already believe that the only worthwhile ‘God’ is one we collectively make for ourselves.38 Harris candidly admits that his approach puts him at odds with Hegel’s own.39 The free rational spontaneity involved in assessing evidence for or against any particular view (HL 1:254; 2:664) requires evaluating evidence or arguments fairly and accurately and accepting or rejecting them accordingly; that is central to enlightenment. Die-hard dogmatists cannot be persuaded to give up their beliefs, nor can die-hard sceptics be persuaded to give up their lack of belief, even on the basis of clear and good counter-evidence or counterargument. This defines dogmatism and dogmatic scepticism, and it is fundamentally irrational. However, the fact that dogmatists (whether sceptical or gullible) cannot be rationally persuaded by evidence or argument does not obviate evidence, argument or justification in knowledge. Justification distinguishes knowledge from lucky or inspired guesswork (i.e., true belief without adequate justification); it is essential for knowledge. In this regard, one of the most important results of Hegel’s phenomenological method is to provide a way of determining when or whether adequate grounds for justifying a view, claim or position have been provided, even if they may be rejected by some dissenters. This is a delicate but absolutely crucial philosophical undertaking. Because he is pessimistic about sceptics and dogmatists, Harris is unduly pessimistic about argument and rational justification per se. Consequently, he seriously underestimates what is required to obtain and to justify claims to scientific knowledge, and he seriously underestimates how Hegel’s Phenomenology addressed – through serious and detailed critical engagement – the philosophically ‘wise’ and, inter alia, their competing theories of knowledge. Where I speak of epistemology, Harris speaks of ‘logical’ issues. In his terms, my point is this: only rigorous logical arguments can show that all purely logical, non-historical accounts of human thought, knowledge and justification fail (HER, 18–90), and that all historicist-relativist cum conventionalist accounts of human thought, knowledge and justification fail. (In Hegel’s day, 37 ‘… no one has to be “logical” in the Hegelian way. What Hegel calls the “leading of language” is a light and easy yoke. One can refuse it at the very beginning, and stand by the practical reading of experience that we call “common sense”’ (HL 2:774). 38 ‘For those who think that the only God worth seeking cannot properly be found “beyond and above,” because that God himself leads us back home to those who made him, and made themselves into a rational community by making him – so that they can rightfully say that (logically) “He” made them able to make both themselves and him – for this constituency the Phenomenology remains essential’ (HL 2:779). 39 ‘… by Hegel’s declared standards, my own procedure, which is a “conversation” about Hegel’s argument, designed for “historischen Belehrung”, is “more for curiosity than for cognition”’ (HL 1:124).

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Herder represented historicist relativism; in ours, Richard Rorty.40) Only with rigorous logical development – far more rigorous than Harris achieves – can an historical account of human thought, knowledge and justification answer logical questions about human thought, knowledge and justification (see below, §§60–64, 83–91). Harris recognises that other interpretations of Hegel’s Phenomenology may complement his, though none is adequate unless it accounts for all the exigencies Harris identifies in its genesis (HL 1:9; cf. 2:450 n. 3). I accept Harris’s account of those exigencies, but I submit that I have identified basic theoretical problems Harris neglects; these are examined throughout this study. I believe my interpretation of Hegel’s critique of rational, justificatory judgment, together with Hegel’s epistemology, complements Harris’s reconstruction of Hegel’s philosophical Kulturkritik. Perhaps Hegel’s solution to the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion is more complex than needed for addressing his Kulturkritik to a general educated audience (cf. HL 1:204 n. 45), but that is only one aim of Hegel’s Phenomenology. To establish the possibility and the superiority of scientific knowledge, and to demonstrate these to the philosophically wise, neither Sextus’s Dilemma nor the intricacies of Hegel’s solution to it can be avoided. I grant that the epistemological argument I ascribe to Hegel is not the only argument in the Phenomenology (HER 154, 271 n. 17), and I believe that our disagreements over details may be resolved by further research. I hope to have indicated that Harris’s monumental commentary is an unprecedented landmark in Hegel scholarship, that it is indispensable for determining and assessing Hegel’s philosophical aims and methods in the Phenomenology of Spirit, but also to show that Hegel’s critical engagement with the history of philosophy and with basic issues in epistemology merits contemporary interest. The spirit of Hegel’s Phenomenology is far more critical than Harris realises; this is essential to the ‘speculative critique of Reason, which the Phenomenology plainly is’ (HL 1:166–7; cf. 168). The recent interest shown in Hegel’s epistemology, by Harris and others, is an important step in the right direction. However, Hegel’s epistemology requires much more sophisticated examination and assessment than it has yet received. Such explication must be guided, in part, by Hegel’s very subtle reflections on Sextus Empiricus’ compendium of Pyrrhonian scepticism, and especially on the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion.

40 In this vein, HER, 47–67, addresses Carnap, a much more philosophically informative example and opponent. On Hegel’s rejection of historicism, see Beiser (1993).

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15 CODA: SOME BRIEF REPLIES TO HARRIS. I remark briefly on three points of Harris’ (1998) response to my comments on Hegel’s Ladder. Harris claims that Hegel’s defence and justification of his use of his logical terminology in the Phenomenology ‘must, almost certainly, begin from the Logic’ (626). This cannot be correct. In the Logic Hegel expressly refers to the Phenomenology as the ‘deduction’ (i.e., legitimation) or ‘justification’ of the standpoint of the Logic (WdL I, 11:20, 21.32–33). To claim that the Phenomenology is the justification of the Logic, and also to claim that the Phenomenology’s use of logical terminology can only be justified by the Logic, is to make the relation of these two works viciously circular, and to leave us with no exoteric introduction to Hegel’s speculative Logic. Harris’ contention on this head completely thwarts the role of the Phenomenology as an introduction to and justification of the Logic (cf. Fulda 1975, Collins 2012). Second, Harris claims to provide a ‘positive interpretation of the Phenomenology as a ‘science of the experience of consciousness’. The ‘other side’, Harris (1998, 626) continues, ‘– the reading of the book as a negative “introduction” to speculative logic – has been emphasized almost ad nauseam in my opinion (and Westphal’s reaction shows that it will never lack for skillful advocates)’. This is doubly mistaken. I do not interpret Hegel’s Phenomenology merely as a negative introduction to speculative knowledge (HER 125–8, 133–6). That view belongs to Hegel’s early Jena essays; he rejects it by 1804 (below, §41). Harris’ claim rests on a false dichotomy, one Hegel sought to counter in his Preface (PhdG 9:30.13–31.16/¶¶38–39); Harris’ dichotomy thwarts Hegel’s method of determinate negation (below, §§60–64, 83–91). Third, Harris (1998, 627) claims that a ‘position can typically mend its own fences by borrowing from the one that arises from it by determinate negation’ and that, e.g., ‘Russell’s problems requires solutions of the kind that he produced’. This response exhibits precisely what I called (above, §9) Harris’ tender-heartedness toward the contradictory aspects of philosophical views. Philosophers can always say something in response to criticisms, but that shows not at all that what they say is adequate. Even very sophisticated and systematic philosophical views often suffer from irreparable internal incoherence; I have shown that this is true of Descartes (HER, 18–34), Carnap (HER, 47–67) and Kant (see below, §§16–36). On Russell’s distinction between identity and predication, please see Westphal (2010a). I regret to say that, in this important regard, Harris’ disinterest in critical assessment (to say nothing of ‘refutation’) clouds his philosophical vision.

CHAPTER 3

Idealism: Transcendental or Absolute? 16 INTRODUCTION. In the manuscripts now known as his ‘opus postumum’ Kant apparently makes many striking statements.1 One of the most rivetting appears to be this: System of transcendental idealism by Schelling, Spinoza, Lichtenberg etc., as it were three dimensions: the present, past and future.2

Tuschling (1989, 1991) has argued in detail that the later phases of Kant’s opus postumum develop a form of absolute idealism of a kind Kant associated with Schelling. These post-Critical developments of Kant’s thought are, Tuschling contends, direct and legitimate responses to problems Kant himself identified within his Critical philosophy. Circa 1800, Tuschling argues, Kant develops Transcendental Idealism into an early form of absolute idealism – under the likely influence of Schelling – and closely corresponding to the absolute idealism developed by Schelling and Hegel circa 1801. Tuschling (1991) argues that in his last thoughts on the matter Kant not only retracts the transcendentally real status of the aether, but also the ‘transcendental dynamics’ that undergirds the Selbstsetzungslehre. To avoid transcendental realism, Kant (1800f.) develops Transcendental Idealism into a new and final theory of selfpositing according to which we posit ourselves and the objects we experience within the space and time by which we intuit them. Because these objects and their relations are only appearances we posit, synthetic judgments a priori are possible. On this view, the thing in itself or noumenon (Kant now equates them) is simply whatever is thought in the object that makes a priori judgments possible. Because Kant’s new view is designed as an alternative to realism, Kant’s use of the term ‘positing’ cannot simply mean that we constitute objects and ourselves as objects of our awareness, a view that can be consistent with realism, but rather that we generate our object and ourselves through our acts of positing. Tuschling concludes (in part) that 1

I omit capitals from ‘opus postumum’ because Kant neither completed nor titled it. Kant, opus postumum, I Konvolut, 7. Bogen, S. 1 (13. Entwurf), July 1801: GS 21:87.29–31; original online, courtesy of the Kant-Arbeitsstelle der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Potsdam): http://kant.bbaw.de/opus-postumum/bildspeicher/C01_ 027b.jpg/image_view_fullscreen. 2

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_004

58 absolute idealism, first articulated in Fichte and, after 1801, in Schelling and Hegel, is inherent in Kant’s transcendental idealism. (Tuschling 1989, 207, cf. 215)

Tuschling’s findings have been an understandable source of excitement and encouragement amongst Schelling’s and Hegel’s devotés. Tuschling’s inclusion of Hegel in this list of absolute idealists is confirmed by Troxler’s Nachschrift from Hegel’s lectures of 1800–01 (Düsing 1988). Tuschling’s account of these aspects of Kant’s opus postumum is subtle and exciting. Whether it is well founded is a further question which divides into two: First, did Kant compose the exciting sentence about the ‘system of transcendental idealism’ that Tuschling seeks to understand? Second, to what extent does Hegel’s mature absolute idealism grow out of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism in the way Tuschling et alia contend? The first question is answered persuasively in the negative by Ernst-Otto Onnasch (2009, §§3, 4). Here I answer the second question in the negative by highlighting several points neglected in the generally enthusiastic reception of Tuschling’s analysis. Though my analysis is independent of Onnasch’s, the convergence of our previously independent inquiries is striking. Some issues regarding the orthographic points Onnasch highlights deserve brief mention before forging ahead into my systematic analysis. Onnasch points out that what appears in Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften as one sentence appears in his manuscript as two phrases: System des transsc. Idealismus durch Schelling, Spinoza, Lichtenberg etc.

and: Gleichsam 3 dimensionen: die Gegenwart, Vergangenheit u. Zukunft

The first part of the second phrase (‘Gleichsam … die’) is plainly not written on the same line as the first phrase (‘System … etc’.); the second phrase is written in two lines, with the first four terms displaced above, and the last four terms (‘Gegenwart … Zukunft’) below, the line of the first phrase. Though the second phrase might be a later thought appended to the first phrase, the start of the second phrase is distinctly offset from the end of the first phrase, above and decidedly to the left. Kant had the space to extend the first phrase by writing an addition next to its end; if it extends the first phrase, the start of the second phrase is very oddly placed, also in view of Kant’s orthography in these sheets. Additionally, the start of the second phrase is located (both vertically and perhaps more significantly laterally) very near an insertion mark made by Kant to the previous line (and paragraph) of his manuscript (see Onnasch 2009). Beneath the first phrase is a blank line, beneath which begins a new

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sentence expressing a new thought. Hence the first phrase may well stand alone, whether complete unto itself or incomplete, in the midst of Kant’s other remarks. From the orthography and from Onnasch’s analysis I believe this is the case. Almost certainly the two phrases were not written in one continuous inscription.3 Adickes (1920, 764, cf. 840) quotes this sentence without further comment, simply citing ‘C 375’. His system of referencing (ibid., V) throughout his discussion of the first Konvolut (and not only this Konvolut), strongly suggests, indeed almost certainly indicates that he worked on this material from Reicke’s (1884) transcription of Kant’s manuscript (designated by Adickes as ‘C’), rather than directly from the manuscripts themselves. Reicke (1884, 375) transcribes the two phrases as a single sentence. Unfortunately, the foremost expert on Kant’s handwriting thus missed what would have been an extremely helpful occasion to comment directly on Kant’s manuscript. The next occasion for Adickes to have done so would have been whilst editing these materials for Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften. This occasion, however, was lost to him and to posterity by the intervention of National Socialists in the Kant-Archiv, which prompted Adickes to resign on 19 June, 1926 (Stark 1993, 112–5). 17 SOME CRITICAL QUESTIONS. Whatever scholarship may ultimately decide about the orthography of Kant’s notorious phrases, there are good systematic reasons to suppose that Hegel’s absolute idealism does not grow out of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, as suggested by Kant’s (purported) phrases and widely assumed by Hegel scholars. The main problem examined here concerns the common assumption amongst many commentators, especially those devoted to Hegel’s purported Entwicklungsgeschichte, that whatever constituted Hegel’s absolute idealism circa 1801 holds also for Hegel’s mature version of idealism in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), the Science of Logic (1812–1816, 1832) and the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (1817, ²1827, ³1830), so that his mature views simply elaborate a core view already established in outline by 1801. Here I highlight five key points: Hegel refuted two key premises of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism which also undergird his later Transzendentalphilosophie in the opus postumum (§18), he critically rejected (ca. 1804) intellectual intuition because it is subject to the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion (§19) and he critically rejected the deductivist ideal of scientia, another key premiss of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and later Transzendentalphiloso3

Kant’s notes are densely inscribed. This particular sheet has a prominent blotch, the lower dot of which overlays the start of ‘gleichsam’. Kant’s graphic organisation is unclear, though for any one sentence it would be very odd, even for these pages.

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phie. Moreover, Hegel’s criticisms of Transcendental Idealism and of scientia show that the a priori and the a posteriori are poles of a continuum rather than an exclusive distinction in kind, as Kant maintained to the very end (§20). Likewise, the basic tenets of Hegel’s mature idealism reveal no debt to Kant’s late transcendental philosophy nor Selbstsetzungslehre of the opus postumum (§21). Furthermore, Hegel’s wide-ranging critical assessment and supersession of common philosophical ideas and assumptions – especially about knowledge – in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit includes several ideas and assumptions underlying the popular notions that Hegel’s idealism somehow grows out of or radicalises Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, that their respective versions of idealism are linked by Kant’s notions of self-positing in the opus postumum or that Hegel’s early absolute idealist views (ca. 1801) hold in their essentials also for Hegel’s mature philosophy (§22). These points raise a series of crucial questions confronting the received wisdom about links between Kant’s and Hegel’s forms of idealism (§20). I conclude that constructive answers to these questions are so little to be expected that this standard view of the relation between Kant’s transcendental idealism and Hegel’s absolute idealism must be rescinded (§21). 18 DOES HEGEL’S ABSOLUTE IDEALISM DEVELOP OUT OF KANT’S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM? One common belief supporting the extension of Tuschling’s interpretation to Hegel’s mature views is that, somehow, Hegel’s idealism is a direct development of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, perhaps even a ‘radicalisation’ of it; Tuschling seeks to articulate and further defend this notion, rather than to establish it de novo.4 I agree that Hegel’s objective idealism develops in response to Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Yet the relevant ‘development’ revealed by detailed research is not constructive, but rather critical. (To be sure, ‘constructive’ developments can also be deeply ‘critical’, yet this is not the present case.) The cornerstone of Hegel’s method in the Phenomenology of Spirit is the constructive ‘determinate negation’ of alternative views based on their thorough internal critique (below, §§60–64). By his own methodological lights, Hegel owes us a detailed internal critique of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Though he did not detail this critique in any extant materials, Hegel is right that Kant’s Transcendental Idealism is subject to devastating internal critique, indeed in part for reasons Kant recognised in the opus postumum, and Hegel did recognise some key points of this critique.

4

E.g., Pippin (1989) and McDowell (2001) also share this common view.

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One critical point is this. In the Differenzschrift (1801) Hegel clearly recognised that Kant’s proof of the law of inertia in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) is irreparably flawed, so that Kant’s Trascendental Idealism ultimately fails to justify our causal judgments about spatio-temporal particulars, whether common-sense or scientific. The problem here is that the only causal principle Kant formulates or tries to justify in the Critique of Pure Reason is the general causal principle that every event has a cause. However, the causal principle required by the Analogies of Experience is the specific causal principle that every spatio-temporal, physical event has an external physical cause. This latter principle is equivalent to Kant’s law of inertia. Hegel recognised that Kant’s essentially kinematic premises from ‘Phoronomy’ cannot justify Kant’s dynamic theory in ‘Dynamics’. (Kant claims that the key premiss of ‘Dynamics’ is demonstrated in ‘Phoronomy’, though this is mistaken; cf. KTPR §§44–47.) Hegel accordingly recognised that Kant’s Transcendental Idealism cannot deliver its promised justification of causal judgments, either in common sense or in natural science. As Tuschling (1971) has shown, Kant subsequently recognised this problem, which became Kant’s key point of departure for developing his thoughts in the opus postumum; indeed, this problem is the crippling ‘gap’ Kant discovered in his Critical system. Hegel’s second point goes beyond the problems Kant recognised in his own Critical Philosophy. In both Glauben und Wissen (1802, hereafter ‘G&W’) and in the Differenzschrift Hegel repeatedly probes the adequacy of Kant’s account of the objectivity of nature and of our judgments about natural phenomena. In so doing, Hegel realised that transcendental analysis and proof of the a priori necessary conditions for the possibility of self-conscious human experience do not require Transcendental Idealism: genuine transcendental analysis and proof of these conditions can show that some objective, material conditions must be satisfied by the world we inhabit, regardless of what we may say, think or believe about it, if we are to be self-conscious at all. In a word, Hegel recognised that there are also material and mind-independent conditions which alone can satisfy some genuine a priori transcendental conditions for the possibility of human thought and self-awareness. One key example of such a condition is that any world in which human beings can enjoy self-conscious experience must provide us a humanly recognisable degree of regularity and variety among the ‘contents’ or ‘objects’ we witness. (Kant uses both terms in this connection.) Lacking such humanly detectable regularity and variety would preclude our forming any concepts whatsoever, and so would preclude our making any judgments whatsoever. Such incapacity to make any judgments at all would in turn preclude our identifying any objects or events around us and thus preclude our distinguishing ourselves

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from them. In this case, we would – for reasons provided by Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction’, ‘Analogies of Experience’ and ‘Refutation of Idealism’ – fail to be self-conscious. This is Kant’s own sound conclusion of his analysis of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold. This finding refutes Kant’s Transcendental Idealism because it directly implies epistemological realism: to satisfy the transcendental principle of the affinity of the sensory manifold there must be a way the world is unto itself regardless of what we think, say or believe about it, whilst conversely, if we are at all self-conscious, we must know at least something about the mindindependent world. The fundamental premiss of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism is that whatever satisfies the a priori transcendental conditions for the possibility of human self-consciousness must and can only be a function of the structure and functioning of the human mind. Hegel’s re-analysis of the a priori necessary, transcendental though material conditions of cognitive judgment proves that this fundamental premiss of Transcendental Idealism is false. Indeed, its falsity can be proven by appeal to Kant’s own principles and analyses in the Critique of Pure Reason (KTPR, §§15–29). In Glauben und Wissen, Hegel develops this idea, inter alia, in connection with the idea of an intuitive intellect: The idea (Idee) of this archetypal intuitive intellect is at bottom nothing else but the same idea (Idee) of the transcendental imagination that we have considered above. For it is intuitive activity, and yet its inner unity is no other than the unity of the intellect itself, the category still immersed in extension, and becoming intellect and category only as it separates itself out of extension. Thus transcendental imagination is itself intuitive intellect. (G&W 4:341)

This is a challenging passage. Hegel here violates a large number of Kant’s Critical strictures in order to extrapolate from Kant’s discussion of the teleological proof of God to Hegel’s post-Kantian, Schelling-inspired view of an intuitive intellect. However, the important point here lies in a clause from this passage that has not received due attention:5 … the unity of the intellect itself, the category still immersed in extension, and becoming intellect and category only as it separates itself out of extension. (emphasis added)

The term ‘extension’ doesn’t simply reach back, via Schelling, to the first Critique (Pippin 1989, 77) it reaches back to Spinoza. If the ‘category’ becomes 5

Pippin (1989) neglects this passage whilst quoting from its surroundings; see Westphal (1993), 268. Pippin (2005) revised his account of Hegel’s idealism; his later view is closer to the view I have defended since 1989. (I do not claim to have influenced Pippin’s shift in view.) McDowell’s (2001) account of how Hegel’s idealism supposedly radicalises Kant’s is critically examined in Westphal (2008a).

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intellect and category only as it separates itself out of extension, then there are two factors here: extension as structured by the category, and the category as articulated expressly as ‘intellect’ (Verstand). The unity of ‘the’ intellect is the unity of these two factors, and in this passage Hegel associates one single ‘idea of this archetypal intuitive intellect’ with both of these factors.6 This strongly suggests the early roots of what are often called the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ aspects of Hegel’s ‘concept’, where the objective aspect is a structure of the world, whilst the subjective aspect is our express formulation and grasp of that structure.7 This early view is not a transcendental idealist view; it is opposed to Transcendental Idealism, and this view is retained and further developed in Hegel’s mature writings.8 19 DOES HEGEL RETAIN THE MODEL OF AN INTUITIVE INTELLECT? A second assumption supporting the extrapolation from Hegel’s early idealism to his mature views is the idea that Hegel’s mature philosophy retains the model and ideal of an intuitive intellect. This supposition, however, fails to pay sufficient attention to Hegel’s recognition, circa Winter 1804, in response to Gottlob Ernst Schulze’s anonymous „Aphorismen über das Absolute“ (1803), that Pyrrhonian Scepticism is not only a problem for the ‘finite’ understanding (Verstand), but is an altogether general problem also affecting ‘absolute idealism’ of precisely the kind developed on the basis of intellectual intuition by both Schelling and himself (see below, §§40–41). Thereafter Hegel never omits the opportunity to point out that intuitionism, as a form of justification or a form of knowledge, and expressly including intellectual intuition, cannot avoid petitio principii because it cannot reliably (or even plausibly) distinguish between actually being directly aware of something, and on that basis alone being (rightly) convinced that one knows it, as contrasted to merely being convinced that one is directly aware of something, and thereby being (spuriously) convinced that one knows it. Though it requires further textual 6 On the sudden rise of the importance of Spinoza in post-Kantian German philosophy, see Beiser (1987), 48–61. On Hegel’s acknowledgement of Spinoza, see ‘On the Concept in General’ (WdL II, 12:11–28). Pippin (1989, 84–5) notes a Spinozistic remark about the identity of thought and being (G&W 4:345), but dismissed it because of Hegel’s supposed allegiance to Kantian principles. However, the main point of Kant’s critical philosophy is to raise questions about our capacity to formulate and to know metaphysical claims, as Pippin (1989, 87) recognised. It is thus possible to retain such critical issues while rejecting Kant’s transcendental idealist answer to them. Apparently Pippin here assumed that critical questions about metaphysical knowledge can only be answered by adopting some form of Transcendental Idealism (cf. Pippin 1989, 219). 7 Pippin (1989, 77) attempts a much more Kantian reading of this passage. However, his reading requires neglecting the points made here about this passage; see previous note. 8 E.g., PhdG, 9:134.31–35, 135.15-18; cf. HER, 140–5, 160, 167, 186–7; below, Parts II, III.

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analysis to demonstrate, Hegel’s mature philosophy dispenses altogether with the model of an intuitive intellect (see below, §§37–42, 92–99). Hence any of his early idealist views which rely on that model cannot reflect his mature views, except by (significant) contrast. 20 TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM, SCIENTIA AND HEGEL’S ABSOLUTE IDEALISM. I have reviewed the above points briefly because their analyses are detailed in subsequent chapters. Here I consider a more serious problem. Another widespread assumption amongst commentators is that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is a failed early work excised by Hegel from his own philosophical system, and that accordingly the Science of Logic is Hegel’s main philosophical text from which all else in his philosophical system follows. My conjecture is that this supposition rests, in part, on paying attention to some features of Kant’s theory of knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason, features which become more pronounced in the opus postumum – at the expense of other features of Kant’s Critical theory of knowledge which are ultimately more important philosophically and which Hegel rightly developed. The writings gathered in Kant’s opus postumum are highly exploratory. Plainly Kant is searching for a new, thoroughly revamped form of transcendental philosophy. However, it is extremely difficult to understand how a sound or even a valid argument for his new form of transcendental philosophy could be developed on the basis of his revamped ideas about transcendental deduction. Kant’s late views retain these Critical characteristics of transcendental principles: although they are synthetic propositions, they are universally and necessarily valid in the sense that they hold of any and all possible objects of human experience, because we posit ourselves and the world we experience according to those principles. In this regard, Kant maintains his allegiance in the opus postumum to the infallibilist-deductivist model of justification, central to rationalism, to empiricist scepticism and to the Critique of Pure Reason, of scientia, introduced in March 1277 by decree: the idea that specific principles or claims can be justified only by deducing them from established first principles, by ruling out all logically possible alternatives. Kant realised of course that the relevant first premises for his transcendental analysis of the very possibility of human experience and knowledge are not self-evident, yet he claims to be able to prove the required principles ‘apodictically’ by transcendental proof (cf. KdrV Axv, 31; Bxliv n., 39, 47, 199). Ultimately, Kant seeks to underwrite his claim to apodictic necessity by appeal to his Transcendental Idealism.

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One problem for Kant’s new transcendental philosophy in the later fascicles of the opus postumum is that Kant still adheres to the infallibilist-deductivist justificatory ideal of scientia, which motivates (though does not justify) Kant’s continued adherence to the fundamental principle of Transcendental Idealism within his new transcendental philosophy, that whatever necessary, a priori conditions there are for the possibility of self-conscious human experience, and whatever satisfies those conditions, must derive from (or be legislated by) the structure and functioning of the human mind. Kant’s adherence to these two basic premises is reflected in his continued inference, that anything genuinely a priori must precede all experience; e.g. (from the very late first fascicle of the opus postumum): ‘System of pure philosophy (not derived from experience), hence for, not from, experience’.9 However, these two basic premises generate increasing difficulties for Kant’s equally fundamental aim to maintain the objectivity of human knowledge. This tension is one of the most important features of Kant’s opus postumum.10 The problem is that trying to uphold those two basic premises forces Kant into ever more precarious philosophical experiments. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is the most sophisticated and valiant effort ever to understand (inter alia) the non-formal domain of empirical knowledge in accord with the deductivist ideal of scientia. In this regard Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason – along with Descartes’ foundationalism and the empiricist attempt to reduce the language of physical objects to the language of sense-data – are enormously instructive epistemological failures. Their failures show that the deductivist model of scientia simply is not suited to nonformal domains, whether in theoretical or practical philosophy, and indeed for reasons already given by Sextus Empiricus. Hegel learned this lesson and worked out its enormous implications in (roughly) the two years leading up to completing his 1807 Phenomenology.11 This, we shall see, is why he set aside is extensive manuscripts on logic, metaphysics and philosophy of nature to first justify the standpoint of his philosophical logic. Fortunately, the Critique of Pure Reason is not exhausted by its deductivist strand. Along side the deductivist model of scientia, Kant’s Critique also develops important and central strands of a fallibilist and social (even an historical) account of rational justification. Moreover, Kant’s Critique develops a sophisticated and tenable semantic theory – a theory of specifically cognitive reference (above, §2.3) – which suffices to secure his most important claims 9 1. Konvolut, Umschlag p. 4; GS 21:8.3–4; cf. e.g. 21:16.8–14, 45.11–18, 67.18–27, 77.22–29, 80.5–12, 84.3–5, 87.11–15, 87.20–23, 89.3–7. 10 See Edwards (2000), 167–92, (2009), esp. 421–32. 11 On the failures of Descartes’ foundationalism and of the reduction of talk of physical objects to talk of sense data, see HER, 18–34, 47–67, 230–2 n. 90.

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about both the possibility of empirical knowledge and the impossibility of rationalist metaphysics, without appeal to Transcendental Idealism! (KTPR). The key point of Kant’s semantics is that determinate cognitive reference requires singular sensory presentation of objects known, and that only such determinate cognitive reference provides full and determinate meaning (Kant’s terms are ‘Bedeutung’, ‘Inhalt’ and ‘Sinn’) for any of our forms of judgment. (On Kant’s view, such determinate cognitive reference is a necessary, though not a sufficient condition of determinate meaning; hence Kant’s view is not a version of verificationism, which holds that determinate reference to particulars is the sole and sufficient condition of the meaningfulness of our terms.) In the remainder of this study I argue in detail that Hegel develops a pragmatic-realist theory of knowledge rooted in his internal critique of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, and that Hegel’s pragmatic, social and historical account of rational justification develops the fallibilist strands in Kant’s Critical theory of rational judgment and justification. Moreover, Hegel adopted and further developed Kant’s semantics of cognitive reference, beginning directly in the first chapter of the 1807 Phenomenology, ‘Sense Certainty’.12 By 1801 Hegel rejected any ultimate distinction in kind between the analytic and the synthetic; according to Hegel, these terms mark poles of a continuum rather than an exclusive distinction in kind. Hegel is explicit about this in ‘Faith and Knowledge’, where he links this directly to his sense of ‘speculative’ knowledge (G&W 4:335.2–6; cf. below, §§30–36). This important insight is further supported by Hegel’s recognition (ca. 1804) that both coherentist and foundationalist models of justification (whether scientia or historia) are refuted by the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion, which can only be solved by the kind of transcendental, though also fallibilist and pragmatic, account of rational justification Hegel develops in the 1807 Phenomenology. Hegel’s account of rational justification thus critically rejects the three basic, underlying premises of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and his new transcendental philosophy in the later fascicles of the opus postumum. This is a very important reason why Hegel’s mature idealism cannot be understood as an outgrowth or radicalisation either of Kant’s transcendental idealism or of Kant’s Selbstsetzungslehre in the opus postumum. 21 SOME BASIC FEATURES OF HEGEL’S MATURE IDEALISM. The conclusion just drawn is reinforced by considering the basic tenets of Hegel’s mature idealism. Very briefly, Hegel’s absolute idealism – as developed in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, the Science of Logic and the Encyclo12

See Westphal (2000), (2002–03), (2009b), (2010a).

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paedia of Philosophical Sciences – is a kind of moderate ontological holism (below, §§122–131). According to Hegel, the individual features or properties of things obtain only as members of contrastive sets of properties. He further argues that the causal characteristics of spatio-temporal individuals are essential to their identity conditions (the conditions that must be satisfied for something to be what it is) and that their causal characteristics are fundamentally relational and hence constitutively interrelate spatio-temporal individuals. Hence the causal interdependence of particulars, along with the constitutive similarities and differences among their properties, establish the mutual interdependence of their identity conditions. The result is two-fold. On the one hand, particulars have their ground (ultimately) in the whole world-system, because their characteristics obtain only in and through contrast with opposed characteristics of other things and because they are generated, sustained and corrupted through their causal interaction with other things. On the other hand, Hegel analyses the ‘concept’ (der Begriff) as an ontological structure. Hegel’s ‘concept’ is a principle of the constitution of characteristics through contrast, where the relevant contrasts include distinctive regularities or patterns of behaviour, including causal regularities. More importantly, this concept, Hegel argues, exists only in and as the interconnection of things and their characteristics within the world. Hegel’s ‘idea’ (Idee) is the instantiation of this conceptual structure by worldly things and events. Hegel describes spatio-temporal individuals as ‘ideal’ because they are not individually self-sufficient, and thus not ultimately real, where to be ‘real’ requires ontological self-sufficiency. He characterises the world-system as ‘spirit’ because he believes it has a normative telos toward which it develops historically. Part of this telos is self-knowledge, which the world-system gains through human knowledge of the world. None of these doctrines are expressed, articulated or suggested by Hegel’s early ‘absolute idealism’ ca. 1801. The sceptical view that things are the unsensed causes of sensory experience has been popular from Protagoras to Putnam; it appears in Locke’s ‘thing I know not what’, Kant’s unknowable ‘thing in itself’ and in Herder’s causal scepticism, which Hegel identifies in his lectures as the target of his critique, in ‘Force and Understanding’, of forces of solicitation (see below, §129.5). Hegel’s analysis of forces and scientific laws in ‘Force and Understanding’ responds to this view and provides support for his holistic ontology. Hegel defends an enriched ‘phenomenological’ account of laws of nature. (This use of the term is distinct from that pertaining to Hegel’s ‘phenomenological’ method.) According to such an account, laws of nature are relations among manifest phenomena. This view was prominent throughout the nineteenth century in German and British physics. Very briefly, Hegel contends

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that nothing more can be attributed to any force or set of forces than precisely the array of manifest phenomena which they are postulated to explain, so that ultimately there is nothing more to ‘forces’ than the conceptual interrelation of manifest phenomena. These interrelations are, Hegel argues, objective features of those phenomena, and the aim of conceiving those phenomena is to formulate those interrelations accurately. Because the interrelations among and within natural phenomena are not strictly speaking perceptible, but nonetheless are objective features of those phenomena, those interrelations are conceptual and concepts are structures of nature. The most basic point for understanding Hegel’s mature, objective form of ‘absolute idealism’ is to recognise that mind-dependence is only a species of ontological dependence. Hegel contends that any and all forms of ontological dependence – many of which are causal – entails that something is ‘ideal’ because it is not ontologically self-sufficient and so in this sense (and in this sense alone) it is not ultimately ‘real’. In Hegel’s ontology, dependence on human minds is an unimportant sub-species of ontological dependence. Hence the first thing most people (including philosophers) think of in connection with ‘idealism’ is deeply ill-suited to understanding Hegel’s mature idealism. Unfortunately, Hegel’s expositors have often succumbed to this equivocation, despite Hegel’s explication of his use of this term in a Remark added to the second edition of the Science of Logic (WdL II, 21:142–3) – presumably he realised people misunderstood his unique form of idealism. How does Hegel argue for or try to justify his idealism? This is a complex issue which I still seek to unravel. Part of the answer lies in Hegel’s internal critique of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, some key points of which are examined in subsequent chapters. Part of the answer lies in Hegel’s analysis of causal relations, as just suggested. Two important features of Hegel’s analysis of causal relations clarify and reinforce these points. Hegel identifies a key equivocation in the traditional concept of substance. This equivocation concerns a very basic feature of the traditional concept of substance that remained unchallenged from the Greeks up through Kant; it underlay the debate about internal and external relations based on the thesis that the logical law of identity entails an atomistic ontology. The equivocation concerns two distinct senses of the term ‘intrinsic’ (or analogously, ‘internal’) when used in connection with the characteristics or properties of individual substances. One sense of the term ‘intrinsic’ in this connection is that a characteristic is essential (rather than accidental) to a substance, that the substance would not be what it is without that characteristic. Another sense of the term ‘intrinsic’ in this connection lies in its contrast with ‘extrinsic’ or ‘relational’. In view of this contrast, an ‘intrinsic’ char-

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acteristic is contained solely within the individual substance; it is non-relational. These two senses of ‘intrinsic’ have been conflated throughout the history of philosophy; conflating them generates the standard assumption that relational properties cannot be essential to individual substances. (Put semantically, the assumption is that relations are expressed by polyadic predicates, whereas only monadic predicates can express the essential characteristics of any individual substance.) This equivocation is responsible for the (broadly) ‘atomistic’ orientation of Occidental philosophy, that individuals are ontologically basic, whilst relations are derivative because they depend upon individuals, whereas individuals do not depend upon their relations. Hegel exposes this equivocation in ‘Force and Understanding’ because he realises it wreaks havoc in our ontologies, both natural and social. In particular, Hegel contends that this conflation blocks our comprehension of causal forces and causal relations. Only if we clarify this equivocation can we recognise that relations can be, and indeed are essential to individuals. In ‘Force and Understanding’ Hegel argues for this view on conceptual and phenomenological grounds. More striking yet, Hegel also contends in ‘Force and Understanding’ that empirical proof that causal relations are essential to material objects is provided by Newton’s gravitational theory, at least once Newtonian mechanics is re-written by Johann Bernoulli and his successors, including especially LaGrange, in terms of mathematical analysis (integral calculus). In this very important regard Hegel’s epistemology in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit is naturalised (though not in Quine’s sense); already in the Phenomenology Hegel holds the view stated in his Philosophy of Nature, that Not only must philosophy accord with the experience nature gives rise to; in its formation (Entstehung) and in its development (Bildung), philosophic science presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics. (Enz. § 246R).

Stated more directly, already in 1807 Hegel contends that any tenable philosophical theory of human knowledge must take the natural sciences into very close consideration. This finding about Hegel’s analysis in ‘Force and Understanding’ is greatly augmented and further supported by Hegel’s taking contemporaneous natural science into very close philosophical consideration in ‘Observing Reason’.13 One central reason why epistemology must closely attend to the natural sciences is semantic. In ‘Force and Understanding’ Hegel develops a sophisticated account of the explanatory power involved in the integration of physical laws under more general laws (PhdG 9:91–2). One central feature of his 13

See below, §§122–6; cf. Ferrini (2007), (2009a, b), Westphal (2015a).

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account lies in his striking critique of the reduction of specific physical laws to general ones, and expressly how this is done in Newton’s Principia. Hegel rightly argues that such ‘reduction’ does not and cannot involve an identity between the specific, subsumed laws and the general law which subsumes them, because the specific laws refer to specific systems, relations and initial conditions that are, by design and of necessity, omitted from the general law. Hegel’s analysis of the integration of general laws with specific laws through the successive re-introduction of specific systems of particulars and their initial conditions has an important semantic component. Hegel contends that general scientific laws, such as Newton’s Laws of Motion, are expressly and necessarily abstractions. As abstractions, they lack determinate semantic content or meaning because they lack determinate reference to spatio-temporal particulars (Gegenstandsbezogenheit, if one will). In a phrase, laws of nature are functions of judgment, they are not descriptions of any specific phenomena. Kant and Hegel both rejected descriptions theories of reference because they realised that descriptions, no matter how specific, cannot by themselves determine whether they are vacuous (refer to no particulars), definite (because they are satisfied by only one individual) or ambiguous (because they are satisfied by more than one individual). Kant and Hegel both expressly defend the thesis Evans (1975) argues for in ‘Identity and Predication’, that determinate reference and ascription of qualities are mutually integrated cognitive achievements which require identifying spatio-temporal individuals (physical objects) by both locating them in space and time via singular sensory presentation and by correctly characterising them; only conjointly do these achievements constitute predication and provide for knowledge. Hegel’s semantics is based on Kant’s, and includes (like Kant’s) the thesis that our conceptions are functions of judgment, and as such lack complete meaning unless and until they are referred to particulars. (Here I use the term ‘conception’ to designate the ‘subjective’ component of Hegel’s Begriff, roughly our classifications for or descriptions of particulars.) Consequently, conceptions lack truth-value unless and until they are incorporated into judgments by which they are referred to particulars. This same point holds, analogously, for combinations of conceptions, however complex or specific, including formulations of laws of nature. The direct implication of Hegel’s semantics for general laws of nature is that, unto themselves, they have no truth value; they only have truth values when they are referred to spatio-temporal particulars (natural phenomena), yet this Gegenstandsbezogenheit requires employing the entire apparatus of theoretical explanation, including more specific laws of nature, specification

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of specific systems of objects, their initial conditions, together with any and all relevant theories, methods, techniques or instruments for making the relevant observations or identifications. This semantic point about general laws of nature has an important cognitive component: General laws of nature are not themselves objects of knowledge; they are objects of knowledge only when taken together with the subsidiary concepts, theories, procedures and data through which alone they can be determined to be instantiated, in part by being referred determinately to their instances. This important semantic and cognitive point is a quite general one, on Hegel’s view: The general principles explicated and defended in the Science of Logic, too, are unto themselves not objects of knowledge. They, too, are objects of knowledge only when taken together with the subsidiary concepts, theories, data and procedures through which alone they can be determined to be instantiated, in part by being referred determinately to their instances. This result is entailed by Hegel’s adopting and fulfilling the requirements for ‘realising’ concepts, in the sense specified by Tetens and adopted by Kant (below, §55.1). Indeed, this view undergirds Hegel’s justly famous remark, quoted earlier, that ‘not only must philosophy accord with the experience nature gives rise to; in its formation and in its development, philosophic science presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics’.14 This remark, made very early in Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature, does not concern only the second part of his Encyclopaedia. Nor does it merely concern the development of spirit out of nature in the third part. It directly concerns Hegel’s Logic too. Just quoted was the second sentence of Hegel’s Remark; the first sentence refers to Hegel’s discussion of the relation between philosophy and the empirical sciences in the Introduction to the Encyclopaedia as a whole.15 There Hegel states directly that philosophy is stimulated by and grows out of experience, including natural-scientific experience, and that the natural sciences develop conceptual determinations in the form of generalisations, laws and classifications which must be reconsidered philosophically (Enz. §12). Thus Hegel insists that his Logic cannot be properly understood apart from his Philosophy of Nature, nor can his philosophy of nature be understood apart from Hegel’s knowledge and understanding of the methods and content of natural science. Hegel’s Logic examines the ontological and cognitive roles of ontological categories (e.g., being, existence, quantity, essence, appearance, relation, thing, cause) and principles of logic (e.g., identity, excluded 14

Cf. Enz. §246n.; cf. Vorlesungen über die Logik (1831), 72. ‘The relation of philosophy to the empirical was discussed in the general introduction’ (Enz. §246n.), i.e., in the introduction to the Encyclopaedia as a whole, not any of the introductions to its three component parts; see below, §§100–110, 116–121. 15

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middle, non-contradiction, forms of judgment and syllogism). It also analyses principles of scientific explanation (force, matter, measure, cognition; mechanical, chemical, organic and teleological functions), by using which we are able to know the world. (These points are detailed below, §§122–6.) Even this brief list suffices to cast grave doubt on the suggestion that Hegel’s Logic can be a purely a priori investigation, for it involves too many very specific concepts and principles, at least some of which obviously derive from historical science (e.g., ‘chemism’).16 Much less so, then, can Hegel’s attempt in the latter two parts of his Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, to show that and how these concepts and principles are specified and exhibited in nature and in human life, be purely a priori. Indeed, as noted above, by 1802 Hegel already rejected the distinction in kind between the a priori and the a posteriori, reinterpreting them as poles of a continuum. In sum, Hegel’s Science of Logic is flanked by two major works – the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Nature – in which Hegel insists, for excellent reasons, that the Science of Logic is not and cannot be the self-sufficient, sui-generis foundation for his philosophical system it is so often presumed to be. Instead, specific conceptions, principles and doctrines analysed in Hegel’s Science of Logic only acquire their determinate meaning and full justification in and through his Realphilosophie, including centrally his Philosophy of Nature.17 Moreover, the very standpoint of Hegel’s Science of Logic is only ‘justified’, ‘deduced’ or ‘proven’ (these are Hegel’s own terms) by the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel states this plainly in the Introduction to both editions of the Science of Logic,18 whilst none of his other ‘introductions’ to his Logic are ever assigned such a crucial justificatory role, a role they cannot fulfil. Though the elder Hegel no longer claimed that the Phenomenology formed the first part of – that is, within – his philosophical system of Logic, Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit, he did not expunge his first masterpiece from his systematic philosophy.19 Hegel’s cognitive semantics entails that his Logik and Realphilosophie must be integrated in ways which defy the distinction in kind between the a priori and the a posteriori central both to Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and to his late transcendental philosophy in the opus postumum. Likewise, these two key components of Hegel’s mature system of philosophy are integrated in 16

On Hegel’s treatment of chemistry, see Engelhardt (1976), (1984), Burbidge (1996), Renault (2002). 17 See Stekeler (1992), Bykova (2003), below §§122–126. 18 WdL I, 11:20.5–18, 20.37–21.11, 21:32.23–33.3, 33.20–34.1. 19 See Fulda (1975), Collins (2012). Hegel speaks positively about, draws from and cites for justification the 1807 Phenomenology in many of his later writings; e.g., WdL I, 21:7.25–8.2, 37.27–32, 11:351.3–12, 12:36–198.11, 232.30–17; Rph §§35R, 57R, 135R, 140R+n., Enz. (1830), §25.

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ways that do not at all conform to Kant’s late model of Selbstsetzung. Hegel’s mature views are thus no outgrowth or radicalisation of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, nor of his late Transzendentalphilosophie; neither is Kant’s opus postumum a reliable guide to Hegel’s mature views. One theme Hegel’s mature views share with Kant’s (e.g., GS 21:84.3–7) late transcendental philosophy is that the systematic unity of experience (not, Kant notes, of experiences) must play a fundamental, transcendental role in human cognition. Though it is very much to Kant’s credit that he finally realised this important point, Hegel had already learned what he needed to know about this point from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, his discussion of the ens realisimum in the Critique of Pure Reason and most importantly from the integrity of the three Analogies of Experience as a set of principles guiding causal judgment (see below, §§29.2, 43). Moreover, Hegel was ahead of Kant on this topic. One lesson to be learned from Kant’s opus postumum is that it is at best extremely difficult, indeed very likely impossible, to provide a proper transcendental role to the integrity of experience whilst adhering to the two basic premises of Transcendental Idealism and of Kant’s late transcendental philosophy discussed above (§20). By rejecting those premises and by developing his transcendental, though also fallibilist and pragmatic account of rational justification, Hegel succeeded far more than Kant in granting a proper transcendental role to the integrity of experience within human cognition.20 22 THE COSTS OF NEGLECTING HEGEL’S INTRODUCTION TO THE 1807 PHENOMENOLOGY. These points reveal a further assumption required by the enormous extrapolation from Hegel’s early idealism (ca. 1801) to his mature views: that Hegel was not particularly concerned about epistemology or semantics, especially the semantics of determinate cognitive reference. This major oversight results in part from the longstanding habit of disregarding Hegel’s own Introduction (Einleitung) to the 1807 Phenomenology in favour of the much more exciting, ambitious and – so it seems – brazenly metaphysical Preface (Vorrede), which is a Preface to Hegel’s projected System of Philosophy, not only to the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. Neglecting Hegel’s Introduction circumvents Hegel’s central concern with epistemology, reflected in his exact paraphrase in the very centre of the Introduction of the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion, a problem he addresses very acutely both in his Introduction 20

Edwards (2009) asks whether Hegel offered a counterpart to Kant’s late Aetherdeduktion. Considered in light of his analysis, my account of the ‘Consciousness’ section of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology (Westphal 2009b) may suggest a positive answer.

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and in the body of the Phenomenology (above, §11).21 Neglecting Hegel’s Phenomenology also insures neglecting his brilliant articulation and justification of his sophisticated semantics of cognitive reference, beginning in ‘Sense Certainty’ and his innovative and defensible naturalisation of epistemology in ‘Force and Understanding’ and ‘Observing Reason’. 23 DO TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM OR INTELLECTUAL INTUITION ILLUMINATE HEGEL’S MATURE PHILOSOPHY? These considerations show that those who interpret Hegel’s mature philosophy in terms of Transcendental Idealism, Kant’s Selbstsetzungslehre, intellectual intuition or Hegel’s own early idealism (ca. 1801) must address seven basic questions: 1. To what extent can viewing Hegel’s Science of Logic as the self-sufficient, self-generating foundation for Hegel’s philosophical system avoid turning Hegel’s decidedly post-Critical philosophy back into a pre-Critical dogmatic rationalism? 2. How can Hegel’s Science of Logic, when taken as a self-sufficient starting point and foundation for Hegel’s system, be known to be true, or even to be determinately meaningful? 3. How can the many very determinate concepts and principles analysed in the Science of Logic, e.g., ‘Maß’ (measure) or ‘chemism’, be derived purely a priori? 4. How and how well can Hegel’s Science of Logic, so understood, either avoid or respond to the Dilemma of the Criterion, and the threat of petitio principii? 5. To what extent did Hegel retain the exclusive distinction in kind between the a priori and the a posteriori required to understand the Science of Logic as a self-generating, self-sufficient system of logical concepts and principles? 6. To what extent can viewing Hegel’s Science of Logic as the self-sufficient, selfgenerating foundation for Hegel’s philosophical system avoid ascribing to Hegel – whether implicitly or explicitly – the top-down deductivist model of scientia that Hegel exposed in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit as profoundly inappropriate to the non-formal domains of human action and cognition, both commonsense and natural-scientific?

21

Hegel’s views are challenging and difficult; hence it is understandable that Hegel’s scholars have principally devoted themselves to expounding his views. It seems obvious that questions of whether or how Hegel may have justified his views must await answers to what his views are. Unfortunately, the lack of interest in epistemology and in philosophical justification more broadly among Hegel’s expositors has occluded Hegel’s central and explicit concerns with these important issues and thus distorted our understanding and indeed much of our exposition of Hegel’s views.

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7. To what extent can viewing Hegel’s Science of Logic as the self-sufficient, selfgenerating foundation for Hegel’s philosophical system avoid ascribing to Hegel the very same fault he claimed to find in Schelling’s systems of philosophy, namely schematising formalism? Though I cannot foreclose on the prospect of cogent answers to such questions, for reasons reviewed here I am not optimistic about them.22 Both the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit and Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature centrally stress that Hegel’s epistemology is naturalised because it is deeply rooted in the empirical sciences, indeed in ways incompatible with understanding his Science of Logic as the self-sufficient, self-generating foundation of his system it is widely held to be. In sum, too much research on Hegel’s Science of Logic unwittingly assumes the top-down, deductivist model of scientia, thereby seriously distorting our understanding of Hegel’s system of philosophy and entirely occluding one of Hegel’s major achievements: the development of the first and still the most sophisticated transcendental-pragmatic theory of semantic analysis and of rational justification, which solves the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion and justifies realism in epistemology and philosophy of science and also strict objectivity regarding practical norms.23 To understand Hegel’s Science of Logic requires taking both his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit and his Philosophy of Nature into very close philosophical account. Only then can we appreciate how Hegel rejected the top-down deductivist model of justification central to Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, to his late Transzendentalphilosophie in the opus postumum and to viewing Hegel’s mature absolute idealism as some kind of extension, radicalisation or at least some kind of natural development of transcendental idealism. 24 CONCLUSION. Transcendental Idealism is a valiant, failed effort to satisfy the justificatory demands of infalliblist scientia within the non-formal domains of transcendental philosophy and of empirical knowledge. Hence neither it, nor Kant’s late Transzendentalphilosophie nor his Selbstsetzungslehre, cast much illumination on Hegel’s absolute idealism, except by (informative) contrast.

22 Houlgate (2006) is an important study which says much of value about the first three questions; it does not, however, appear to address the latter four. I think Hegel can only avoid the charge of schematising formalism on my kind of view, which allows Hegel to explicate his concepts, categories and principles ‘bottom up’ by examining relevant phenomena, as well as ‘top down’ by explicating his Science of Logic. Some key points in this large issue are examined below, §§116–121. 23 Regarding Hegel’s practical philosophy, see Westphal (2017d), (2018a).

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Though convenient, the idea that Hegel’s absolute idealism is an extension or a radicalisation of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism is ill-conceived and rests on over-simplifications which can be corrected only by careful systematic reconstruction of Hegel’s texts and issues. My surmise is that this convenient idea is the product of lecture halls, in which lecturers had the unenviable task of providing a brief synopsis of Hegel’s extraordinarily compendious, detailed and intricate philosophy. Hegel’s Entwicklungsgeschichte is fascinating and can be very helpful in understanding his mature views, though only if it is critically reconstructed and assessed in view of Hegel’s philosophical issues and analyses and also, of course, the details of his often difficult texts and above all his important and identifiable revisions of his views. What Hegel rejected in his early views and why he rejected it is as illuminating – if not more so – than what his mature philosophy retains from them. The widespread assumption that Hegel’s idealism is somehow a direct outgrowth or radicalisation of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, rooted in Kant’s late views about self-positing, short-circuits philosophical understanding of Hegel’s views in the ways and about the issues indicated above. Clinging to the models of intellectual intuition, self-positing or (in some sense) ‘radicalised’ transcendental idealism precludes answering – or even posing – the above questions (§23). The considerations presented here thus raise a final question: Why do so many of Hegel’s expositors find the (alleged) development or radicalisation of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and the models of self-positing and intellectual intuition so attractive? Or is that fascination with process, development, unfolding, realisation, has distracted attention from the fact that such processes as such do not constitute justification? This is the key error of psychologism, which was quite prevalent in the Nineteenth Century.

CHAPTER 4

Hegel’s Early Critique of Kant’s Critical Foundations of Physics 25 INTRODUCTION. Hegel claims that a proper criticism of a philosophy must be sufficiently immanent, detailed, and systematic to show that and how a more adequate view is introduced and justified by a thorough comprehension of the merits and deficiencies of another view (WdL II, 12:14.27–15.1). However, Hegel’s explicit criticisms of Kant can hardly be said to meet this exacting standard. As Ameriks (1985) and Guyer (1993) have argued, Hegel’s criticisms of Kant are too often external, and thus admit easy Kantian rejoinders. Hegel’s lectures on Kant are only an overview. Hegel makes some detailed criticisms of Kant in the conceptual preliminaries of the Encyclopaedia Logic and in a number of remarks in the Science of Logic, but these criticisms appear isolated. Hegel often criticises Kant in his early writings, but those objections are embedded in Hegel’s still embryonic philosophy, and as such do not constitute a thorough and mature Hegelian critique. Yet Hegel makes two fundamental criticisms of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism in the Differenzschrift (1801) and in Faith and Knowledge (1802). These criticisms have been overlooked by Hegel’s expositors and critics alike (including Sedgwick 2012). Both criticisms are immanent and far more significant than they first appear. Both objections were briefly summarised above (§§18.3, 18.4); here they are considered more thoroughly. Together, they constitute the key points of a profound internal critique of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, of just the sort Hegel owes us by his own methodological lights.1 26 THE ROLE OF THE FOUNDATIONS IN KANT’S CRITICAL SYSTEM. One major point of Kant’s Critical system is to articulate the a priori and rational grounds of common sense and scientific judgments about natural forces and their causal laws. Officially, Kant’s ‘general metaphysics’, set out in the first Critique, grounds the ‘special metaphysics’ of moving bodies, set out 1 This chapter summarises two key points made in detail in KTPR, §§15–59. Doubters may be assured that I only discerned the significance of Hegel’s remarks on these topics after having understood these two internal problems infecting Kant’s idealism.

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in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (MAdN). ‘Special metaphysics’, in turn, provides the rational part of physics, which in turn grounds the empirical part of physical science. More specifically, Kant’s transcendental Critique only considers understanding and reason themselves within a system of all concepts and principles which relate to objects in general, while abstracting from given objects2 or events and their specific causes, and indeed even the cause of change in general.3 Its main aim is to analyse how synthetic cognitions a priori are possible.4 Transcendental knowledge is not concerned with objects, but instead with our way of knowing objects (Erkenntnisart) in general, insofar as this is possible a priori.5 This restriction does not rule out considering specific examples in Kant’s Analogies of Experience, because the form of the alterations considered there – the successive states of affairs illustrated by Kant’s examples – can be explicated a priori according to the law of causality and the conditions of time.6 Among much else, the Critique of Pure Reason sets out the sources and conditions for the possibility of the metaphysics of nature.7 The Foundations applies the transcendental principles of the ‘general metaphysics’ (MAdN 4:469–70) developed in the first Critique to a specific range of given objects: nature as a realm of extended things.8 In this way, the Foundations serves to give sense and meaning to the pure a priori concepts and principles set out in the first Critique: And so a separate metaphysics of corporeal nature does excellent and indispensable service to general metaphysics, inasmuch as the former provides instances (cases in concreto) in which to realise the concepts and propositions of the latter (properly, transcendental philosophy), i.e., to give to a mere form of thought sense and meaning. (MAdN 4:478.15–20)

As Förster (1987, 542; 2000, 59) has noted, this language is virtually identical to the language Kant uses in describing the role and significance of the Schematism in the first Critique:

2

A845/B873, A65–6/B90–1, A55–7/B79–82; 3:546.16–23, 83.33–84.7, 77–8. A171/B213, A206–7/B252; 3:155, 178. 4 B19, 3:39; Prol. §5 4:279. 5 B25, 3:43; cf. A11–2, 4:23. 6 A207/B252, 3:178. I recall only those points that are most important for my subsequent analysis. For more thorough discussion of Kant’s transcendental level of analysis see Förster (1989), esp. 290–2, and KTPR. 7 Axxi, 4:13–14; A845–8/B873–6, 3:546–8; Prol. §5 4:279. 8 A845/B873, 3:546; cf. „Welches sind die wirklichen Fortschritte, die die Metaphysik seit Leibnizens und Wolf’s Zeiten in Deutschland gemacht hat?“, 1. Ent. 2. Abt. GS 10:285.31–37. 3

79 This significance [sc. relation to an object] is acquired by the categories from sensibility, which realises the understanding insofar as it also restricts it. (A147/B187, GS 3:139.36–37)

In giving ‘sense and meaning’ to the categories, the Foundations provides the rational part of physics, which makes physics as an empirical science possible.9 Notice, for example, that after writing the Foundations (1786) Kant claims, in the second edition Preface of the first Critique (1787), that his transcendental idealist account of time explains the possibility of the synthetic a priori cognitions involved in the universal theory of motion.10 This is a direct reference to his purported a priori proofs of the conservation of matter, the law of inertia and the equality of action and reaction (Propositions 2–4 of MAdN chapter 3, ‘Mechanics’); these are Kant’s a priori foundations for Newtonian physics. 27 HEGEL’S EARLY CRITIQUE OF KANT’S FOUNDATIONS. In 1801 Hegel makes a brief but, I will argue, incisive criticism of Kant’s Foundations. The kernel is this: For [Kant], … forces are not merely superfluous; they are either purely ideal, in which case they are not forces, or else they are transcendent. The only construction of phenomena that he can allow is mathematical, not dynamical. (GW 4:69.36–70.4)

Significantly, the year before Kant privately reached the same conclusion: The transition to physics cannot lie in the metaphysical foundations [MAdN] (attraction and repulsion, etc.). For these furnish no specifically determined, empirical properties, and one can imagine no specific [forces], of which one could know whether they exist in nature, or whether their existence be demonstrable; rather, they can only be feigned to explain phenomena empirically or hypothetically, in a certain respect.11

Kant also then recognised that the only tenable part of the Foundations was the first chapter, ‘Phoronomy’, and subsequently he described the Foundations in terms only suitable to ‘Phoronomy’.12 ‘Phoronomy’ is the quasi-mathe9

Friedman (1992, 136–7, 159, 163–4, 171, 185, 202–3, 234, 255, 259) takes up this point, too, and treats the Foundations as if it is the schematism of the categories. Friedman greatly overstated the case; see Westphal (1995), §10. 10 B49, 3:59.14–16. The official relations between the first Critique and the Foundations are complex, and have been subject to controversy. For good discussion see Dahlstrom (1991). 11 th X Fascicle; August 1799–April 1800; GS 22:282.12–18. 12 GS 21:402.11–24; cf. 21:524.10–16, 21:483.14–18. The first of these passages is quoted in part by Tuschling (1971), 62–3. I am indebted throughout to his, and to Förster’s, work on Kant’s opus postumum, as also to Edwards (2000).

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matical, expressly non-dynamical, kinematic treatment of individual bodies in motion and mathematical combinations of motions in a single body. To say that this first chapter is the only tenable part of the Foundations is to admit that Kant’s dynamic construction of matter out of forces, begun in Foundations chapter 2, ‘Dynamics’, fails; and it is to admit, as Hegel charged, that Kant’s constructions could only be ‘mathematical’ and not ‘dynamical’. Significantly, Kant came to see that rectifying that failure required excising ‘Phoronomy’ – and indeed the very mathematical model on which it is based – from the metaphysical foundations of physics.13 This is to admit that phoronomic constructions, licensed and supported by the first Critique, could not come to grips with dynamic phenomena; that is to say, they do not provide a sufficient basis for analysing forces.14 28 THREE INTERNAL PROBLEMS WITH KANT’S FOUNDATIONS. Neither Hegel nor Kant elaborate this criticism of the Foundations, but my research into Kant’s Foundations and its role in the Critical system shows that they are right. The whole account of why this is so is intricate (KTPR §§30– 59); here I summarise the main points. Briefly, Kant came to recognise that his account of matter in Foundations begs the question (§28.1) and is circular (§28.2). In these regards, Kant’s basic forces are ‘merely ideal’. Furthermore, Kant’s proof of the law of inertia is fallacious. In this regard, real forces transcend Kant’s Critical analysis (§28.3). Both points have profound significance for Kant’s Critical system (§29) which illuminate some important features of Hegel’s post-Kantian philosophical reorientation (§44). 28.1 Kant’s Flawed Proof of Matter’s Basic Forces. Kant’s proof in the Foundations that matter is constituted by forces begs the question in the following way. At the beginning of the second chapter of Foundations, ‘Dynamics’, Kant appeals to the main principle of the first chapter, ‘Phoronomy’ (roughly, kinematic geometry), but gives it an interpretation that cannot be justified by that first part. In ‘Phoronomy’ Kant demonstrates several principles concerning the mathematical description and combination of motions, in explicit and necessary abstraction from any dynamic interpretation of those motions or their causes (MAdN 4.28–38). ‘Phoronomy’ concerns movements pure and simple, not their causes or forces. The first Proposition of ‘Dynamics’ is the 13

Cf. GS 21:482.4–18, 22:487.27–490.27, 22:511.17–517.2. In this regard, Kant’s and Hegel’s criticism of the Foundations echoes Aristotle’s criticism of Pythagorean physics. The Pythagoreans, according to Aristotle, ‘do not tell us at all, however, how there can be movement if limit and unlimited and odd and even are the only things assumed, or how without movement and change there can be generation and destruction, or the bodies that move through the heavens can do what they do’ (Met. 990a8–12; tr. Ross). Dan Dahlstrom kindly brought this passage to my attention. 14

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main principle of Kant’s dynamic theory of matter. It states that ‘matter fills a space, not by its mere existence, but by a special moving force’ (MAdN 4:97.15–16). In the proof of this Proposition, Kant claims that ‘nothing can be combined with any motion as lessening or destroying it but another motion of the same movable thing in the opposite direction (phoronomic proposition)’.15 ‘Lessening or destroying’ (vermindert oder aufhebt) are not pure mathematical concepts! They are dynamic concepts that make no sense except by reference to forces: ‘cause’ (Ursache) or ‘resistance’ (Widerstand). Consequently, these concepts do not belong in any proposition of Phoronomy, nor are they justified by any proposition of Phoronomy. Kant’s crucial proof of his first principle of dynamics begs the question. This problem was pointed out by one of the first reviewers of the Foundations (Anon. 1786); Kant transcribed this objection onto the first sheet of what became the opus postumum.16 This explains Kant’s reduction of the Foundations to ‘phoronomy’. Because ‘phoronomy’ is modelled closely on mathematics (though it includes time and motion) this objection establishes Hegel’s point that Kant’s constructions of forces are only ‘mathematical’ or kinematic, not dynamical. 28.2 Kant’s Circular Account of Matter’s Quantity. Before the anonymous review brought this petitio principii to Kant’s attention, he came to see that his proof that matter and its quantity can be defined in terms of a balance of attractive and repulsive forces is circular.17 On Kant’s dynamic theory of matter, any bit of matter is constituted by equipoised attractive and repulsive forces radiating from a common centre. The quantity of matter in any such spatial sphere occupied by two such forces, that is, the density of that matter, should be directly proportional to the combined absolute value of the intensities of the two fundamental forces that counterbalance each other in that matter. The basic attractive force is supposed to be identical to gravitational force. However, to preserve the Newtonian principle that gravitational attraction is proportional to mass, Kant must distinguish between gravitational attraction and the original power of attraction that, on his theory, combines with the original repulsive power to determine the basic quantity of matter. This is because, to retain Newton’s equation, gravitational attraction is a (mathematical) function of density and volume, while density and volume must be (on Kant’s theory) functions (both mathematically and constitutively, i.e. causally) of the absolute values of both of the original attractive force and the repulsive force. Therefore, gravitational attraction cannot be 15

MAdN 4:497.21–24; emphasis added. Lehmann quotes the relevant paragraph of the review (GS 22:809). Kant’s transcription is likely have been made shortly after the review would have appeared, no later than 1787. 17 GS 11:1st ed. 348; 2nd ed. 361.30–362.2; letter to J. S. Beck, 16. Oct. 1792 (11:1st ed. 362; 2nd ed. 376.35–377.4); for detailed analysis see KTPR §§41–52. 16

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identified with the original attractive force which is said to constitute any quantity of matter, simply because the original attractive force is only one of two opposed forces of which gravitational attraction is said to be a constitutive, metaphysical function. Therefore, there must be at least two kinds of attractive forces, Kant’s ‘original’ attractive force and gravity. This further entails that gravity cannot be a basic force, because it is a (constitutive) function of the two basic forces said to constitute any bit of matter. Once gravity is demoted to a derivative force, then the relation between it and the alleged basic forces of attraction and repulsion that supposedly constitute matter is entirely a matter of speculation, and can afford only feigned explanations of gravitational attraction – just as Kant concluded in the passage quoted above from his opus postumum.18 Kant’s basic forces are ‘merely ideal’; they are mere Gedankendinge, and so are not real forces, just as Hegel charged. 28.3 Why Forces Transcend Kant’s Critical Analysis. Hegel’s further claim, that real forces transcend Kant’s metaphysical analysis, is born out by critical examination of one of Kant’s main principles of ‘Mechanics’. Kant’s proof of Proposition 3 of Mechanics is fallacious. Proposition 3 is Kant’s ‘Second Law’ of Mechanics, that all physical causation is external. There are two defects in Kant’s third Proposition. First, Kant’s proof of Newton’s First Law, the Law of Inertia, commits a fundamental petitio principii (§29.3.1). Second, Kant’s purported metaphysical proof of the externality of physical causation appeals to an illicit, unsupported yet crucial empirical premiss (§29.3.2). 28.3.1 Kant’s Flawed Proof of Newton’s Law of Inertia. Kant’s Second Law is: Second law of mechanics: Every change of matter has an external cause. (Every body remains in its state of rest or motion in the same direction and with the same velocity unless it is compelled by an external cause to forsake this state.) (MAdN 4:543)

Notice that Kant’s law speaks of the causally unaffected state of a body as either rest or ‘motion in the same direction’. What does ‘same direction’ mean? According to Newton, ‘same direction’ meant rectilinear motion, as he explicitly states in his First Law.19 The closely parallel wording between Kant’s and Newton’s laws strongly suggests that Kant’s phrase ‘motion in the same direction’ means ‘rectilinear motion’. This suggestion is supported by Kant’s claim 18 th X Fascicle; August 1799–April 1800; GS 22:282.12–18, quoted above, §27. While I have not found exactly this objection to Kant’s construction of matter from attractive and repulsive forces in Hegel, Hegel did severely, and effectively, criticise Kant’s construction to much the same effect in the Science of Logic (WdL I, 11:102–07, 21:166–208). 19 ‘Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by forces impressed’ (Newton 1999, 416).

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in ‘Phoronomy’ that he cannot treat non-linear motions in that chapter because Phoronomy must abstract from all forces, and such motions presuppose forces (MAdN 4:480.15–18, 4:95.5–12). This may seem to pick nits, but everything turns on how one understands ‘motion in the same direction’. Newton defined it in terms of rectilinear motion. Aristotle would have defined ‘motion in the same direction’ in terms of something moving toward its natural place. Understood in this way, Aristotle could accept most of Kant’s Second Law (except Kant’s claim about constant velocity). In another case, planetary motion, Aristotle and other Greek cosmologists understood ‘motion in the same direction’ as motion in the same circular direction, and in this case, ‘speed’ was thought to be constant, and motion ceaseless, too. The point is this: Kant’s Second Law claims that ‘every change of matter has an external cause’. However, this principle cannot justify the claim that all ‘changes’ in the motion of material bodies are deviations from rest or rectilinear motion without presupposing what needs to be proven, namely, that rest or rectilinear motion is the natural state of motion of bodies. At one point Kant recognises that progressive movements might be curved (MAdN 4:483.8–16). However, he later claims that curved motions involve a continuous change of direction, and thus presuppose forces (MAdN 4:495.5–12); this claim clinches the point that by his phrase in his Second Law, ‘motion in the same direction’, Kant intends rectilinear motions. Kant’s proof of Newton’s First Law thus assumes what it is supposed to prove. 28.3.2 Kant’s Flawed Disproof of Hylozoism. Showing the inadequacy of Kant’s proof that all physical causality is external is more intricate; here are the most central points. Kant’s argument for his second law of mechanics, that every change of matter has an external cause, rests entirely upon matter consisting solely of external spatial relations. His proof assumes the transcendental causal thesis (defended in KdrV) that every event has a cause. He then argues: Matter as mere object of the external senses has no other determinations than those of external relations in space and hence undergoes no changes except by motion. With regard to such change, insofar as it is an exchange of one motion with another, or of motion with rest, and vice versa, a cause of such change must be found (according to the principle of [general] metaphysics [i.e., KdrV]). But this cause cannot be internal, for matter has no absolutely internal determinations and grounds of determination. Hence all change of a matter is based upon an external cause (i.e., a body remains etc.). (MAdN 4:543)

Kant claims that this is the law of inertia, and then remarks: The inertia of matter is and signifies nothing but its lifelessness, as matter in itself. Life means the capacity of a substance to determine itself to act from an internal principle, of a finite substance to determine itself to change, and of a material substance to determine itself to motion or rest as change of its state.

84 Now, we know of no other internal principle of a substance to change its state but desire and no other activity whatever but thought, along with what depends upon such desire, namely feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and appetite or will. But these determining grounds and actions do not at all belong to the representations of the external senses and hence also not to the determinations of matter as matter. Therefore all matter as such is lifeless. (MAdN 4:544)

Kant goes on to remark on how the entirety of physics as a science depends on the lifelessness of matter, and that the opposite view, hylozoism, would be ‘the death of all natural philosophy’ – i.e., of physics (MAdN 4:544.25–26). Kant’s argument is consistent with biology as a science. Organic beings are subject both to physical laws and to further biological laws. Physics focuses only on some characteristics of matter, and hence only on some characteristics of material beings, including those material beings that happen to be organic. It is an empirical question whether any of the beings we observe consist solely of matter, or if some (or even all) are composites of matter plus animate substance,20 yet this is irrelevant to the issue of whether the material aspects of these beings are subject to the laws of physics. However, Kant has no adequate argument against hylozoism, and the inadequacies in his argument show that the lifelessness of matter is at best an empirical fact, not a metaphysical necessity. If that is correct, then Kant has no adequate proof of the externality of physical causation. The question cannot be whether the organic beings we experience are immaterial. Kant holds that, by the bare fact that organic beings are observed to be extended occupants of space, the metaphysical concept of matter as ‘the movable in space’ applies to those beings (MAdN 4:480–2). The applicability of that concept to organic beings provides purchase for Kant’s metaphysical arguments (such as they are) to show that, since those beings are material, they must be subject to physical laws, including the law of inertia. The basic issue can be put two ways. One is to ask, given Kant’s transcendental and metaphysical principles and arguments, whether spatially extended bodies invested with living forces could violate the laws of physics. Another is to ask whether a physics of ‘dead’ matter is possible simply because matter is extended and moveable in space. That is Kant’s contention, but his arguments are unconvincing. I shall argue that on Kant’s grounds it is a distinct logical, transcendental, metaphysical and empirical possibility that matter be animate, or that material bodies violate the laws of physics. Consider a counter-example. What would Kant do if he were called to witness and to analyse a recalcitrant billiard ball that rolled at random times in unpredictable directions? Suppose we had something close to the theories and equipment available at the apocryphal ‘end of science’ and scientists 20

Kant explains life expressly in dualist terms (MAdN 4:544.7–19).

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gave us full assurances that no detectable external forces influenced that peculiar billiard ball, and that thorough non-destructive analysis of the ball revealed nothing unusual about its internal structure. The ‘externality’ of the ball’s spatial relations would not suffice to demonstrate the externality of any causal principles responsible for the ball’s unusual behaviour. Nothing about the ball’s behaviour makes it an impossible object of experience; we can see it and we can record its wanderings in exact detail. But nothing these ultimate scientists can detect shows that the causes of its behaviour are external. The ‘externality’ of the spatial relations involved in the ball’s occupying space does not entail – not logically, transcendentally nor metaphysically – that the ball’s behaviour can only be governed by external causes. Kant’s argument for the intrinsic lifelessness of matter rests on two crucial premises; one is this: ‘Matter as mere object of the external senses has no other determinations than those of external relations in space …’ (MAdN 4: 543.25–26). It is one thing to infer that matter has external relations because it is spatially extended; it is quite another to infer that, because it is spatially extended, matter consists solely of external relations. Kant’s argument requires this stronger conclusion. Is it plausible to suppose that matter necessarily consists only of relations? That is what Kant says. Kant treats matter as if it were just ‘thick space’, so to speak; otherwise it is a non sequitur to infer that what occupies space as such can only have ‘external’ relations. The fact that billiard balls can only be governed by external causes, and thus be subject to the laws of physics, if and so long as that is a fact, is an empirical fact. Kant’s metaphysical analysis may provide grounds for showing how the judgments involved in developing and applying our physical theories are possible, but they do not show that those judgments concern the only possible features of the objects of our theories. It is a piece of contingent luck that treating matter as dead, extended, massy stuff is an adequate basis for a successful physics. For all Kant has shown, the lifelessness of matter as such is an empirical fact, not a metaphysical necessity. The second crucial premiss is Kant’s claim that … we know of no other internal principle of a substance to change its state but desire and no other activity whatever but thought, along with what depends upon such desire, namely feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and appetite or will. (MAdN 4:544)

Unlike life, which Kant defines as ‘the capacity of a substance to determine itself to act from an internal principle’ (MAdN 4:544), this claim is not a definition; it is a claim about what we know. Unfortunately, Kant gives no reasons to think that this claim to knowledge is transcendental or metaphysical, rather than empirical. (The same problem infects Kant’s argument in the Am-

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phiboly against the existence of monads within the phenomenal realm.21) The only empirical element which is supposed to enter Kant’s metaphysical analysis in the Foundations is the empirical concept (not proposition) of matter as the moveable in space (MAdN 4:470.1–12, 472.4–6). Consequently, Kant cannot rest a metaphysical argument on such empirical propositions. The fact that he does shows that his Foundations cannot provide an a priori Critical ‘construction’ of matter out of dynamic forces. Therefore, real forces transcend Kant’s Critical analysis, just as Hegel charged. 29 THE RAMIFICATIONS OF THESE PROBLEMS FOR KANT’S FIRST CRITIQUE These problems not only mark a failure in Kant’s application of metaphysical principles to natural science. Because of the fundamental role of the Foundations in Kant’s system, they mark a decisive failure of Kant’s Critique of empirical and scientific knowledge as a whole. Two reasons for this may be indicated briefly. 29.1 Kant’s Table of Categories as a Groundplan for Rational Physics. Burkhard Tuschling (1971, 37–9) explains the importance of the Foundations for Kant’s first Critique in terms of the Table of Categories laying the groundplan for theoretical science, in particular, the groundplan for the metaphysical foundations of physics. Publishing the Foundations thus fulfilled Kant’s aim, left unfulfilled in the twenty years since Kant accepted Lambert’s offer to collaborate, an aim which led Kant in the interim to write the first Critique to establish the parameters for the Foundations. In this connection, Tuschling cites an important remark Kant added to the second edition of the Critique, subsequent to publishing the Foundations: For that this table [of categories] is extremely useful in the theoretical part of philosophy, and indeed is indispensable for outlining completely the plan of a whole of a science, so far as it rests on concepts a priori, and for dividing it systematically according to determinate principles; [this] is self-evident from [the fact] that the table contains all the elementary concepts of the understanding in their completeness, indeed [it] even contains the form of a system of them in the human understanding, and consequently indicates all the moments of a projected speculative science, indeed even their order; as I accordingly have essayed (Probe geben) elsewhere.* (KdrV B109–10)

Kant footnotes the Foundations as the intended locus of this test (Probe). Tuschling then points out that a systematic failure of the Foundations thus reflects directly back onto the soundness of the first Critique.

21

A285/B341, 3:229.10–12; see Van Cleve (1988), esp. 244.

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29.2 External Causation and Kant’s Analogies of Experience. Tuschling’s point is correct, but only part of the story. The causal principle Kant needs to sustain the principles defended in the Analogies of Experience is not the principle stated in the text of the Critique (in either edition), that every event has a cause (KTPR §§36–38). The Analogies aim to defend causal interaction between distinct physical substances. This is explicit in the third Analogy, and implicit in the other two. This is because the principles in the Analogies form an integrated, mutually supporting set of principles; no one of them can be used without conjoint use of the other two.22 Because they aim to justify causal interaction between physical substances, the Analogies require the principle that every physical event has an external physical cause. Kant formulates and defends this principle only in the Foundations.23 Consequently, this principle is required, not only for physical science, but also for common sense judgments about ordinary physical objects; it is necessary for using the category of causality to judge (and thus to know) objects of possible experience. If Kant’s (official) justification of this specific, metaphysical causal thesis in the Foundations fails, then the Principles of the Analogies of Experience – one pillar of Kant’s justification of the validity of causal judgments about objects of possible experience – is unsupported.24 Thus Kant’s official analyses and proofs of the legitimacy of our causal judgments fail, in their own terms, to justify the legitimacy of causal judgments. Hegel recognised this crucial point by 1801–02 (above, §27). Hegel’s method of internal critique (determinate negation) requires more than refutation, it also requires identifying and highlighting the insights of the view criticised. One surprise in this regard is that the official roles of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and Critical Metaphysics of Natural Science in his analysis and defence of causal judgments can be replaced by appeal instead to his Semantics of Singular Cognitive Reference (KTPR, §62–63). This feature of Kant’s Critique of pure reason is very important to Hegel’s reconstruction of Kant’s Critical philosophy sans Transcendental Idealism (below, §§43–46).

22

See Guyer (1987), 168, 212–4, 224–5, 228, 239, 246, 274–5; also Edwards (2000). MAdN 4:543; cf. KdU Einl., 5:181.15–31. 24 This marks the downfall of the whole of Kant’s Transcendental Idealist analysis of the transcendental and metaphysical conditions of empirical knowledge because the other potential domain of application, psychology, is already foreclosed by Kant’s arguments in the Paralogisms, which entail that none of the Principles of the Analogies can be applied to the objects of inner sense (‘psychology’, as Kant understood it), because we cannot identify substances within the form of inner intuition, time, whereas identifying substances is necessary for using the Principles of the Analogies (KTPR, §61). 23

CHAPTER 5

The Transcendental, Formal and Material Conditions of the ‘I Think’ 30 INTRODUCTION. The phrase ‘transcendental material conditions of experience’, may seem oxymoronic. It is not. A crucial feature of Kant’s ‘formal’ idealism is that the matter of experience is given to us ab extra. This is itself a transcendental material condition of experience (Allison 1983, 250). There may be difficulties understanding just how Kant thinks this material is supplied, but the condition itself is not incoherent.1 The oddity lies in another transcendental material condition of experience Kant identified: the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold. This condition is peculiar because it is both transcendental and formal, and yet neither conceptual nor intuitive, but rather material. This is to say, the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold is transcendental because it is a necessary a priori condition of the possibility of self-conscious experience. It is formal because it concerns the orderliness of the matter of empirical intuition. However, ultimately it is satisfied neither by the a priori intuitive conditions of experience analysed in the Transcendental Aesthetic nor by the a priori conceptual conditions analysed in the first half of the Transcendental Analytic. As Kant twice acknowledges, its satisfaction is due to the ‘content’ or the ‘object’ of experience.2 31 KANT’S TRANSCENDENTAL PROOF OF SENSORY AFFINITY. Appearances must be associable in order for us to make cognitive judgments at all. This associability, Kant argues, must have an objective, necessary ground in order for experience to be possible at all. This ground Kant calls the ‘affinity’ of the sensory manifold.3 Kant argues as follows:

1 H.J. Paton (1936; I 139–40) recognises that the matter of sensation must result from the sensory affection due to things in themselves; cf. KTPR, 4–14. Hegel recognised that this must be Kant’s view (G&W 4:330.34–37; quoted below, §36, Passage 1). 2 KdrV A112–3, GS 4:85.3–10; A653–4/B681–2, GS 3:433.14–29. 3 §§31–36 summarise main points of an internal criticism of Kant’s transcendental idealism detailed in KTPR, §§15–29.

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90 Now if this unity of association did not also have an objective ground, so that it would be impossible for appearances to be apprehended by the imagination otherwise than under the condition of a possible synthetic unity of this apprehension, it would be entirely accidental that appearances should fit into a connection in human knowledge. For even though we should have the capacity to associate perceptions, it would remain entirely undetermined and accidental whether they themselves were associable; and in case they were not associable, then a multitude of perceptions, and indeed an entire sensibility would be possible, in which much empirical consciousness would be found in my mind, but separated, and without belonging to one consciousness of myself, which, however, is impossible. For only because I ascribe all perceptions to one consciousness (original apperception) can I say of all perceptions that I am conscious of them. There must, therefore, be an objective ground (that is, one that can be comprehended a priori, antecedent to all empirical laws of the imagination) upon which rests the possibility, indeed, the necessity, of a law that extends to all appearances – a ground, namely, for regarding all appearances as data of the senses that must be associable in themselves and subject to universal rules of a thoroughgoing connection in their reproduction. This objective ground of all association of appearances I entitle their affinity. It is to be found nowhere else than in the principle of the unity of apperception, in respect of all cognitions which should belong to me. According to this principle all appearances, without exception, must so enter the mind or be apprehended, that they conform to the unity of apperception. Without synthetic unity in their connection, which is thus objectively necessary, this would be impossible. The objective unity of all (empirical) consciousness in one consciousness, that of original apperception, is thus the necessary condition of all possible perception; and the affinity of all appearances, near or remote, is a necessary consequence of a synthesis in imagination which is grounded a priori on rules. (KdrV A121–3, 4:90.6–91.2; tr. Smith; emended, some emphases added.)

Kant here points out that a complete human sensibility and understanding, capable of associating perceptions, does not of itself determine whether any appearances or perceptions it has are in fact associable. If they weren’t, there may be fleeting episodes of empirical consciousness (i.e., random sensations), but there could be no unified, and hence no self-conscious, experience. In part this would be because those irregular perceptions would not admit of any reproductive synthesis; they wouldn’t admit of any psychological association, and so couldn’t afford a basis for developing empirical concepts or for applying categorial concepts to objects. (There could be no schematism of categories in a world of chaotic sensory intuitions.) In this regard, the necessity of the associability of the manifold of intuition is a conditional necessity, holding between that manifold and any self-conscious (human) subject. Necessarily, if a human subject is self-consciously aware of an object via a manifold of intuition, then the content of that manifold is associable. The associability of this content is its ‘affinity’. The fact that affinity is necessary, and

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can be known a priori to be necessary, for the possibility of experience entails that this affinity is transcendental. Kant makes the transcendental status of this issue plainest in a passage in both editions of the first Critique, though here he speaks of a ‘logical law of genera’ instead of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold: If among the appearances which present themselves to us, there were so great a variety – I do not say in form, for in that respect appearances might resemble one another; but in content, that is, in the diversity of existing entities – that even the acutest human understanding could never by comparison of them detect the slightest similarity (a possibility which is quite conceivable), the logical law of genera would absolutely not obtain, and there would not even be the concept of a genus, or any other universal concept, or indeed any understanding at all, since it has to do solely with such concepts. If, therefore, the logical principle of genera is to be applied to nature (by which I here understand only those objects which are given to us), it presupposes a transcendental principle [of genera]. In accordance with this latter principle, homogeneity is necessarily presupposed in the manifold of possible experience (although we cannot determine a priori its degree); for without homogeneity, no empirical concepts, and hence no experience, would be possible. (KdrV A653–4/B681–2; 3:433.14–29; tr. Smith; emended, emphasis added.)

Despite Kant’s shift in terminology, the condition that satisfies this ‘logical law of genera’ at the very fundamental level Kant here considers is the very same as that which satisfies the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold: Below a certain (a priori indeterminable) degree of regularity and variety amongst the content of sensations, (or mutatis mutandis) empirical intuitions or sensory appearances, our understanding cannot make judgments4; consequently we cannot under that condition be self-conscious. Consequently, this condition is a necessary, transcendental condition of humanly possible apperceptive experience. (Above this minimal level of regularity and variety, there is then a reflective issue about the extent to which our experience of the world can be systematised.) The question now is: What is the status of this principle of affinity in Kant’s transcendental analysis, and is his analysis of that status adequate? 32 KANT’S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALIST EXPLANATION OF SENSORY AFFINITY. Kant explains the ‘necessity’ of transcendental conditions of possible experience exclusively in terms of the nature and functioning of our cognitive apparatus ineluctably structuring our experience in accord with those conditions. 4 Nor can our transcendental power of judgment synthesise sensory stimulations over time or through space, to provide, sub-personally, perceptual synthesis.

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This thesis defines Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.5 Kant argues that this kind of explanation also holds true of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold. This passage is Kant’s most explicit statement of his argument: I therefore ask, how do you make comprehensible to yourselves the thoroughgoing affinity of appearances, whereby they stand under constant laws, and must belong under such laws? On my principles it is easily comprehensible. All possible appearances, as representations, belong to the totality of a possible self-consciousness. But as self-consciousness is a transcendental representation, numerical identity is inseparable from it, and is a priori certain, because nothing can come to cognition except through this original apperception. Now, since this identity must necessarily enter into the synthesis of all the manifold of appearances, so far as this synthesis is to become empirical knowledge, the appearances are subject to a priori conditions, with which the synthesis of their apprehension must be in complete accord. Now the representation of a universal condition according to which a certain manifold can be uniformly posited is called a rule, and, when it must be so posited, a law. Thus all appearances stand in thoroughgoing connection according to necessary laws, and therefore in a transcendental affinity, of which the empirical is a mere consequence. (KdrV A113–4, 4:85.10–28; tr. Smith, emended; cf. A101–2, A122, A123, A125–6)

In this passage Kant formulates the principle of the affinity of appearances as a principle which, prima facie, is open to alternative explanations, he challenges non-Kantians to explain it, and claims it is easy to explain on his Transcendental Idealist principles. Here Kant errs seriously: Transcendental Idealism cannot at all explain the occurrence of transcendental affinity. I submit that Kant is quite correct, for reasons discussed above (§31), that transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold is indeed a transcendental condition of the possibility of experience. However, Kant cannot explain why this principle is satisfied, nor what is responsible for fulfilling this condition. 5 Kant states this most directly in the Prolegomena: ‘Even the main principle expounded throughout this section, that the universal laws of nature can be known a priori, leads of itself to the proposition that the highest prescription of laws of nature must lie in ourselves, that is, in our understanding; and that we must not seek the universal laws of nature in nature by means of experience, but conversely must seek nature, regarding its universal conformity to law, merely in the conditions of the possibility of experience which lie in our sensibility and understanding. For how were it otherwise possible to know these laws a priori, since they are not rules of analytic knowledge but are true synthetic extensions of it? Such a necessary correspondence of the principles of possible experience with the laws of the possibility of nature can only proceed from two causes: either these laws are drawn from nature by means of experience, or conversely, nature is derived from the laws of the possibility of experience in general and is utterly one with the latter’s strict universal lawfulness. The first [cause] contradicts itself, for the universal laws of nature can and must be known a priori (that is, independently of all experience) and can and must be the foundation of all empirical use of the understanding; therefore only the second [cause] remains’ (Prol. §36, Beck [1988], tr., emended; cf. B41, A23/B37–8, A26–8/B42–4, A195–6/B240–1; A101–2, A113–4, A121–3, A125–6).

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The problem is that Kant’s idealist explanations of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold conflate the ratio cognoscendi of this principle (which lies in Kant’s transcendental analysis of the conditions of possible experience) with its ratio essendi (which his idealism cannot explain at all). 33 KANT’S FATAL EQUIVOCATION. Kant’s first contention on this head is that the ‘empirical affinity’ of a manifold of intuition (or a set of appearances) is the mere consequence of its ‘transcendental affinity’ (KdrV A114, quoted just above). This is incorrect. That an empirical manifold have affinity – in order for us to be self-consciously aware of it – is indeed entailed by the requirements for unitary self-consciousness, but this entailment expresses a conditional necessity: If unitary self-conscious (human) experience occurs, then to that subject is presented a manifold of associable sensations, empirical intuitions and appearances. However, the associability of that manifold of appearances (etc.) is an independent factor, a conditio sine qua non, of self-conscious experience; empirical affinity is an independent factor, required to satisfy the transcendental principle of affinity. Kant’s related claim, second, that the affinity of appearances is a necessary consequence (notwendige Folge) of the (transcendental) synthesis of imagination (KdrV A123, 4:90.37–91.2), is equivocal. Like the English ‘consequence’, the German ‘Folge’ can denote either logical or causal consequence. The affinity of a sensory manifold is a logical consequence of the occurrence of the transcendental synthesis of imagination requisite for unitary apperception. Neither synthesis nor apperception could occur if the sensory manifold lacked affinity. However, this affinity cannot be a functional product (causal consequence) of that synthesis, unless Kant were to give up his carefully qualified Transcendental Idealism and adopt unrestricted subjective idealism. Our judgmental synthesis could only produce affinity of the manifold by producing, i.e. generating, a substantial set of associable empirical intuitions. This would transgress the cardinal tenet of Transcendental Idealism that the matter of sensation is given to us ab extra.6 Unified self-conscious experience is the ratio cognoscendi of the occurrence of transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold; however the occurrence of such transcendental affinity is the ratio essendi of unified self-conscious experience. This is a corollary of Kant’s 6

Cf. Paton (1936, I:139–40): ‘I believe that the empirical differences in the shapes and sizes of objects, like their empirical qualitative differences, must be ascribed to the ‘influence’ of things-in-themselves. … Only what is strictly universal is imposed by the mind upon objects. Empirical differences are particular determinations of the universal, but their particularity is not due to the mind and must be due to things. If this view be given up, I do not see how the Critical Philosophy can be made intelligible’. Affinity consists in regularities among the particularities of the contents of sensations.

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thesis that the analytic unity of transcendental apperception depends upon the synthetic unity of transcendental apperception (KdrV B133–5); no such synthetic unity is possible unless the representations it integrates are associable, i.e., unless the (ultimately sensory) representations involved have ‘affinity’ because they have humanly identifiable similarities and differences of content (or objects and their sensed features). Thus Transcendental Idealism cannot at all explain the occurrence of transcendental affinity.7 Third, Transcendental Idealism is not at all the only possible explanation of affinity.8 The satisfaction of the principle of affinity is a distinct factor from its transcendental status as a necessary condition of unified self-conscious experience. This is because the ‘necessity’ that this principle be satisfied is conditional. Once this is recognised, then it is possible to recognise that the satisfaction of the principle of affinity is a function of the de facto orderliness of nature – a tenet espoused by naturalism and (commonsense) realism. Finally, it also cannot be the case that we are solely responsible for introducing order and regularity into the appearances we call nature, as Kant also claims (KdrV A125–6, 4:92.14–24). The key reason is the same in each case: If the matter of sensation occurs to us a posteriori, ab extra, then ex hypothesi we cannot generate its content. Thus we also can neither generate nor otherwise insure the regularities, the recognisable similarities and differences, within that content or amongst that set of sensory intuitions or appearances. The satisfaction of the principle of transcendental affinity by any manifold of intuitions or appearances cannot be generated, injected, or imposed by that subject; in Kant’s terms, it cannot be a ‘transcendentally ideal’ condition of possible experience. The satisfaction of the principle of affinity is required by the cognitive nature of a human subject, and thus it can be a transcendental condition for the possibility of our unified self-conscious experience. This is a conditional necessity. The satisfaction of the transcendental principle of affinity is a contingent function of the specific characteristics of the a posteriori matter of sensation, namely the (recognisable) similarities and differences amongst those characteristics of that matter. Kant is thus correct that the principle of affinity concerns the ‘content’ of experience, and that its ground lies in the ‘object’ of experience (KdrV A112–3, A653–4/B681–2). Hence the principle of affinity is no more explicable on Kant’s Transcendental Idealist account than on any naturalist account of the objects of knowledge.9 Thus the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold is a transcendental, formal and material condition of the possibility of apperceptive human experience. 7

Contra KdrV A101–2, A113–4, A122. Contra KdrV A101–2, A113–4, A122. 9 Contra KdrV A113–4, quoted above, §32. 8

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34 HEGEL’S RECOGNITION OF KANT’S PROBLEM WITH TRANSCENDENTAL AFFINITY. Hegel’s mature epistemology incorporates several important points from Kant’s ‘Transcendental Ideal’ into his reinterpretation of Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction’ and ‘Refutation of Idealism’.10 Accordingly, Hegel’s mature discursive, conceptual account of ‘absolute knowing’ performs some of the roles Kant assigned to the intuitive intellect, though not (at all) in the ways Kant attributes to an intuitive intellect. Hegel suggests this line of thought already in Faith and Knowledge and elaborates it in the very important remark in the Science of Logic, ‘On the Concept in General’.11 One key feature of Hegel’s thought stems from his early recognition of the insights of and problems with Kant’s transcendental affinity. In Faith and Knowledge Hegel recognised that Kant did and must hold that things in themselves are the source of sensory affection (GW 4:330; cf. KTPR §§4–14). Moreover, Hegel also recognised that, on Kant’s account, the contents of our sensations must be both varied and regular enough that we are able to bring them to intuition under concepts in determinate cognitive judgments about experienced objects. This variety and regularity of the content of our sensations is the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold; for brevity I shall refer to it as ‘transcendental affinity’. I have formulated this issue more precisely than Hegel did. Nevertheless, this is a point to which Hegel returned frequently in his Jena publications, and he was right that Kant’s philosophy faces a grave problem accounting for it. 34.1 Some Interpretive Difficulties. There are, however, some interpretive problems involved in ascribing to Hegel awareness of precisely the problem involved in the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold. Hegel’s remarks regarding transcendental affinity are numerous, though brief, and do not identify by name the issue of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold. One reason Hegel may not have identified this issue by this name is that he worked with the second edition of Kant’s Critique, from which most of the passages containing this phrase were omitted.12 However, this issue is equally central to Kant’s views in both editions, and some important passages discussing it are included in both editions (KTPR §§22, 23). Hegel develops the problem involved in transcendental affinity in a variety of ways, often in connection with Kant’s successors. For several reasons 10 Hegel’s counterpart to Kant’s Transcendental Deduction IS his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit; see HER, Westphal (2009b). On the importance of Hegel’s Phenomenology for his Science of Logic, see Fulda (1975), Colins (2012). 11 G&W, 4:365.12–366.6; WdL II, 12:11–28. 12 Hegel clearly cites the B edition in G&W (4:328.22, 364–6) and in the first edition Logik (1816), Wdl II, 12:18.9, 26.5.

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the ascription of a distinct awareness of this problem to Hegel is legitimate. First, the problems addressed by Kant’s immediate successors were current because they arose already as problems in Kant’s views (Beiser 1987). Second, Hegel does develop the problem in connection with Kant. Third, I shall show that this problem, regarding the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold, provides the lynch pin that both holds Hegel’s various formulations together, and ties them to a central problem in Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. That said, I now issue a caveat. I shall appeal freely to brief excerpts from Hegel’s early writings. Although Hegel’s early writings formulate or at least indicate many of the central problems Hegel addressed in his mature philosophy, they do so within an immature, still developing, often obscure philosophical framework. This is to say, I make no attempt to improve upon Harris’s (1984) comprehensive reconstruction of Hegel’s Jena writings. I shall unabashedly mine Hegel’s early writings for the light they shed on his mature philosophy. Considering the problems with Kant’s views on transcendental affinity, and considering Hegel’s interest in them, provides an independent line of support for ascribing to Hegel the kind of holistic realism coupled with regressive, transcendental arguments that I argued previously characterise Hegel’s Phenomenology (HER 140–88; 2009b). 34.2 Traces of the Problem of Transcendental Affinity in Hegel’s Early Writings. In general, Hegel was disturbed by Kant’s account of nature. He asserted that philosophy must recompense nature ‘for the mishandling that it suffered in Kant and Fichte’s systems, and set reason itself in harmony with nature’ (D 4:8.8–10). One way Hegel characterises the problem that turns out to be the problem of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold is this: The basic problem in Kant’s metaphysics is that it does not explain the ‘most interesting aspect of the objective world, the aspect of its reality’ and that the most fundamental question ‘is not at all about ideality, but about reality, and it does not matter whether the reality concerned is an infinite mass of sensations or of thing-qualities’ (G&W 4:388.26–35). Hegel is well aware that if our mind is to contribute the structure of our experience, then the matter of experience must be unstructured, indeed so unstructured that it seems ‘the world is always falling to pieces’.13 Hegel is, in a word, very interested in the

13

‘… the absolute judgment of idealism as expounded by Kant may, and on this level, must be grasped in such a way that the manifold of sensibility, empirical consciousness as intuition and sensation, is in itself something unintegrated, that the world is in itself falling to pieces, and only gets objective coherence and support, substantiality, multiplicity, even actuality and possibility, through the good offices of human self-consciousness and intellect’ (G&W 4:330.21–27; quoted more extensively below, §36, Passage 1).

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order, or lack thereof, in the manifold of empirical intuition, and in Kant’s account of that order – an issue Hegel also pursued regarding Fichte.14 Analogously, Kant’s view of the relation between conceptual form and sensory matter is central to Hegel’s claim that Kant’s philosophy is dualist: A formal idealism which in this way sets an absolute ego-point and its intellect on one side, and an absolute manifold, or sensation, on the other side, is a dualism. (G&W 4:333.24–26)

Indeed, Hegel paraphrases Kant’s direct statement of this dualism in the third Critique (§76): The intellect is for concepts, sensuous intuition for objects – they are two entirely heterogenous parts.15

Other passages also demonstrate Hegel’s awareness of the contingency of nature and the matter of sensation with respect to our categories.16 Third, Hegel repeatedly stresses the importance of the material conditions that must be fulfilled in order for judgment to be possible, namely, the matter of sensation must be such as to be subsumable under our concepts. In the Differenzschrift he presses this point against Kant’s immediate successors Reinhold and Bardili,17 and in Faith and Knowledge he presses it at length four 14 ‘Because of the absolute subjectivity of reason and its being set against reality, the world is, then, absolutely opposed to reason. Hence it is an absolute finitude devoid of reason, a sense-world lacking organisation [unorganische Sinnenwelt]’ (G&W 4:406.9–11; contra Fichte). 15 G&W 4:341.11–13; cf. KdU §76, GS 5:401.34–35; KdrV A50/B74, A51–2/B75–6, A65/B89–90. 16 For Kant, ‘The phenomena must be given, and they are filtered by the categories. Now this filtering may produce all sorts of correct concepts, to be sure, but it does not confer any necessity on the phenomena; and the chain of necessity is the formal aspect of what is scientific in the construction. The concepts remain contingent with respect to nature just as nature does with respect to the concepts. For this reason correctly constructed syntheses by way of the categories would not necessarily have to be corroborated by nature itself. Nature can only offer variegated displays that could count as contingent schemata for laws of the understanding, exemplary by-plays whose living peculiarity would fade away precisely because only the determinations of reflection are recognised in them. And conversely the categories are only impoverished schemata of nature’ (D 4:70.4–13). 17 ‘One might be tempted by this semblance of identity into regarding this thinking as reason. But because this thinking has its antithesis (a) in an application of thinking and (b) in absolute materiality (Stoffheit), it is clear that this is not the absolute identity, the identity of subject and object which suspends them both in their opposition and grasps them within itself, but a pure identity, that is, an identity originating through abstraction and conditioned by opposition, the abstract intellectual concept of unity, one of a pair of fixed opposites’ (D, GW 4:18.34–19.2; contra Reinhold; cf. D, GW 4:82.20–33). ‘What is opposite to thought is, through its connection with thought, determined as something thought = A. But such a thought, such a positing = A is conditioned by an abstraction and is hence something opposite. Hence, that which is thought, besides the fact that it has been thought of = A, has still other determinations = B, entirely independent of

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times against Kant himself.18 Finally, in precisely this same vein Hegel sought principles governing the a posteriori realm of the given matter of experience: Outside what is objectively determined by the categories there remained an enormous empirical realm of sensibility and perception, an absolute a posteriori realm. For this realm the only a priori principle discovered is a merely subjective maxim of the faculty of reflecting judgment. (D 4:6.11–1519)

In sum, Hegel is acutely aware that there must be some humanly recognisable order in the matter (or contents) of sensation if we are to have experience at all, and that there must be some rational principle that governs that order, although it cannot be one of Kant’s Principles of the Understanding (i.e., the ‘Anticipations’ and ‘Analogies’), nor one of Reflective Judgment. The being merely determined [as something thought] by pure thought. These other determinations are brute data for thought. Hence for thought as the principle of the analytic way of philosophizing, there must be an absolute stuff. We shall discuss this further below. With this absolute opposition as foundation the formal program, in which the famous discovery that philosophy must be reduced to logic [Reinhold, Beiträge 1:98] consists, is allowed no immanent synthesis save that provided by the identity of the intellect, i.e., the repetition of A ad infinitum. But even for this repetition the identity needs some B, C, etc. in which the repeated A can be posited. In order for A to be repeatable, B, C, D, etc. are a manifold, in which each is opposed to the other. Each of them has particular determinations not posited by A. That is to say, there exists an absolute manifold stuff. Its B, C, D, etc. must fit in [Bardili] with A, as best it can’ (D 4:26.34–27.12). ‘For even the slight synthesis called application involves a transition of the unity into a manifold, a union of thinking and matter, and hence includes what is called the inconceivable. To be capable of synthesis, thinking and matter must not be absolutely opposed to each other; they must be posited as originally one, and so we would be back with that tiresome identity of subject and object in transcendental intuition …’ (D 4:88.14–19; contra Reinhold or Bardili). ‘In addition to the postulated matter and its deduced manifoldness, [Bardili’s] Outline [of Logic] also postulates an inner capacity and suitability of matter to be thought. Besides the materiality that is to be annulled in thinking, there must be something that cannot be annulled by thinking; and even the perceptions of a horse do not lack it. It is a form that is independent of thinking, and since by the law of nature form cannot be destroyed by form, the form of thinking has to fit itself into it. In other words, besides the materiality that cannot be thought, besides the thing in itself, there must be an absolute stuff which can be represented and is independent of the representing subject, thought in representation it is connects with the form’ (D 4:88.23–31). 18 G&W 4:330.8–331.4, 332.16–27, 332.34–333.2, cf. 389.26–28; quoted in full in §36. 19 Cf.: ‘In Kant, too, nature is posited as absolutely determined. But it cannot be thought of as determined by what Kant calls understanding, for the variety of particular phenomena are left undetermined by our human discursive understanding; so they must be thought of as determined by another understanding. However, this determination by another understanding is to be taken merely as a maxim of our reflecting judgment. Nothing is asserted about the actual existence of this other understanding’ (D 4:53–28–34). ‘This is, finally, the place to exhibit the most interesting point in the Kantian system, the point at which a region is recognised that is a middle between the empirical manifold and the absolute abstract unity [KdU Preface, §III]’ (G&W 4:338.35–37).

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irony is that Kant did propound such a principle, namely the principle of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold, and indeed he established it soundly within his transcendental analysis and proofs of the conditions of humanly possible experience, though ultimately Kant cannot account for it within the framework of his Transcendental Idealism. Hegel is clearly aware of the key problem identified above (§31). 35 IMPLICATIONS OF KANT’S PROBLEMS WITH TRANSCENDENTAL AFFINITY. The implications of transcendental affinity for a naturalistically based transcendental analysis of the conditions of humanly possible experience help elucidate several of Hegel’s philosophical concerns and aims. First, this provides some insight into Hegel’s concern to combat Kantian scepticism. Hegel was clearly aware that faith assumed priority over philosophy by appealing to scepticism, a strategy he observed in Jacobi, Kant and Fichte.20 In Fichte and in Kant the scepticism that makes faith necessary results, Hegel contended, from the utter heterogeneity between our intellectual categories and the manifold of empirical intuition.21 Second, this may provide a rationale for, and perhaps some insight into, Hegel’s dismissal of Kant’s arguments in the Transcendental Aesthetic for idealism. Hegel accepted the standard objection to Kant’s argument, known as the problem of the neglected alternative.22 One way of formulating the alternative Kant neglected is to claim that we can know a priori that the objects we experience must be in space and time because our forms of receptivity are spatial and temporal in the sense that they are only receptive to stimulation (affection) by spatial and temporal objects.23 In various, often less pre20 Cf.: ‘Reason, having in this way become mere intellect (Verstand), acknowledges its own nothingness by placing that which is better than it in a faith outside and above itself, as a beyond. This is what has happened in the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte. Philosophy has made itself the handmaid of faith once more’ (G&W 4:315.28–316.1). On the epistemological significance of Hegel’s opposition to this kind of faith, see below, §§92–99. 21 ‘The immediate product of this formal idealism as we have seen it arise [in Fichte], has, then, the following shape. A realm of experience without unity, a purely contingent manifold, on one side, is confronted by an empty active thought on the other. If the empty thought is posited as a real, active force, then like everything else that is objective, it must be recognised as something ideal. Or, in order to put the antithesis of the thought and the manifold realm of empirical necessity in its pure form, the thought must not be posited as a real active force – i.e., in the context of reality – but purely for itself, as empty unity, as universality completely set apart from particularity. Kant’s pure reason is this same empty thought, and reality is similarly opposed to that empty identity, and it is precisely the lack of concordance between them that makes faith in the beyond necessary’ (G&W 4:395.23–33). 22 Cf. VGP 3, MM 20:341, H&S 3:434; Enz. §§254R (1817: §197), 448Z. 23 In HER, 41–3, I developed this objection independently; here I show that Hegel had the grounds to develop it internally to Kant’s principles. In KTPR, §§15–29, I develop this ob-

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cise forms, this objection was commonplace in Hegel’s day.24 Most important is that this objection stems directly from principles internal to Kant’s first Critique. Namely, the principle of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold shows that a priori transcendental analysis and proof can show that an objectively real feature of objects – a feature not contributed by our cognitive structure or functioning – can nevertheless necessarily be required for our cognitive functioning. Exactly this insight is exploited by the ‘neglected alternative’ objection to Kant’s arguments by elimination for his Transcendental Idealist accounts of space and time as nothing but human forms of sensory receptivity (intuition). The prospect that mind-independent features of the world may nevertheless be necessary conditions knowable a priori for humanly possible experience opens the prospect of offering regressive, transcendental proofs of the necessary, a priori conditions of humanly possible experience in conjunction with, indeed on the basis of, a realist or (broadly, non-reductively) naturalist ontology. This is precisely what Hegel does in the 1807 Phenomenology. Moreover, Hegel clearly was aware of this prospect, as is shown by his extensive quotation from and enthusiasm for Kant’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’ in Faith and Knowledge, in which he credits Kant with a ‘genuinely rational construction’ (GW 4:365.18–367.27). This same high estimation of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, together with dismissal of Kant’s Transcendental Idealist account of space and time, is also found in the very important remark in the Logic, ‘On the Concept in General’.25 Finally, the implications of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold and its objective, mind-independent ratio essendi provides some insight into Hegel’s dual-aspect notion of the ‘intellect’ (Verstand), on the one hand as the structure of nature, and once again as the structure cognised by human subjects (above, §18). The principle of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold entails that there must be an order of nature that is sufficiently regular and varied for us to come to cognise it and to have self-conscious experience at all. If so, then there is some sense in saying that there is a common structure that is instantiated in the world, exhibited (at least in part) in our experience, and reconstructed in our thought and knowledge. This structure with its two-fold instantiation – in the world and in our knowledge of the jection in detail, strictly within the bounds of Kant’s KdrV. 24 Vaihinger (1892; 2:142 n.2, 143, 144 n. 1, 307, 312ff., esp. 323) cites the following of Hegel’s predecessors who insisted, with greater or lesser acuity, on the problem of the neglected alternative: Lambert, Pistorius, Lotze, Fries, Maass, the anonymous author of ‘Ueber Raum und Zeit’, Flatt, Tiedemann, Schwab, G.E. Schulze (Aenesidemus), Selle, Ouvrier, Brastberger, Platner, J.G. Schultz, Maimon, Bardili, Schleiermacher, and Beneke. He concludes that the objection is sound (ibid., 148, 289–90, 310). 25 WdL II, 12:17–8; cf. HER, chapt. 11, esp. 150–3.

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world – Hegel calls (in Faith and Knowledge) ‘intellect’ (Verstand). After all that has been shown here, it should be no surprise that he finds the roots of this view already in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction: If the intellect is to be considered for itself as abstraction of the form in its triplicity, it is all one whether it be regarded as intellect of consciousness or as intellect of nature, as the form of conscious or of non-conscious intelligence: just as in the ego the intellect is thought of as conceptualised, so in nature it is thought of as realised. Suppose the intellect existed altogether in itself, then it would have as much reality in nature, i.e., in a world outside of intellectual cognition, yet intelligible in and for itself, as it would have in an intellect thinking of itself in the form of intellectuality outside of nature. It would be experience taken subjectively as the conscious system, and experience taken objectively as the non-conscious system of the manifoldness and coherence of the world. (G&W 4:334.18–27)

As Harris notes, Hegel’s reference to ‘triplicity’ ties his discussion to Kant’s ‘Analytic of Concepts’, which forms the basis of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. Specifically, it refers to Kant’s remark, added to the second edition, about the integrity and systematicity of the Table of Categories.26 That Table gives Kant’s account of the categorial structure of thought – and thus of the empirical world. Hegel here invites us to consider the structure of ‘intellect’ (Verstand) ‘for itself’ or independently of Kant’s view that this is the structure specifically of human understanding. On the basis of this abstraction, Hegel’s reflections in this passage, plainly point toward a very non-Kantian ontology. This ontology is a coherent, manifold structure instantiated as a ‘non-conscious system’ in the world, which system can become an object of consciousness and knowledge in our experience of the world. Because this idea is not merely out of philosophical fashion, but so unfamiliar, it deserves further comment. This is especially so, because Hegel first explored this thesis in connection with intellectual intuition. Hence it is important to see that Hegel retains this thesis in his mature thought without appeal to intellectual intuition. In ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Hegel remarks: The Idea of this archetypal intuitive intellect is at bottom nothing else but the same [Kantian] idea of the transcendental imagination that we have considered above. For it is intuitive activity, and yet its inner unity is no other than the unity of the intellect itself, the category still immersed in extension, and becoming intellect and category only as it separates itself out of extension. Thus transcendental imagination is itself intuitive intellect. (G&W 4:341.2–8)

In this passage, Hegel violates Kant’s Critical strictures in order to extrapolate from Kant’s discussion of the teleological proof of God to Hegel’s post-Kanti26

KdrV §11, B109–13. Regarding Hegel’s early attention to Kant’s Table of Judgments, see below §43. (Harris’s editorial notes cite Hegel’s reference to Kant’s Table.)

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an, Schelling-inspired view of an intuitive intellect. Though Hegel soon rejected the model of intellectual intuition (below, §§37–42), an important clause in this passage indicates a central point of Hegel’s mature ontology: ‘… the unity of the intellect itself, the category still immersed in extension, and becoming intellect and category only as it separates itself out of extension’ (emphasis added). The term ‘extension’ alludes directly to Spinoza, as Hegel indicates much later in the Science of Logic.27 If the ‘category’ becomes intellect and category only as it separates itself out of extension, then there are two factors here: extension as structured by the category, and the category as articulated expressly as ‘intellect’. The unity of ‘the’ intellect is the unity of these two factors; Hegel here associates one single ‘idea of this archetypal intuitive intellect’ with both factors. This strongly suggests the early roots of the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ aspects of Hegel’s ‘concept’ (Begriff), where the objective aspect is a structure of the world, and the subjective aspect is our express formulation and grasp of that structure. This idea recurs in a very important section of the Logic titled ‘On the Concept in General’, in which Hegel clarifies his own view of the concept by comparing it with Kant’s and specifically stresses the transcendental unity of apperception and the ‘Transcendental Deduction’ (WdL II, 12:17–18). Hegel’s remarks about Kant in this passage also stress a very pointed contrast with Kant’s account of concepts. Kant treats concepts as predicates of possible judgments, and as forms under which sensory manifolds are unified. Kant’s taxonomy of representations (KdrV A320/B376–7) treats perceptions, sensations, cognitions, intuitions and all kinds of concepts as species of representations; hence they exist only if human intellects exist. Hegel takes great pains in discussing ‘the Concept in General’ to repudiate this psychological understanding of concepts. Hegel directly states that such psychological considerations – even those in philosophical psychology – ‘belong to the self-conscious spirit which, as such, does not fall to be considered in the science of logic’ (WdL II, 12:19–20). In the Logic, the concept is to be regarded not as the act of the self-conscious understanding, not as the subjective understanding, but as the concept in its own absolute character which constitutes a stage of nature as well as of spirit. … the logical form of the concept is independent of its non-spiritual, and also of its spiritual, forms. (WdL II, 12:20.12–18)

This passage is crucial. Hegel states directly that ‘the concept’ is independent both of its instantiation in nature and of its articulation in human thinking. This is one important way in which Hegel understands the ‘autonomy’ of thought. As Wartenberg (1993, 116–7) notes, this makes quite plain that Hegel 27

Hegel acknowledges Spinoza in ‘On the Concept in General’, WdL II, 12:12–15.

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opposes Kant’s, and following Kant, Fichte’s account of concepts as nothing but judgmental functions generated by human subjects. Certainly Hegel owes much to Kant’s deduction, but he does not owe to Kant an account of subjects generating the conceptual conditions that make the objects they experience possible. In order to highlight his view that concepts have an existence unto themselves and are instantiated in or displayed by both the world (in the forms, e.g., of natural kinds and laws of nature) and by self-conscious human thought (in the form of conceptions), Hegel expressly introduces the terms ‘objective thoughts’ or ‘thought determinations’ (Denkbestimmungen) in order to avoid the common and (for understanding Hegel’s view) misleading subjective connotations of the term ‘concept’.28 This view is elaborated in Hegel’s philosophy of nature (see below, §§122–126). The objective status of ‘concepts’, ‘objective thoughts’, or thought-determinations is one main element of the kind of ontological holism Hegel works out in his mature writings (HER, 140–145), to set ‘reason itself in harmony with nature’ (D 4:8.8–10). Hegel may not have known to call the transcendental principle that leads to such an ontology the ‘transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold’, but he clearly recognised that such a principle, and the realist ontology it requires, are entailed by Kant’s transcendental analysis of the conditions of possible experience in his ‘Transcendental Deduction’ and ‘Refutation of Idealism’. In this regard, Hegel was the first to recognise that Kant’s transcendental analyses and proofs in the ‘Transcendental Analytic’ can be made to stand independently of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, and can be put to the service of realism.29 However, Hegel recognised that Kant’s claims to ‘apodeictic’ certainty cannot be sustained, and that Kant’s own deduction of causal judgments fails because Kant’s stated argument needs but cannot justify the thesis that all physical causality is external (per above, §§27–29). Likewise, this premiss is unwittingly assumed rather than justified in Neo-Kantian and analytic reconstructions of Kant’s arguments. Consequently, Hegel adjusts his strategy and arguments in several important ways, two of which may be noted here. First, Hegel develops a much richer account of and approach to Kant’s method of ‘transcendental reflection’ and its role in justifying accounts of empirical knowledge (see below, §§43, 44). Second, Hegel focuses his defence of commonsense realism on what Kant called the ‘transcendental affinity of the 28

Enz. §24+R+Z1 (¶1), WdL I, 11:21.5–11, 22.3–19; 21:33.27–33, 34.30–35.10. The use of Kant’s arguments in the Transcendental Analytic, especially in the Analogies and the Refutation of Idealism, in service of realism is a common theme in Neo-Kantian and analytic interpretation of Kant since Strawson (1966). Guyer (1987) has argued that Kant’s only successful transcendental arguments are to be found in the Analogies, and that these arguments support realism. 29

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sensory manifold’ and on the kind of perceptual discrimination central to Kant’s Analogies as an integrated set of principles. For Hegel’s argument, it suffices that commonsense objects and events display a minimal degree of identifiable regularity and variety and that they in fact have external physical causes, and that these facts are conditionally necessary for us to identify them and to distinguish ourselves from them (and through that to attain self-conscious experience). As noted above (§§31), the affinity of the manifold of sensory intuition is a transcendental condition of the possibility of self-conscious human experience. The fact that this affinity of the manifold must by provided – according to Kant’s Transcendental Idealism – by the transcendentally real, noumenal source of sensory affections provides yet another important reason why Hegel thought Kant had more knowledge of the supersensible ground of experience than he admitted.30 Given Kant’s distinction between appearances and things in themselves as objects (respectively) of discursive and intuitive intellects, this provides yet another important reason why Hegel thought Kant came closer to the actual experience of an intuitive intellect than he admitted. Bearing this point in mind helps to show that in Faith and Knowledge Hegel did what he claimed to do: He identified a problem in Kant’s theory of judgment which arises both in Kant’s theoretical and in his practical philosophies: Hegel argued that Kant did not have an adequate account of the relation between discursive concepts and the particulars subsumed under them, regardless of whether our judgments involve sensations or inclinations.31 Kant held that the synthetic unity of apperception is the highest point reached in the Critique of Pure Reason (B134 n.). Hegel seized upon this idea and pointed out that Kant thus gave priority to the synthetic unity of apperception over the analytic unity of apperception, over the ‘I think’ that must be able to accompany each of one’s own representations. The analytical unity may have priority over the synthetic unity as its ratio cognoscendi, but the synthetic unity of apperception takes priority over the analytic unity as its ratio essendi, precisely because actual instances of self-consciousness only occur on the basis of actual cognitive judgments by which we both identify objects and distinguish ourselves from them. This is the highest point of ‘synthetic judgments a priori’, in Hegel’s view.32 In this point what there is, 30 G&W 4:340.26–341.34. The ground for Hegel’s claim examined here supplements those cited by Longuenesse (2007), 165–191. 31 Cf. G&W 4:346.5–26, 395.23–396.21. I report, not endorse, the point of Hegel’s objection. On Hegel’s mature critique of Kant’s moral theory, see Westphal (forthcoming a). 32 G&W, 4:328.7–29; cf. Kant: ‘… the analytic unity of apperception is only possible under the presupposition of some sort of synthetic [unity of apperception]’ (KdrV B134); cf.

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what characteristics it has, what is thought about it, and what is judged true of it are identical – identical in content, and in at least one sense identical in number: the existing object is one and the same as the object known (cf. HER 152–3). Even in Faith and Knowledge Hegel clearly suggested the difference in form between them, made explicit in the 1807 Phenomenology: the particular extant object known is ‘in the form of being’, and the predicate truly ascribed to it is ‘in the form of thought’.33 I do not claim that Hegel clearly maintained this distinction in Faith and Knowledge; rather the contrary. However, even in that early essay Hegel generally insisted upon some sort of mediated – complex rather than ‘empty’ – identity (cf. G&W 4:327.17–328.6). This is to say, alongside the model of ‘identity philosophy’ according to which some sort of original undifferentiated unity comes to differentiate itself (cf. G&W, 4:328 .23–29), in Faith and Knowledge there are significant traces of the sense of ‘idealism’ characteristic of Hegel’s mature sense of the term, according to which something is ‘ideal’ if it exists, or is what it is, only as an integral member of a complex whole.34 When Hegel finally rescinds the model of intellectual intuition (below, §§41, 42), he also gives up that early form of ‘identity philosophy’ and adopts a discursive model of human knowledge. Once he does so, he is able to reconsider the significance of his earlier insights into the internal problems crippling Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (above, §§27, 32– 33) and to develop them into the powerful form of pragmatic realism, supported by transcendental analyses, first presented in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. Before turning to the Phenomenology in Part II, it is important to recognise the rich implications of the points reviewed in this chapter informing Hegel’s profound epistemological re-orientation; this is the task of the next chapter.35

Hegel’s rejection of both ‘dogmatic’ idealism and ‘dogmatic’ realism (D 4:40.32–41.22). 33 G&W, 4:327.3–6; cf. HER, 164–5. In this regard, at least, Hegel’s characterisation of the relation of subject and predicate in synthetic judgments a priori is not so puzzling as Longuenesse (2002, 269) suggests. 34 Cf. G&W, 4:325.30–326.2, 327.3–29 (re: KdrV B150–53, 160–61); D 4:63.36–64.15, 82.3–14. 35 Here correct one point in my account of Hegel’s epistemology in HER. There I assumed that, because transcendental affinity provides such splendid proof of mental content externalism, and so of epistemological realism, Hegel must have used this argument in the 1807 Phenomenology. He did not. In part, this is because that argument requires much more specific examination of issues regarding mental content and the very possibility of human thought which for methodological reasons are not topics for the 1807 Phenomenology, which first examines and confirms the cognitive competence of philosophy prior to such detailed epistemological investigations. More important, however, is Hegel’s identification and development of a much more exoteric analysis and justification of mental content externalism to reach the same crucial conclusion; see below, §§83–91.

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36 APPENDIX: EVIDENCE OF HEGEL’S AWARENESS OF KANT’S ISSUE OF TRANSCENDENTAL AFFINITY. Above (§34.2) I claimed that Hegel repeatedly stressed in his early writings, in direct connection with Kant’s epistemology, the importance of the material conditions that must be fulfilled in order for judgment to be possible, namely, the matter of sensation must be such as to be subsumable under our concepts. Because I claim that Hegel was aware of Kant’s views on the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold, though he did not refer to it by this terminology, these passages bear quotation and careful consideration. Because they are so frequent and full, they cannot be quoted in footnotes; they are better presented here. I number them for ease of reference. 1. ‘Imagination, however, which is reason immersed in difference, is at this level raised only to the form of infinitude and fixated as intellect. This merely relative identity necessarily opposes itself to, and is radically affected by, the particular as something alien to it and empirical. The in-itself of both, the identity of this intellect and the empirical, i.e., the a priori aspect of judgment, does not come to the fore; philosophy does not go on from judgment to a priori inference [A298– 309/B355–66], from the acknowledgement that the judgment is the appearing of the in-itself to the cognition of the in-itself. It is for this reason that the absolute judgment of idealism as expounded by Kant may, and on this level, must be grasped in such a way that the manifold of sensibility, empirical consciousness as intuition and sensation, is in itself something unintegrated, that the world is in itself falling to pieces, and only gets objective coherence and support, substantiality, multiplicity, even actuality and possibility, through the good offices of human self-consciousness and intellect. All this is an objective determinateness that is man’s own perspective and projection. Thus the whole deduction gets the easily grasped meaning that things in themselves and the sensations are without objective determinateness – and with respect to the sensations and their empirical reality nothing remains but to think that sensation comes from the things in themselves. For the incomprehensible determinateness of the empirical consciousness comes altogether from the things in themselves, and they can be neither intuited nor yet cognised. In experience, the form of intuition belongs to the figurative synthesis, the concept to the intellectual synthesis [KdrV B151]. No other organ remains for the things in themselves but sensation; for sensation alone is not a priori, or in other words, it is not grounded in man’s cognitive faculty for which only appearances exist. The objective determinateness of sensations is their unity, and this unity is merely the self-consciousness of an experiencing subject. So it is no more something truly a priori and existing in itself than any other subjectivity’ (G&W 4:330.8–331.4).

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2. ‘Identity of this formal kind finds itself immediately confronted by or next to an infinite non-identity, with which it must coalesce in some incomprehensible way. On one side there is the ego, with its productive imagination or rather with its synthetic unity which, taken thus in isolation, is formal unity of the manifold. But next to it there is an infinity of sensations and, if you like, of things in themselves. Once it is abandoned by the categories, this realm cannot be anything but a formless lump, even though, according to the Critique of Judgment, it is a realm of beauteous nature and contains determinations with respect to which judgment cannot be subsumptive but only reflecting. Objectivity and stability derive solely from the categories; the realm of things in themselves is without categories; yet it is something for itself and for reflection’ (G&W 4:332.16–27). 3. ‘In this way, then, the objectivity of the categories in experience and the necessity of these relations become once more something contingent and subjective. This intellect is human intellect, part of the cognitive faculty, the intellect of a fixed ego-point. The things, as they are cognised by the intellect, are only appearances. They are nothing in themselves, which is a perfectly truthful result. The obvious conclusion, however, is that an intellect which has cognisance only of appearances and of nothing in itself, is itself only appearance and is nothing in itself’ (G&W 4:332.34–333.2). 4. ‘… this form [Fichte’s formal idealism] does not alter the common and incomprehensible necessity of empirical existence in the slightest. Whether reality appears to us as the qualities of things or as our sensation, we cannot think for a moment that we have here a genuine ideality of actuality and of the real side [of experience]’ (G&W 4:389.17–20). 5. ‘What this formalism [in Jacobi and Fichte] comes down to basically is that either the pure concept, the empty thought, supervenes incomprehensibly upon a content, a determination of the concept, or vice versa: the determination supervenes incomprehensibly upon the indeterminateness [of the pure concept]’ (G&W 4:389.26–28).

CHAPTER 6

The Fate of ‘the’ Intuitive Intellect in Hegel’s Philosophy 37 INTELLECTUAL INTUITIONS AND INTUITIVE INTELLECTS. Kant’s remarks on intellectual intuition captivated Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel and intellectual intuition continues to entrance many Hegel scholars. Hegel’s early Jena writings on Kant are complex, compressed and cryptic. Nevertheless, much of Hegel’s interpretation of Kant at that time is sophisticated and subtle, though often obscure and nascent.1 Understanding and learning from Hegel’s early writings requires overcoming wide-spread unclarity about the nature of ‘the’ intuitive intellect. It is widely assumed that, because it is non-discursive, an intuitive intellect is aconceptual. That is how Schelling understood it, and that is often the initial view of Hegel. Most commentators, whether sympathetic or critical, followed them in this assumption.2 Yet this is not how Kant understood an intuitive intellect. Gram (1981) has shown that Schelling and Fichte each have different accounts of ‘intellectual intuition’, their accounts differ from Kant’s, and indeed Kant discussed three distinct views under the heading ‘intellectual intuition’.3 Kant’s three accounts of an intuitive intellect are these: 1. An intellect which knows things in themselves independent of any conditions of sensibility. 2. An intellect which creates its own objects. 3. An intellect which intuits the sum total of the whole of nature. Gram points out that these accounts are logically independent of one another. The first only requires knowledge sans sensibility; it does not require that objects are created in the act of knowing them, which is the hallmark of the second; neither of the first pair specify whether the object known is nature as a totality, which is the hallmark of the third account. Conversely, the third is defined in terms of a certain kind of understanding, rather than the 1

See Düsing (1986), Longuenesse (2007), 165–191. This assumption is shared, e.g., by Werner Pluhar, whose translation glosses an ‘intuitive’ intellect as one that is not ‘discursive, i.e., conceptual’ (KdU 1987, 248). 3 Gram (1981) does not discuss Hegel’s views. 2

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lack of sensibility, and is silent about whether the object of knowledge is created in the act of knowing it. The one case in which these three accounts would be compatible is the case of divine intuition of creation as a whole. Indeed, Kant insists that God is the only plausible example of an intuitive intellect.4 Kant’s three accounts share one point in common: each concerns knowledge of an object or objects other than the intellect. Fichte’s account of intellectual intuition concerns immediate knowledge of the self.5 Schelling’s account of intellectual intuition concerns the identity of concept and object in absolute knowledge, in which both universal and particular and finite and infinite are united.6 Indeed, according to Schelling these supposed contrasts are indistinguishable because they are undifferentiated; in the absolute everything is simply one and the same. This ‘pure absolute identity’ is supposed to be evident in pure intellectual intuition. In the Science of Logic Hegel acknowledged that Kant’s philosophy formed the basis and point of departure for modern German philosophy, and his early writings show that from the outset this is true for Hegel’s own philosophy (WdL I, 11:31n., 21:46n.). One central task of the present study is to determine precisely in what ways Hegel took Kant’s philosophy as his point of departure. The standard view is that Hegel’s idealism somehow radicalises Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, whilst disregarding Kant’s Critical epistemology. I argue instead that Hegel drew deeply from Kant’s method of transcendental analysis, deeply enough to find in it transcendental proofs of realism which instead undermine Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. In this regard it is important to examine Kant’s notions of an intuitive intellect more closely, to see that, in Kant’s view, intellectual intuition (in any of the three versions dis4

Reflexion 6048, GS 28:433 (not cited by Gram). Gram (1981) contends further that these three accounts are incompatible. According to Gram, the first and second accounts are incompatible because the first excludes, while the third requires, the creation of the object known. The first and second accounts are incompatible with the third because they exclude any distinction between phenomena and noumena, whereas the third specifically concerns knowledge of ‘phenomena’. However, Gram overstated the case. In fact, Kant’s discussion of the third account (KdU §77) does not mention ‘phenomena’ (nor ‘noumena’); it only discusses nature as a totality and the ‘synthetically universal … intuition of a whole as a whole’. Things in themselves, as objects of an intellectual intuition sans sensibility (per the first account) are only independent of the act of knowledge for finite, ungodly intellects. Kant happily countenances God creating things in themselves. The problem with Gram’s account results from his interpreting these three accounts from within Kant’s Transcendental Idealist account of human understanding. 5 Actually, Fichte had at least four distinct senses of ‘intellectual intuition’, each of which concern various aspects of self-knowledge; see Breazeale (1998). 6 Gram(1981, 288–9) summarises these points and then documents and analyses them. However, initially he claims that Schelling’s account of intellectual intuition involves direct acquaintance with our own mental acts, and that such acquaintance involves the knowing subject creating its object (289). However, this characterisation fits neither the passages Gram quotes from Schelling nor Gram’s analysis of those passages (301–2).

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tinguished by Gram) is not aconceptual. Kant says that if our understanding were intuitive, it would lack both concepts and intuitions – concepts, that is, ‘which concern merely the possibility of an object’ and intuitions ‘which give us something, without thereby allowing us to know it as an object’.7 This is to say, an intuitive intellect would not have our distinct, contrasting kinds of discursive concepts and sensible intuitions. However, Kant does call it an intuitive intellect (Verstand), not a power of intuition (nor an archetypal power of intuition).8 The intellect (Verstand) is the power of concepts, and an intuitive intellect is an understanding ‘in the most general sense of the term’.9 Thus in Kant’s view, intuition and concept are not eliminated, instead they are identical for an intuitive intellect. This identity of concept and intuition also holds for an intuitive intellect in Gram’s other two senses. An intuitive intellect in Gram’s second sense, according to Kant, is an intellectus archetypus – an intellect that creates objects by knowing them. If the creations of an intuitive intellect are objects and not just bare or indeterminate particulars then they have characteristics and are of kinds. A discursive intellect (like ours) represents such characteristics and kinds through general concepts as classifications, which are distinct to sensory intuitions of objects which instantiate them. An archetypal intuitive intellect represents neither objects nor their kinds in this way. However, this does not mean that such an intellect, on Kant’s view, dispenses altogether with any or all kinds of concepts that identify objects and their characteristics. Here, too, concept and intuition would be identical in, not absent from, an intuitive intellect. Kant insists in the third Critique that an intuitive intellect (in Gram’s third sense) ‘proceeds from the synthetically universal (the intuition of a whole as a whole) to the particular, i.e., from the whole to the parts’, and this, Kant immediately adds, requires that such an intellect have a ‘presentation of the whole’ (Vorstellung des Ganzen; KdU §77, 5:407.19–25). In connection with an intuitive intellect, this Vorstellung cannot simply be a sensory intuition, but must be some kind of concept. This way of putting the point comes from the first Critique, to which Kant refers directly in this connection (KdU §77, 5: 405.27–32). In the first Critique Kant describes an intuitive intellect as one which, through its self-consciousness, supplies itself the manifold of intuition 7 „Wäre nämlich unser Verstand anschauend, so hätte er keine Gegenstände als das Wirkliche. Begriffe (die bloß auf die Möglichkeit eines Gegenstandes gehen) und sinnliche Anschauungen (welche uns etwas geben, ohne es dadurch doch als Gegenstand erkennen zu lassen) würden beide wegfallen“ (KdU §76, 5:402.1–5). 8 Most directly: ‘a power of complete spontaneity of intuition … would be an understanding in the most general sense of the term’ (KdU §77, 5:406.20–24). 9 KdU Einl. §VII, §§15, 23, 29, 35, 39, 62, 77; GS 5:190.7, 228.34–36, 244.16–18, 266.2–3, 287.26–27, 292.28, 365.27–28, 406.16–17; see preceding note and KdrV B138, 3:112.20–21.

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and thus as one ‘through whose presentation (Vorstellung) the objects of the presentation at once exist’.10 Though we cannot very well understand what sort of ‘concepts’ or ‘presentations’ – Vorstellungen – such an intuitive intellect has, Kant is emphatic that such an intuitive intellect is an intellect, that is, a power of concepts, though ‘in the most general sense of the term’. Here, again, we must understand concepts to be identical with, rather than to be absent from, such intuitions. We will seriously misunderstand Hegel’s better reasoning if we mistakenly assume that Kant’s intuitive intellect is simply and purely aconceptual. 38 ACONCEPTUAL INTUITIONISM IN SCHELLING’S AND HEGEL’S EARLY VIEWS. Unfortunately, Schelling and the early Hegel encourage this misunderstanding because their models of intellectual intuition are non-discursive and aconceptual. Klaus Düsing has argued very persuasively that Schelling and Hegel did not hold exactly the same views about ‘intellectual intuition’, ‘speculation’ nor the ‘absolute identity’ that they supposedly reveal.11 Prior to 1801 Schelling conceived ‘absolute identity’ as an absolutely simple, undifferentiated unity. This ultimate undifferentiated unity simply cannot be known through philosophical reflection, according to Schelling. Philosophy can only approach the absolute through a negative theology, though the absolute can be manifested by art. Late in 1800 Schelling opted for a distinctive ‘philosophy of identity’. In this view, speculative reason is superior to reflective understanding; the absolute is completely knowable through reason; this knowledge constitutes ‘metaphysics’, the first and primary part of philosophy; and the absolute is conceived (like Hegel’s) as an internally differentiated unity (though Schelling also retained his earlier notion of an undifferentiated absolute). Most important here, Schelling claimed that knowledge of the absolute is constructed in pure intellectual intuition, which is altogether divorced from reflective thought. Philosophical reflection does not and cannot prepare us for intellectual intuition; one must simply have intellectual intuition of the absolute, and only thus recognise its possibility and its actuality. Schelling’s retention of an undifferentiated absolute and his claim that pure intellectual intuition has nothing to do with reflective thought show that Schelling’s philosophy of identity is committed to a non-discursive, aconceptual account of knowledge.12 10

KdrV B138–39, 3:112.23–25; cf. B145, 3:13–16. See Düsing (1969), (1987), (1993). 12 Düsing (1993, 162) notes that Schelling’s later philosophy retreats from this account of knowledge in his philosophy of identity to a view much like his earlier idealism, that reason cannot know the absolute, the absolute must simply be presupposed. 11

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Hegel, in contrast, learned already in Frankfurt from Hölderlin to conceive ‘absolute identity’ in terms of the ultimate and essential integration of all differences. In his 1801 philosophy of identity Hegel held that speculation is the synthesis of intellectual intuition and reflective thought. Although Hegel still gave reflective (i.e., discursive, conceptual) thought a subordinate role, its role is nevertheless constitutive of speculative knowledge. However, the constitutive role of reflective thought is restricted to demonstrating (in ‘logic’) the ultimate inadequacy of finite reflective concepts for grasping the absolute. This demonstration, Hegel claimed, prepares us for speculative knowledge of the absolute via intellectual intuition. Hegel’s account of knowledge at this time was completely ahistorical. Because intellectual intuition transcends reflective thought, it is non-discursive. Because Hegel conceived the absolute as internally differentiated, it is possible that he did not view intellectual intuition as aconceptual, though if it involves concepts, they cannot be the familiar kind of ‘finite’ discursive concepts found in ordinary thought and in philosophical reflection (as classifications, intension). However that issue may be settled (if it can be), Hegel simply assumed the possibility of such intellectual intuition, and simply assumed we can have such intellectual intuitions of the absolute. I now highlight some grave problems intellectual intuition caused Hegel, an important cause of his rejection of intellectual intuition and some very important ways in which Hegel’s mature epistemology built upon Kant’s account of discursive judgment in articulating the possibility and defending the legitimacy of a conceptual grasp of the totality of the world. Even if (somehow) Hegel’s notion of intellectual intuition allows a role for some kind of non-discursive concepts, that role is so meagre that it cannot solve, indeed cannot even address, the problems confronting intellectual intuition, all of which stem from the fact that it supposedly transcends discursive, reflective, conceptual thought. The first problem is revealed by Hegel’s attitude toward Kant’s arguments for the transcendental ideality of space and time. 39 HEGEL’S YOUTHFUL NEGLECT OF KANT’S TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC. One troubling feature of Hegel’s early view of Kant is his disregard of Kant’s direct arguments for Transcendental Idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic. In Faith and Knowledge Hegel notes, obliquely and in passing, that Kant holds that space and time are only forms of human intuition (G&W 4:323.10–14). Hegel’s stress on the role of the understanding in integrating our formal intuitions of space and time does not respond to this crucial set of

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Kant’s arguments.13 We know that in his mature writings and lectures Hegel accepted the standard objection to those arguments, the problem of the neglected alternative.14 We know that this objection was commonplace among Hegel’s immediate predecessors (see above, §35). I have argued that, properly formulated, this objection is sound (HER, 39–43); indeed, this objection follows from grounds central to Kant’s first Critique (KTPR §§19–27). However, we do not know when Hegel first considered or accepted the objection to Kant’s arguments for Transcendental Idealism based on the neglected alternative. Perhaps that information was lost with Hegel’s 1789 notes on Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant; but that is merely possible.15 We do know that in 1795 Schelling wrote to Hegel that Kant had provided the proper results, but not their premises.16 From that, along with Hegel’s remarks about Kant in his early writings, we can be confident that Hegel was unpersuaded by Kant’s arguments for Transcendental Idealism. However, finding Kant’s arguments unpersuasive does not meet the general philosophical obligation to provide their detailed critical assessment and, potentially, refutation. As it stands, Hegel apparently committed a flat petitio principii against Kant in his early publications, including Faith and Knowledge, by disregarding Kant’s direct arguments for the transcendental ideality of space and time.17 40 IN PRINCIPLE, INTELLECTUAL INTUITION ENTAILS PETITIO PRINCIPII. This is a genuine problem for Hegel’s early treatment of Kant, yet it is only one instance of a graver problem. Hegel’s bold appropriation and transformation of Kant’s description of an intuitive intellect is astonishing. The problem 13

G&W, 4:327.6–29, referring to KdrV B160+n.. Cf. VGP 3, MM 20:341, H&S 3:434; Enz. §254R (1817: §197), §448Z. 15 Rosenkranz (1844, 14) reports that Hegel attended Flatt’s course in 1789 on Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant. In this connection Hegel evidently wrote notebooks (which Rosenkranz had in hand) full of extensive excerpts from their writings. Unfortunately, these notebooks are now lost. 16 ‘Kant provided the results; the premises are still missing. And who can understand results without premises? Perhaps a Kant, but what is the great crowd to make of it? Fichte, the last time he was here, said that one must have the genius of a Socrates to fathom Kant. I find this truer every day’. Schelling to Hegel, Jan. 6, 1795 (Briefe, 1:14; B&S 29, tr. rev). Hoffmeister notes that Fichte visited Tübingen in May, 1794 (Briefe, 1:435 n. 3). 17 Such petitio princippi is not alleviated by ascribing to Hegel an argument parallel to that sometimes heard against scepticism about commonsense objects, namely that we do have commonsense knowledge of perceptible things around us, so that scepticism consequently is false. The parallel would be that Hegel insists he has intuitive knowledge of the absolute, so that Kant’s restriction of human knowledge to phenomena is consequently false. Neither argument recognises that sceptical or Kantian positions are supported by analysis and arguments which require critique, and not merely rejection via a contentious modus tollens. 14

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is that the very model of an intuitive intellect is a model of a kind of knowledge in which there is no distinction between thinking and knowing. Because Hegel not only espoused this model, but was enthralled by it, he (mistakenly) assumed that the ability to conceive or to think this model shows that the model is true and is known to be true. These assumptions flatly commit a petitio principii against Kant and indeed against anyone who rejects the idea of an intuitive intellect as a model for human knowledge. By committing himself to the model of an intuitive intellect, Hegel committed himself to an account of knowledge to which petitio principii is in principle endemic. In this regard, I suggest, Hegel’s initial disregard of Kant’s arguments for the transcendental ideality of space and time is not accidental.18 Nor is it accidental that the young Hegel, like Schelling, shows much more enthusiasm and conviction than proof or evidence for the absolute speculative standpoint supposedly attained by intellectual intuition.19 41 HEGEL’S RECONSIDERATION OF THE PROBLEM OF PETITIO PRINCIPII. In his early publications Hegel was quite willing to raise the problem of petitio principii in general, and to press it against Reinhold;20 and once in pass18

I would like to offer a conjecture regarding a related point. It is also troublesome that Hegel claims that Kant promulgates merely ‘empirical psychology’ (e.g., G&W 4:322.1–8, 341.21–24). Hegel regards Kant’s philosophy as ‘psychological’ insofar as it tries to explain the content and structure of our experience in terms of our nature as sentient beings (cf. WdL II, GW 12:22.33–23.1). I suspect Hegel calls it ‘empirical’ psychology because Kant had refuted, or at least had rejected, rational psychology in the Paralogisms (cf. G&W 4:336.32–337.6) and because Kant (supposedly) did not derive his account of our cognitive abilities systematically from a single principle; such a derivation would be required for his account of our abilities to count as rational rather than historical – i.e. empirical – knowledge. Both Hegel and Kant take over this medieval distinction between rational and historical knowledge (cf. KdrV A835–6/B863–4); cf. Hegel’s remark in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy: ‘Now Kant goes to work [in his critique of theoretical reason] psychologically, that is, historically’ (MM 20:339, B 3:222). 19 Schelling flatly begged the question against opponents and dissenters by charging that anyone who didn’t understand or accept his views lacked the relevant capacity or ‘organ’ of intellectual intuition (System des transcendentalen Idealismus, Werke 2:369–70, 376; Heath 27–8, 33); cf. Schelling’s explications of his Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie in the Summer of 1801 (Düsing 1988, 43.29–44.1). Near the end of the 1800 System Schelling claims that the ‘universally acknowledged and altogether incontestable objectivity of intellectual intuition is art itself. For the aesthetic intuition simply is the intellectual intuition become objective’ (Werke 2:625, Heath 229). As an aesthete and occasional artist I recognise the power and richness of aesthetic experiences that give rise such impressions, yet as aesthetician and occasional art critic I testify that such impressions do nothing to justify Schelling’s claims about intellectual intuition. If my testimony regarding this point is regarded as begging the question, it is licenced to do so by Schelling’s own position (cf. Enz. §75, and below, §98). 20 See „Ueber das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik überhaupt …“, GW 4:118.21–119.12; and D 4:83.34–84.26.

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ing Hegel mentioned the Dilemma of the Criterion classically formulated by Sextus Empiricus (above, §12).21 This dilemma concerns petitio principii at a very fundamental level, regarding the very criteria for settling either substantive or methodological disputes. In the Skeptizismus essay Hegel dismissed this problem because he thought it only concerns discursive, conceptual knowledge, which he called ‘reflection’. He thought that he escaped this problem through intellectual intuition of the absolute, which he called ‘speculation’ (GW 4:215.2–31, 220.8–27). As mentioned above (§11), in his early article on scepticism (1801) Hegel gladly invoked Pyrrhonian scepticism against the ‘finite’ knowledge of the merely analytical understanding (see Forster 1989, Parts I, II). This point merits closer consideration. As Ferrini (2002) has stressed, Hegel proposed a criterion of truth already in his master’s thesis, De Orbitis Planetarum, namely in his first Thesis: Contradiction is the rule of truth, non-contradiction of falsehood.

This deliberately provocative thesis need not be examined in detail here.22 It suffices to note that here Hegel’s terms ‘identity’ and ‘contradiction’ do not denote principles of formal logic; instead he uses them to designate ontological theses. ‘Identity’ in Hegel’s early usage stands for any form of atomism. In contrast to that, Hegel used the term ‘contradiction’ to designate his holism, which stresses the mutual contra-distinction and interrelations of finite (or limited) phenomena. In a word, Hegel contends that the identity conditions of things are mutually interdependent. If so, then anything is what it is only within the context of other things (HER 140–5). At this stage in his thinking, Hegel appeals to his holism for two main purposes: To respond directly to Pyrrhonian Tropes of Relativity, and to develop a tenable, holistic account of natural-scientific explanation, to replace the atomising tendencies of Newton’s methods (see below, §§123, 124). In these regards, Hegel’s early dialectical method (ca. 1801–02) aimed to achieve positive results.23 However, in De Orbitis Hegel tried to use his view of knowledge (at this time he hardly had a theory of knowledge), and to present it merely by using it, without attempting to justify it, and without considering criteria for philo21 PH 1.20; cf. 2.116–7. Hegel mentions the Dilemma of the Criterion in passing (Skept. 4:212.9), a fact I overlooked in HER. 22 See Ferrini (2002); cf. Fulda (1987). Hegel’s much-maligned master’s thesis has been grossly misunderstood; it contains some surprisingly acute philosophical and scientific analyses. For a brief word about the seven planets, see Beaumont (1954). For a thorough guide and reliable edition of Hegel’s thesis, see Ferrini (1995). 23 The points made in this paragraph were clarified in discussions with Cinzia Ferrini, Guiseppe Varnier and Klaus Vieweg.

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sophical knowledge, including his own. In his essay on scepticism Hegel contended that Pyrrhonian scepticism consists only in the Five Modes of Agrippa (GW 4:218.4–7), and tried to show that his holistic philosophy escapes those modes unscathed. Hegel only notes the Dilemma of the Criterion in passing, without considering, much less answering it (GW 4:212.9). This situation was changed by G.E. Schulze’s (1803) publishing anonymously his ‘Aphorisms on the Absolute’, a brilliant parody and critique of the views of Schelling and Hegel.24 Among much else, Schulze showed that Schelling’s and Hegel’s appeal to intellectual intuition is indistinguishable from Jacobi’s appeal to ‘feeling’ (something for which Hegel roundly criticised Jacobi in Faith and Knowledge), in part because in the Absolute nothing is distinct from anything else, and in part because (certainly) Schelling’s and (probably) Hegel’s intuitionism repudiated concepts, which are required to distinguish, differentiate or otherwise identify the characteristics either of things or of knowledge. Schulze also expressly raised the problem involved in providing mere assurances that one knows the truth, along with the issue of how ordinary people are supposed to ascend to the absolute. In this connection he used the metaphor of a ladder – a key problem and metaphor in Hegel’s description of the aim and role of the Phenomenology.25 Like the Dilemma of the Criterion, these concerns about the petitio principii in mere assurances (i.e., mere assertions) and finding a ladder to genuine knowledge stem directly from Pyrrhonian skepticism (AL 1.315, 2.464, 481). In brief, Schulze’s ‘Aphorisms’ prompted Hegel to recognise that his speculative idealism cannot evade, but rather must address Pyrrhonian scepticism. Schelling sought to respond to Schulze’s ‘Aphorisms’ in part by appealing to Hegel’s scepticism essay.26 Hegel, on the other hand, saw that Schulze’s ‘Aphorisms’ showed that his own epistemological view in the scepticism essay and in De Orbitis was untenable, or at the very least inadequate, precisely because it provides no response to the Dilemma of the Criterion. On the contrary, Hegel’s view assumed precisely what he should instead have justified. This is to say, Hegel’s early idealistic position committed a blatant petitio 24

Schulze (1803), brilliantly explicated by Meist (1993) – without its Pyrrhonist context. See Schulze (1803), 346–50; Hegel PhdG, 9:23.3–4; cf. 47.34–48.4; 55.18–24. 26 Schelling (1806), 153 n. 2. He cites Hegel’s „Skepticismus“ essay in connection with his own proposition that ‘the absolute has no predicates’ (ibid., ¶64). This indicates Schelling remained centrally concerned with metaphysics, unlike Hegel, who is already concerned with epistemology. Professor Jaeschke surmises, I believe rightly, that Schelling’s own „Aphorismen“ were drafted before 1806. Unfortunately, most of Hegel’s devotés follow Schelling’s continued preoccupation with ‘metaphysics’, neglecting why Hegel set aside his extensive Jena „Systementwürfe“ on metaphysics to take up a quite distinctive project in the 1807 Phänomenologie des Geistes. Favouring Hegel’s Vorrede and neglecting his Einleitung abets this interpretive self-distraction. 25

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principii. Schulze’s ‘Aphorisms’ convinced Hegel, rightly, that the main Pyrrhonian argument against philosophical knowledge consists in the Dilemma of the Criterion, rather than in the Five Modes of Agrippa. Thus Schulze led Hegel during the summer of 1804 to the important insight that his own absolute idealism must avoid any and all petitio principii. Thereafter, Pyrrhonian scepticism represented for Hegel, not merely a useful source of arguments against ‘finite’ knowledge (e.g., naïve realism27), but also a profound philosophical opponent. Consequently, the Dilemma of the Criterion is given pride of place, right in the middle of his methodological reflections in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit (above, §12, below, §§48, 60–63, 86–90). The mature Hegel continued to use antinomical-dialectical arguments, based on Pyrrhonian Tropes of Relativity, in order to develop, expound and defend his (moderate) ontological holism. However, in his epistemology, especially in the 1807 Phenomenology, such arguments were replaced by his account and practice of the ‘determinate negation’ of alternative philosophical views. ‘Determinate negation’ grew directly out of Hegel’s solution to the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion (see below, §§63, 64, 87). Following the publication of Schulze’s „Aphorismen“ Hegel clearly recognised in „Zwei Anmerkungen zum System“ (likely written in Summer 1804) that the problem of petitio principii is especially acute for any philosophy, such as his own, which recognises the (moderately) holistic character of knowledge and justification.28 These two Remarks are only fragments of very preliminary drafts; they are characteristically compressed and difficult, yet they repay careful scrutiny. In the first Remark, Hegel contends that a philosophy has only one idea, and this idea must be one and the same at the beginning and the end of a circularly organised philosophical system. Only in this way, he contends, can a philosophy avoid having an initial proposition that would require either a prior and independent starting point or subsequent mediation (via articulation in subsequent propositions). Either prospect would inevitably result in something other than absolute, i.e. unconditioned knowledge (GW 7:343–4). The implication, clearly, is that in order to be absolute, philosophical knowledge must avoid the problem of infinite regress posed by Sextus Empiricus, but also avoid the incompleteness involved in a progress (whether in development or articulation) of knowledge. Hegel’s emphasis on completeness and circularity strongly suggests the holistic character of his conception of philosophy, and in particular, Hegel’s holistic conception of philosophical justification. This Anmerkung shows Hegel’s recogni27

Düsing (1973), Graeser (1985). See „Zwei Anmerkungen zum System“, GW 7:343–347. I follow the dating suggested by Harris (1983), 580 (entry 210). 28

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tion that he must solve the problems of circularity that confronted Fichte, rather than evade them through Schelling’s style of intellectual intuition.29 Hegel’s second Remark consists of four paragraphs. In the first paragraph he addresses the distinction between knowledge and its object. He acknowledges the common presumption that knowledge and its supposed objects are at best only contingently related, yet denies that such a distinction between knowledge and its object is tenable because these two moments must become one (GW 7:345.2–11).30 In the second paragraph (quoted below) Hegel acknowledges that it is hard to convince commonsense not to view the relation of knowledge and its supposed object as anything other than contingent or accidental. In the third paragraph, Hegel claims already to have shown that the commonsense distinction between knowledge and its objects is null and void (GW 7:346.1–21). What remains of the fourth paragraph is the beginning of one incomplete sentence. In it Hegel again acknowledges that others regard the relation of knowledge to its supposed object differently than he does (GW 7:346.22–347.4). In a marginal note to this last paragraph (also incomplete), Hegel acknowledges that of course the ‘reality’ of these two ‘components’ (Glieder) of the opposition – i.e., knowledge and its object – must be recognised, although this distinction must be philosophically reconstructed (GW 7:346.28, 347.5–10). This progression of topics in the second Remark suggests rather clearly that Hegel is quite aware of his profound disagreement with commonsense, potentially sceptical ways of viewing the relation between knowledge and its objects, of his obligation to give the commonsense experiential distinction between knowledge and object its philosophical due, and of a variety of ways in which this distinction is construed. This awareness suggests that Hegel now recognises that he, too, must avoid petitio principii. When these remarks are contrasted with Hegel’s earlier optimistic confidence about intellectual intuition placing him beyond the problem of petitio principii, and are taken in connection with the holistic character of philosophy stressed in the first of Hegel’s two Remarks, this suggestion is significantly reinforced. This suggestion is further reinforced when the second paragraph of the second Remark is considered in its entirety. There Hegel states: However, it is difficult to bring ordinary thought away from the fixing of this being for itself of knowledge and of its object. The distinct knowledge, that such a being for self of diverse [moments] destroys itself, underlies the habit of ordinary knowledge to reify the opposed [moments], and thereby to give them each a semblance of a particular subsistence for itself, so that it posits 29

On Fichte’s concern with circularity, see Breazeale (1994, 1996). I do not understand Hegel’s reason for this supposed ‘must’. The relation between one and many which supposedly leads to unity is obscure and implausible (GW 7:345.8–11). 30

120 the CERTAINTY as the knowledge of such a being for itself, but connects the certainty with the form of abstract being for itself in such a way that it separates that knowledge [of that being for itself] from it [from that being for itself], and then again it divides within itself this knowing [gewisse] and known, as if there were a lot of such certainties.31

In this paragraph Hegel explicitly discusses the supposed ‘certainty’ that knowledge and its object are distinct and independent, and (at the end) he notes that there are many ways in which this idea may be conceived and held to be ‘certain’. He claims to have a deeper knowledge of this relation (enunciated in the first two clauses of the second sentence), and both of his two Remarks are dedicated to refuting in principle such cognitively opaque distinctions between knowledge and its object, by showing that knowledge and its object are not merely contingently or accidentally related. At the end of the first Remark, Hegel quite explicitly acknowledges that such refutations must not only be ‘for us’ as absolute philosophers, but must be provided by philosophy from within itself in order to show (zeigen) that its claims are valid.32 Between that point and his marginal comment regarding the importance of accounting for the commonsense distinction between knowledge and its object (GW 7:344.28–347.5–10), it appears that Hegel is well on his way to recognising that absolute idealists, too, must avoid begging the question. This realisation prepares Hegel to reconsider Sextus’s Dilemma of the Criterion as the central methodological problem addressed in the Introduction to the Phenomenology (above, §§15–17). If there was any lingering doubt in Hegel’s mind about his rejection of all brands of philosophy of identity, recognising that even absolute idealists must avoid question-begging and must address Sextus’s Dilemma of the Criterion seals the fate of intellectual intuition in Hegel’s theory of knowledge.33 31 GW 7:345.12–21. Hegel wrote: „Von dem Fixirn aber dieses Für sich seyns des Erkennens und seines Gegenstandes ist das gemeine Denken schwer abzubringen; die deutliche Erkenntniß, daß ein solches für sich seyn Verschiedener sich zerstört, unterliegt der Gewohnheit des gemeinen Erkennens, die Entgegengesetzten zu substantiiren, und ihnen dadurch den Schein eines besondern für sich Bestehens zu geben, so daß es die GEWISSHEIT, als das Wissen um ein solches für sich seyn setzt, aber die Gewißheit an die Form des abstracten Für sich seyns so knüpft, daß es das Wissen um dasselbe von ihm trennt, und dann ebenso auch wieder dieses gewisse und gewußte so in sich theilt, als ob es eine Menge solcher Gewißheiten gebe“. 32 7:344.22–27. Hegel makes this remark specifically about the circular character of a proper philosophical system, which must show (zeigen) that it has no beginning, and so does not begin with a mere assumption, due to the mutual implication of its ‘first’ and ‘last’ elements. 33 This also adds to Hegel’s reasons to differentiate his philosophy more fully and explicitly from Schelling’s. Düsing (1993, 162–3) notes that after 1804 Hegel rejects the idealist metaphysics of substance, modelled on Spinoza and central to his philosophy of identity, in favour of a different kind of speculative idealism based on the self-knowledge of abso-

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Accordingly, the Dilemma of the Criterion becomes the central methodological problem posed in the Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology, where he develops a very subtle and powerful response to it (above, §§15–17). His response involves an unqualified commitment to a discursive, conceptual model of human knowledge, a commitment he retains to the end of his career.34 Although Hegel’s mature epistemology distinguishes reason and understanding (or intellect, Verstand), he always insists that reason can only function by reintegrating conceptual distinctions made by the intellect. In the Science of Logic, on those very few occasions where he mentions intellectual intuition in connection with his own views, Hegel stresses as strongly and as clearly as possible that such supposed intuitions are definite and determinate – and thus genuinely contentful or significant – only if they are articulated conceptually.35 Hegel’s mature account of absolute knowledge repudiates the aconceptual accounts of knowledge central to Schelling’s and to Hegel’s own early accounts of the intuitive intellect. Hegel criticises aconceptual intuitionism decisively, both with regard to empirical knowledge (in ‘Sense Certainty’) and with regard to philosophical knowledge generally in connection with Jacobi in the ‘Third Attitude of Thought Toward Objectivity’ (see below, §§92–99). His objections to aconceptual intuitionism are fundamental, powerful and hold quite generally. In particular, they hold against Schelling, whose intellectual intuition plays no role in the Phenomenology – other than as a posilute spirit, a kind of view he retains in his mature philosophy. Noting that Hegel’s marginal comment on the passage quoted above from his „Zwei Anmerkungen zum System“ shows that these remarks already belong to his new conception of absolute spirit, which is designed to resolve the problem about the relation between concepts and their contents (7:345.23–28). Hegel’s rejection of Schelling’s model of intellectual intuition is likewise the rejection of any merely negative introduction to speculative logic or metaphysics. Harris (1983, 397–8+n. 1; HL 1:280–1, 311 n. 24) dates Hegel’s philosophical break with Schelling circa late 1804, though on the basis of other evidence. In HL, Harris calls Hegel’s attitude toward Schelling ‘at best ambivalent’. I think this is incorrect. Any philosopher committed to determinate negation, i.e., to constructive Aufhebung of alternative views, must appreciate the insights and suggestions found in other philosophies, whilst criticising shortcomings and errors (above, §§14, 15). That is not ambivalence; it is critical appraisal. It may look ambivalent, but only if one disregards Hegel’s method of determinate negation by productive internal criticism and neglects the substantive details of Hegel’s critical assessment of other views. As argued above (§§4–15), Harris does not adequately appreciate the point, purpose or structure of Hegel’s critical phenomenological method. 34 Regarding Hegel’s rehabilitation of the correspondence theory of truth, as required by his mature discursive account of knowledge, see below, §§63.3, 86–89; HER, 111–4. 35 WdL I, 11:38.12–40.29, 21:62.12–65.26; WdL II, 12:41.29–42.14; cf. 226.18–24. Similarly, on those few occasions where he mentions ‘subject-object identity’ in his mature writings, Hegel stresses the conceptually mediated character of that identity (e.g. Enz. §162+R; WdL II, 12:176–8); ‘… through intuition no science is produced; instead [it is produced] only through thought’ (WdL II, 12:226.22–4). The other passages cited in this note are too long to quote here, though they should be considered carefully, especially by those who believe the mature Hegel espoused intellectual intuition.

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tion criticised internally and refuted by reductio ad absurdum, especially in ‘Observing Reason’.36 Indeed, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1825) Hegel formulates the main problem with Schelling’s philosophy in a way that makes plain the weakness it shares with Jacobi’s ‘immediate knowledge’ (i.e., intuitionism): ‘Nothing could be more convenient than to posit cognition on the basis of immediate knowledge, of what pops into one’s head’. Schelling’s esoterism – some people have intellectual intuition of the absolute, others don’t – only discredits his ‘standpoint of speculation’ and its ‘pure intellectual intuition’ further; retreating to a defensive esoterism abandons the project of accounting for human knowledge and its objects generally.37 Hegel’s remark from his history lectures directly recalls his parallel criticism of Jacobi in the Encyclopaedia,38 and directly the remark with which Hegel first introduces the problem of petitio principii in the Introduction to the Phenomenology: ‘one bare assurance counts as much as another’39 – directly paraphrasing Sextus Empiricus (AL 1.315, 2.464)! Only a discursive form of knowledge involving justification and critical assessment can avoid the crucial problem of petitio principii. Consider now some important points Hegel learned from Kant’s discursive account of human knowledge.40 42 HEGEL’S CRITIQUE OF SCHELLING’S INTUITIONISM IN HIS LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. To conclude this discussion of Hegel’s rejection of intuitionism, intellectual or otherwise, consider the following passages from Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy. These have been cited (Franks 2005, 378–9) against my thesis that Hegel rejected intellectual intuitionism in all forms; to the contrary, they instead confirm my interpretation in all regards. Hegel states: 36

See HER, 164–9. Harris (HL passim) details many of Hegel’s philosophical disagreements with Schelling, and in particular, with his intuitionism. In his attempt to rehabilitate Schelling, Bowie (1993; 18–9, 23–7, 46, 55–8, 83–4, 154–5) conveniently overlooks the problems Hegel points out in intuitionism, including intellectual intuitionism. He also does not recognise the significance of Hegel’s objection that the ‘identity’ alleged to be found in intellectual intuition cannot be presupposed as an unmediated beginning (ibid., 160–2; cf. HER, 150–5). 37 VGP 3, MM 20:428/B 3:260–1. 38 ‘There is nothing quicker or more convenient than to have to make the mere assurance, that I find a content in my consciousness with the certainty of its truth and that therefore this certainty doesn’t belong to me as a particular subject, but rather to the nature of spirit itself’ (Enz. §71R; cf. below, §98). 39 PhdG Intro. ¶76, 9:55.18–24. 40 In view of his reconstruction of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction in Hegel’s mature writings, it is unsurprising that he comes to equate the transcendental unity of apperception with the concept (pace Longuenesse 2007, 188).

123 1. The Schellingian Philosophy takes its start from immediate knowledge, from intellectual intuition; though second, its content is no longer the indeterminate, the being of beings, but rather the absolute as concrete. We have already spoken about of the form of intellectual intuition; it is the most convenient manner on which to base knowledge – on whatever happens to occur to one. However, the immediate knowledge of God as spirit is only for Christian peoples, not for others, it is not in their consciousness. Even more contingently does this immediate knowledge appear as intellectual intuition of the concrete, more precisely of the identity of subjectivity and objectivity. Because the presupposition of philosophy is that individuals have the immediate intuition of this identity of the subjective and the objective, philosophy appears in individuals as an artistic talent, genius, as if only the favoured few (Sonntagskinder) had it. However, by its nature philosophy is able to be universal, for its ground is thought, and through thought human beings are human. Therefore the principle [of philosophy] is something altogether universal; though if a determinate intuition or consciousness is required, such as the consciousness or the intuition of the identity of the subjective and the objective, then this is the requirement of a determinate, particular thought. (VGP 3, MM 20:428, cf. B 3:260–1, H&S 3:520) 2. This intuition is intellectual because it is rational intuition (Vernunftanschauung), and as knowledge it is as such (zugleich) absolutely one with the object of knowledge. (VGP 3, MM 20:438/H&S 3:520) 3. But this intuition is itself knowledge, but it is not yet known; it is the unmediated, the required. As thus immediate one must possess it; and what one can have, one also can not have. (VGP 3, MM 20:439/H&S 3:520) 4. For the immediate, the intuited is in the form of something that is, or something accidental; and whoever does not understand it must believe that he does not possess this intuition. Or, in order to understand it, one must make the effort to have intellectual intuition; but one can know whether one has it or not – not from understanding it, for one may merely think one understands it. (VGP 3, MM 20: 439/H&S 3:520)

These passages are from Hegel’s lectures on Schelling, where Hegel expounds and comments upon Schelling’s views, not his own.41 His exposition of Schelling’s views do not endorse those views on his own behalf! When lecturing on Schelling’s view of intellectual intuition, Hegel again criticises it, thoroughly, in precisely the terms and for precisely the reasons noted above (§§40, 41), which parallel exactly Hegel’s critique of Jacobi’s intuitionism (below, §§92–99). Hegel’s criticisms show that he espouses no kind of intellectual intuitionism whatsoever; and certainly not the kind espoused by Maimon, and ascribed by Franks (2005, 378–9) to Hegel! One of Hegel’s criticisms of intellectual intuition begins the first passage: 41 These statements appear as one passage in the Haldane and Simson translation (1955, 3:520), which is cited by Franks (2005, 378). There is much more to Hegel’s exposition and assessment of Schelling in his lectures, but many of the key critical points are sounded in the passages quoted here, and once these points are understood, it is easy to make sense of the remainder of Hegel’s criticisms.

124 The Schellingian Philosophy takes its start from immediate knowledge, from intellectual intuition; though second, its content is no longer the indeterminate, the being of beings, but rather the absolute as concrete. We have already spoken about of the form of intellectual intuition; it is the most convenient manner on which to base knowledge – on whatever happens occur to one. (VGP 3, MM 20:428, cf. 435/B 3:260)

Hegel’s objection, that intellectual intuition is ‘the most convenient manner on which to base knowledge … whatever happens to occur to one’ reiterates one of Hegel’s key complaints against intuitionism of any form, including Jacobi’s. Hegel’s terminology here repeats (for good reason) his objection to Jacobi in the conceptual preliminaries (Vorbegriff) to the Encyclopaedia Logic: There is nothing quicker or more convenient than to have to make the mere assurance, that I find a content in my consciousness with the certainty of its truth and that therefore this certainty doesn’t belong to me as a particular subject, but rather to the nature of spirit itself. (Enz. §71R)

One general problem for intuitionism in epistemology is that in principle it cannot distinguish the merits of competing claims to ‘immediate knowledge’. Thus it fails to distinguish justified from unjustified claims, and so also fails to distinguish true from false, reasonable or plausible claims. More importantly, intuitionism generally fails to provide any reliable way to distinguish between these two cognitively quite distinct states: Directly intuiting something and only thus knowing it and being certain one knows it, in contrast to: Feeling certain about something and only thus being utterly convinced that one directly intuits and knows it. Because intuitionism fails to distinguish reliably between these two kinds of state, intuitionism can equally warrant any claim and also its negation. Any alleged principle of knowledge (or of justification) which can equally warrant any claim and its negation simply is no principle of knowledge, nor of justification, because knowledge requires both truth and justification. If ‘immediate knowledge’ happens to seize upon a genuine truth, this is entirely accidental, utterly contingent. (On this point of Hegel’s critique of Jacobi and intuitionism, see below, §98.) As Hegel rightly notes, on the basis of Schelling’s intellectual intuitionism, we cannot even tell whether we have a capacity for intellectual intuition, ‘for one may merely think one understands it’ (VGP 3, MM 20:439). This turns the previous criticism into an important reflexive criticism of Schelling’s view: According to his view, we cannot tell whether his view is true, or whether it is true of any one of us, because we cannot distinguish reliably between actually having and enjoying genuine intellectual intuition, from merely though mistakenly thinking we have and enjoy it. (Hegel likewise argued that Jacobi’s intuitionism faced devastating self-reflexive difficulties of this kind; see §98.)

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Hegel continues to criticise Schellingian intellectual intuition in ways which again reiterate another of his points against Jacobi’s intuitionism: However, the immediate knowledge of God as something spiritual is only for Christian peoples, not for others, it is not in the consciousness of other peoples. (VGP 3, MM 20:428/cf. B 3:260)

In Enz. §70, Hegel argues against Jacobi along these lines: According to the doctrine of ‘immediate knowledge’, cognition of an object is a noetically unstructured event: one places oneself before an object and without further ado knows that object. This kind of knowledge would only be possible if the following two phrases were equivalent: ‘knowledge of an object x’ and ‘knowledge that the object is an x;’ for example, the observation of a green shirt and the observation that the shirt is green, to borrow Davidson’s (1984, 427) example. The conflation of this subtle but important distinction is a presupposition of the Modern empiricist tradition. Only if objects were in this way ‘selfidentifying’ would pure aconceptual intuition suffice for knowledge. Is this the case? Are there such objects and is there such knowledge? Insofar as the doctrine of ‘immediate knowledge’ concerns common, if also religious, objects, which according to Jacobi it does, then there should be universal agreement about these objects (Enz. §72). Yet there is no such universal agreement – precisely Hegel’s point in the passage just quoted from his lectures on Schelling, and without considerable philosophical education one wouldn’t even understand Jacobi’s contention. Hegel’s appeals to the cultural variability of religious belief (Enz. §72) and to the necessity of education (Enz. §§66, 67, 67R) against Jacobi make exactly the right point: An object is only known insofar as it is identified as the object that it is. Such identification requires a representational system (in a broad sense, as classifying particulars and their features) and accordingly refutes Jacobi’s presumed cognitive ‘immediacy’. Such a system is one of the main acquisitions we gain as we are raised and educated in a culture; differences amongst these representational systems are often responsible for many of the differences of opinion about those objects Jacobi claims we know ‘immediately’ (see below, §97). In his Lectures Hegel points out, however briefly in the passage just quoted, that Schelling’s intuitionism fares no better in this regard than Jacobi’s. Furthermore, in this same passage from his Lectures, Hegel condemns Schelling’s intuitionism – unmistakably identified here by Hegel’s characterisation of the view he now expressly criticises – for being even more arbitrary and contingent than Jacobi’s: Even more contingently does this immediate knowledge appear as intellectual intuition of the concrete, more precisely of the identity of subjectivity

126 and objectivity. Because the presupposition of philosophy is that individuals have the immediate intuition of this identity of the subjective and the objective, philosophy appears in individuals as an artistic talent, genius, as if only the favoured few (Sonntagskinder) had it. (VGP 3, MM 20:428; cf. B 3:260–1)

Hegel immediately distinguishes (aber) genuine (i.e. Hegelian) philosophy from the Schellingian view just criticised: However (aber), by its nature philosophy is able to be universal, for its ground is thought, and through thought human beings are human. Therefore the principle [of philosophy] is something altogether universal; though if a determinate intuition or consciousness is required, such as the consciousness or the intuition of the identity of the subjective and the objective, then this is the requirement of a determinate, particular thought. (VGP 3, MM 20:428; cf. B 3:261)

Hegel here maintains that philosophy requires thought, which in principle is universally accessible to people; thought as such is not uniquely possessed by a few select geniuses. Hegel directly criticises Schelling for the inevitable petitio principii and intellectual elitism entailed by intellectual intuitionism. After characterising some of Schelling’s advances over Kant and Fichte, Hegel makes a decisive objection to Schelling’s views, one which differentiates Hegel’s own philosophical views unmistakably from Schelling’s: Schelling calls ordinary categories ‘concepts’; but the concept is the concrete, intrinsically infinite thought. (VGP 3, MM 20:432)

Although Schelling had once again made the ‘truth’ the object of philosophy, his philosophy fails rightly to understand ‘the concept’ (der Begriff), and so fails to provide the account of determinate concepts required for philosophy. The determinate concepts Hegel advocates consist in integrating mutually opposed determinations. Hegel’s comment could hardly make plainer that Schelling’s intellectual intuition fails to achieve this crucial aim of developing concretely determinate thoughts. One key aim of Hegel’s dialectical analyses is to integrate mutually opposed conceptual determinations into determinate, ‘concrete’ concepts (cf. below, §43.) Thus Hegel argues that intellectual intuition fails to fulfill the crucial philosophical task of developing genuinely concrete thoughts; only Hegel’s dialectical (moderately holistic) account of concepts can do that job effectively (he claims). Hegel’s criticisms of Schelling in this passage from his lectures accord entirely with the criticisms Hegel makes of intellectual intuition in The Science of Logic and in the Enzyclopaedia considered below (§§92–99, 124).

CHAPTER 7

Hegel’s Post-Kantian Epistemological Reorientation 43 HEGEL’S CO-DETERMINATION THESIS. 43.1 The four points examined above: Hegel’s ultimate rejection of aconceptual or other forms of intellectual intuition (§§41–42), his recognition of Kant’s problems with defending causal judgments (§25–29) and with transcendental affinity (§30–36), and his consequent reinterpretation of Kant’s deduction of synthetic judgments a priori (§35), are related. Although Hegel regarded Kant’s account of the Table of Judgments as inadequate, though also extremely instructive (Enz. §171Z). In his third remark on his Table of Judgments Kant noted that a proper disjunctive judgment divides up the whole of a specific range (‘sphere’) of predicates relevant to a particular possible cognition.1 Denying one predicate of the relevant kind of subject entails that another predicate within that range must be true of that subject; conversely, affirming a predicate of a relevant subject is tantamount to denying of that subject the other predicates within that range. Hegel seized upon this idea and recognised that singular categorical judgments and hypothetical judgments both presuppose disjunctive judgments. Hypothetical judgments require disjunctive judgments because establishing any judgment of the form, ‘If A then B’, requires judging that no relevant alternative to B results (or follows) from A. Such conjoined hypothetical and disjunctive judgments are central to Kant’s Analogies of Experience: perceptual judgments are discriminatory, and in part identify the presently perceived particular by discriminating it from causally possible relevant alternatives (KTPR §36).2 Accordingly, the categori1

KdrV A73–74/B98–99. For discussion of Kant’s Table of Judgments, see Wolff (2017). Such conjoint judgments seem to be part of Hegel’s understanding of disjunctive judgments already in the 1804 Jena logic manuscript, though not in any obvious connection with Kant’s Analogies (GW 7:87.10–93.27). (Showing that this is how Hegel views the relation amongst the forms of judgment would require extensive commentary on his Logic; Part III below strongly corroborates this suggestion.) The parallels between Hegel’s treatment of disjunctive judgment in the 1804 Logic manuscript and his mature treatment in the Encyclopaedia and Science of Logic suggest that in 1804 he is grappling with Kant’s Table of Judgments; cf. his explicit reference to Kant’s Table of Judgments, Enz. §171Z). In view of his attention to Kant’s remarks about the systematic character of the Table of Categories (e.g. G&W 4:334.18–27, re: KdrV §11, B109–13), it is not surprising that Hegel would also pay close attention to Kant’s Table of Judgments during his years in Jena. 2

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cal judgments required to identify objects in synthetic judgments a priori about them – judgments required for us to be self-conscious – also require disjunctive judgments whereby we discriminate any one object from other objects. If such disjunctive judgments require a grasp of the whole of the relevant range of alternatives within a class (‘sphere’), then singular cognitive judgments about objects are possible only on the basis of (moderately, locally) holistic judgments about the relevant class of objects and their features (i.e., about perceptually-causally relevant alternatives). This requires (within any ‘sphere’) a complete set of mutually exclusive categories, at least some of which are in fact instantiated. This would differ greatly from a complete set of logically possible categories, such as the traditional ‘sum of all [logical] possibility’, or taken as instantiated, the traditional ens realisimum – the topics of Kant’s Ideal of Pure Reason (A571/B599f.). (Is it logically possible that we could perceive more colours than are found in the standard spectrum of visible light?) Hegel’s point is that actual hypothetical and categorical judgments are co-determined, and they are co-determined only in connection with extant things and events.3 This way of making Hegel’s point decouples it from intellectual intuition, and so suggests how Hegel can retain this view in his mature philosophy without relying upon any form of intuitionism. Note further that this approach to the classifications used in cognitive, including perceptual judgments is required by rejecting the infallibilist-deductivist model of cognitive justification stemming from the 1277 Paris condemnation, which requires demonstrating the falsehood of all logically possible alternatives to any claim to knowledge (above, §2.1). In brief, Hegel held that hypothetical and categorical judgments are codetermined, that they can be co-determined only within a complete set or ‘sphere’ of contrasting predicates, and that they can be co-determined only in connection with extant things and events. Hence hypothetical and categorical judgments require disjunctive judgments (and vice versa), and our ability to make such judgments requires at least some cognisance of whatever exists. For brevity, I shall call this Hegel’s ‘Co-determination Thesis’. This thesis has several important implications; seven of them are important here. 43.2 If Hegel is right about the Co-determination Thesis, then he detected a tension between Kant’s account of (categorical) synthetic judgments a priori about objects and his denial of a discursive grasp of the totality of the world: Ultimately, local wholes or sets of predicates can be determined, for analogous reasons, only in relation to the whole set of such local wholes or spheres of predicates. This would have led Hegel, I suspect, to read a good deal into 3 This requires a modal version of the material conditional, to avoid the absurd result that determining the truth values of all conditional (hypothetical) propositions ipso facto determines the truth values of all elementary (categorical) propositions (Brandom 1981).

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Kant’s remark in the Third Analogy that ‘all appearances lie and must lie, in one nature, because without this a priori unity no unity of experience is possible, and therefore no determination of objects within it, would be possible’ (KdrV A216/B263), and would have led Hegel to recognise the constitutive importance of the regulative principles expounded in Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic (KdrV A581–2/B609–10). 43.3 The Co-determination Thesis suggests how Hegel appropriated the Spinozistic slogan, omnis determinatio est negatio (Spinoza, Letter 50): The determination of any single individual (or any particular group of individuals) as having a particular property is possible only on the basis of a disjunctive judgment that distinguishes that individual (or group) from other individuals (or groups) falling within the relevant class of alternative predicates (or kinds of groups). Hegel’s appropriation of this slogan is facilitated by Fichte’s substituting ‘determination’ for Kant’s ‘limitation’, a key Kantian term concerning those disjunctive judgments that exclude a subject from a particular sphere of predicates.4 Kant himself remarks: ‘All true negations are nothing but limitations – which they could not be called, if the unlimited (the All) were not their basis’ (KdrV A576/B604). 43.4 The Co-determination Thesis suggests why Hegel was unperturbed by Sextus Empiricus’s tropes of relativity: According to Hegel’s moderate ontological holism, things in fact are what they are only in and through their relations to other things, including their causal relations and their relations of mutual contradistinction. This is one doctrine the mature Hegel retained and developed from the early Skeptizismus essay.5 43.5 Given Kant’s claim that only an intuitive intellect could grasp the whole, the Co-determination Thesis would seem to give enormous impetus, both to ascribing to Kant more reliance on such an intellect than he allowed, and to developing such an account of human knowledge. 43.6 Hegel came to realise, however, that judgments, including disjunctive judgments, are determinate only insofar as they are articulate, that is, only insofar as they are specified conceptually so as to classify relevant instances, distinguishing them from other contrasting kinds (particulars or features). This insight, together with the problem of petitio principii, posed a central problem for Hegel’s mature philosophy: establishing both the legitimacy and the actuality of a cogent conceptual grasp of the totality. The first stage in Hegel’s attempt to do so is, of course, the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, with its task to demonstrate the cognitive competence of philosophy, and thus al4 See the third principle of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (FGA 2:282, H&L 119); cf. KdrV A80/B106. 5 Skept., 4:215.26–31, 220.8–27; cf. HER, 162–3.

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so the ‘standpoint’ of Hegel’s logic. 43.7 Cognitive judgments, whether disjunctive and categorical, require (inter alia) that the conceptions (classifications, predicates) they involve are in fact instantiated in the world. Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism based on transcendental affinity and his regressive, naturalistic reconstruction of Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction’ and ‘Refutation of Idealism’ provide strong grounds for showing that the conceptions involved in our cognitive judgments are in fact instantiated in the world. 43.8 Finally, the problems involved in establishing that a range of instantiated predicates forms an exhaustive and mutually exclusive set lead directly to Hegel’s fallibilism and his doctrine of determinate negation, according to which (in part) a positive thesis is justified only through an internal critical evaluation and rejection of its alternatives, in view of all the relevant phenomena within some specified domain. This thesis holds, according to Hegel, both in philosophical and in empirical theory. Hegel’s espousal of the Co-determination Thesis, together with his use of transcendental affinity to justify realism, provide strong reasons to adopt a broad (non-reductive) kind of philosophical naturalism. Those reasons are reinforced by Hegel’s insight into the defects of Kant’s dynamic theory of matter in the Foundations. These insights set the philosophical agenda of Hegel’s post-Kantian epistemological reorientation.6 44 HEGEL’S POST-KANTIAN REORIENTATION. The problems with the Foundations, which Kant himself saw, vindicate Hegel’s criticism of the Foundations in the Differenzschrift, and they do much to justify Hegel’s shift away from Kant’s transcendental idealism towards his own holistic naturalism (§35). Five aspects of this shift should be noted briefly; they concern the idea of system, the status of necessity, the relation between philosophy and physics, the emptiness of Kant’s Categories, and the metaphysics of transcendental arguments. 44.1 The Idea of System. According to Christian Wolff, the principles of scientific reasoning are the same across scientific disciplines, and a rational system can be constructed only by carefully ordering a fully determinate and complete set of rational and empirical data. According to Kant, empirical systems can only be coördinated aggregates of data, whilst rational systems present a synthetic unity of subordinated differentia. The synthetic unity of a system stems from its idea of the whole of its domain, where that idea has 6

What constitutes ‘broad’, as opposed to reductive or eliminativist, naturalism is a large topic that cannot be directly addressed here; see Rouse (2002), Westphal (2016b).

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priority over the subordinate parts, and this idea stems from the rational purposes of the discipline in question (Hinske 1991). Though Kant admits that the founder of a discipline may not have an adequate idea of that new science (KdrV A834/B862), what we see in Kant’s efforts to work out his Critical philosophy is the fundamental way in which the leading idea of a discipline cannot have the kind of priority over its parts upon which Kant insisted.7 The leading idea of a discipline must be revised on the basis of its adequacy to the parts or components of its domain. This insight does not require returning to Wolff. Instead it indicates that one must develop concurrently both the leading idea and the systematic interpretation of the components of any scientific domain or disc. This insight is fundamental to Hegel’s view of dialectical analysis, proof and development, and grounds Hegel’s pragmatic fallibilist account of philosophical justification. This development is clearly one from empiricism to rationalism to pragmatic realism. We also see that, on this occasion, the history of the philosophy of system itself follows a dialectical development from Wolff to Kant to Hegel. 44.2 The Status of Necessity. Coupled with Hegel’s reconception of the idea of system goes a reconception of the nature and status of necessity. Kant’s late Selbstsetzungslehre involves some extraordinary claims about what is known a priori, e.g., that we consist of systems of moving natural forces (Förster 2000, 75–116). Why would Kant come so close to naturalism and yet insist on such theses being a priori? One basic reason, Hegel notes, is that Kant’s point of departure is Hume’s critique of inductive and causal reasoning.8 Necessity and universality cannot be established a posteriori.9 Kant read Newton’s Principia and saw unqualifiedly universal synthetic statements apparently expressing necessity. Misled by this surface grammar, he took Newton’s laws as synthetic a priori propositions, and tried to provide an epistemological account of them in those terms (KdrV Bx, 17–20). Aware of the problems in Kant’s theory, Hegel rejects any ultimate distinction between analytic and synthetic, and between a priori and a posteriori; on Hegel’s view, these terms mark poles of continuua. Hegel is explicit about this in ‘Faith and Knowledge’ (GW 4:335.2–6), where he links this directly to his sense of ‘spec7 Kant continued to insist on this priority even in the opus postumum; cf. Loses Blatt 3/4, GS 21:478.11–16. 8 VGP III, MM 20:333, 335–6; H&S 3:427–8; B 3:217–8, 219–20. Another reason for Kant’s rejection of naturalism, of course, was to defend freedom, in part by foreclosing on the possibility of any materialist theory of mind (A383 , 4:240.1–3; B419–20, 421, 3:274.9–15, 274.36–275.3; KdU §89, 5:460.20–32; cf. KTPR, §61). Fortunately, Kant’s cognitive semantics and some basic features of causal judgment and explanation suffice to curb unjustifiable claims about universal causal determinism within nature, without appeal to Transcendental Idealism (Westphal 2016b, 2017b), as Hegel recognised (below, §§140–148). 9 KdrV B4, B13, B17, A2, A91/B124f., A112, A114, Prol. 4:258; cf. MAdN 4:468–69.

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ulative’ knowledge. Hegel also makes explicit what others have found implicit in Kant’s philosophy of science, namely an account of necessity resting on systematic coherence.10 44.3 The Relation between Philosophy and Physics. Adopting a dialectical idea of system involves giving up the neat order of philosophical priority that undergirds Kant’s original conception of Critical philosophy, namely, that transcendental philosophy grounds metaphysics, which in turn grounds the rational part of physics, which provides the basis for physics as an empirical science. Hegel made bold and rejected Kant’s rationalist view of the foundational relation between philosophy and empirical knowledge.11 Hegel insists that philosophy is grounded in the empirical sciences: Philosophy must not only accord with the experience of nature; the genesis and formation of philosophic science has empirical physics as its presupposition and condition. (Enz. §246R, cf. §246Z, also from the Berlin period.)

Though this remark is late (1827), the basis of Hegel’s enormous post-Kantian philosophical re-orientation is set in the Differenzschrift of 1801, at the beginning of his reflections on Newtonian physics.12 Hegel recognised from the start that physics does not have the sort of ‘metaphysical foundation’ Kant proposed in the Foundations (and planned KdrV). To say that philosophic sci10

On this aspect of Kant’s philosophy of science, see Kitcher (1986), Wartenberg (1992), and Buchdahl (1992), 183–314. (The problem with Buchdahl’s interpretation of Kant is that he tries to make these elements out to be the whole of Kant’s view.) On the relation between Kant’s views and Quine’s, see Kitcher (1982). On Hegel’s anticipation of Quine, see Tuschling (1981). On Hegel’s view of the role of systematic considerations, see Buchdahl (1984, 1985), and below, Part III. 11 Förster (1989b) has shown that Kant ultimately did give up his original Critical distinction between transcendental and metaphysical philosophy. However, his late recoil from naturalism (documented by Tuschling 1991) shows that he refused to take this last step. 12 In the second edition of the Enzyklopädie (1827) Hegel added the following statement to his discussion of Kepler and Newton: ‘I shall not appeal to the fact that, moreover, an interest in these subjects has occupied me for 25 years’ (§270R, GW 19:209.11–13). (Miller’s translation preserves this statement in a footnote. It is omitted from Petry’s translation and from MM, which follow the third edition, 1830.) Twenty five years puts the beginning of these reflections at 1802, but in this context this figure is likely to be a round number, and would have been penned some time prior to publication. There are extensive reflections on Newton in Hegel’s Jena Systementwürfe, but I have found no specific discussion of Newton’s three laws, much less the first law as such, nor of Kant’s proof thereof. Hegel’s interest was primarily directed towards Newton’s theory of planetary motion. Hegel does discuss inertia as a fundamental characteristic of matter (Enz. §§263f.), and relates it to the externality of physical causation (§264R), but doesn’t there discuss Newton’s First Law or Kant’s proof thereof. However, Hegel’s careful study of Newton goes back to his Frankfurt period, from which an apparently detailed set of notes is now lost. Hegel’s much maligned Dissertatio (1801) in fact offered some acute criticisms of Newton’s proof of Kepler’s second law and of the Titius-Bode law; see Ferrini (1994, 1995), Nasti de Vincentis (1998); cf. also Beaumont (1954).

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ence presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics is not to say, as Hegel goes on explicitly to deny, that philosophic science is itself (merely) empirically justified (cf. below, §§122–126). 44.4 The Emptiness of Kant’s Categories. A related reason for Hegel’s philosophical re-orientation also stems from his criticism of Kant’s Foundations. Kant describes the importance of the Foundations in terms directly linked to the Schematism, namely, the Foundations provides cases in concreto which give the otherwise empty forms of thought, the categories, sense and meaning (above, §26). So doing is required (in Tetens’ sense) to realise Kant’s Categories. As he himself stressed, Kant’s architectonic has strong affiliations with syllogisms: intuitions are subsumed under concepts, sensibility is subsumed under understanding and understanding is subsumed under reason.13 This underscores both the importance of the possibility of supplying cases in concreto for the a priori categorial forms of thought (understanding), and the possibility of Hegel’s argument modus tollens against the soundness of Kant’s Critical philosophy as a whole, in view of the ultimate failure of Kant’s Transcendental Idealist justification a priori of our commonsense causal judgments. If Kant’s dynamic theory of matter in the MAdN fails, as Kant and Hegel recognised (above, §§25–29; cf. KTPR §§30–59), then Kant’s architectonic hierarchy shifts to a syllogism modus tollens: the Categories are ‘mere forms of thought’, just as Hegel charged in 1802.14 44.5 The Metaphysics of Transcendental Arguments. Finally, Kant’s post-Critical ‘transcendental dynamics’ involves putative transcendental arguments for realism, for the reality of forces as natural phenomena, including those natural forces which constitute subjects as centres of experience. Why subjects as centres of experience? Because matter can only affect our senses through their moving forces,15 but for them to affect us, we must ourselves be centres of moving forces.16 If such an argument, or argument strategy, is an immanent, legitimate development out of Kant’s own transcendental deduction, then this has profound implications for Hegel’s emphasis on ‘the’ transcendental deduction (cf. WdL II, 12:17.28–19.2). Hegel had, I believe, profound 13 „Der Verstand macht für die Vernunft eben so einen Gegenstand aus, als die Sinnlichkeit für den Verstand“ (A665–6/B693–4, GS 3:439.29–30). 14 I take this phrase from Kant’s own statements in the first Critique and MAdN, quoted above, §26. Hegel doesn’t formulate his early critique of Kant’s theoretical philosophy in terms of Kant’s categories being mere empty forms of thought; instead he formulates it in terms of Kant’s categories being merely formal identities (e.g., G&W 4:328, 343, 383). However, the point comes to the same; formal identities are (in Hegel’s lexicon) contentless forms, whether in practical or theoretical philosophy (cf. Enz. §54, ¶1). 15 A19–20/B34, A494/B522; Prol. n. II, 4:289; MAdN 4:476, cf. 4:508. I defend the legitimacy of a causal interpretation of Kant’s locutions about sensory affection in KTPR, chapt. 2. 16 GS 21:490.24–30, 21:213.10–16, 22:326.30–327.3, 22:364.24–25; quoted and discussed by Förster (1989d), 230f, (2000), 105–16.

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insight into just what Kant’s deduction in fact achieves: regressive, transcendental proofs can be developed independently of Transcendental Idealism, and can be used to justify realism. Hegel developed this strategy in the Phenomenology (see below, §§54–59, 65–82). 44.6 Hegel’s Post-Kantian Agenda. To refurbish Kant’s regressive, transcendental method of analysis and proof on a realist, broadly naturalistic basis, as Hegel does in the 1807 Phenomenology, requires recovering some key Kantian theses and arguments, whilst dispensing with Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. The acuity with which Hegel identifies and aims to meet these desiderata in the Phenomenology is truly astonishing; for this I argue in Parts II, III. However, two points can be made now to clarify Part II by anticipating two key themes. One is to identify and justify the role of a priori conceptions in human knowledge; the other is to identify and justify the key role of space and time in human knowledge. Traditionally, the distinction between a priori and a posteriori conceptions was drawn in terms of concept-empiricism, the thesis that any and all empirical concepts can be defined or learned solely on the basis of logical terms, names for elementary sensory qualities, or combinations solely of these two kinds of terms. Recently this traditional distinction has faded from philosophical use as analytic philosophers realised that virtually no terms or conceptions can be either defined or acquired in accord with concept-empiricism. This rejection of concept-empiricism has not, however, led philosophers to embrace a priori conceptions. Instead, it has led them to abandon the issue. Recently, analytic philosophers have begun to pay renewed attention to ‘the a priori’ (e.g., Boghossian & Peacocke, 2000), yet these considerations have neglected the role of fundamental a priori conceptions in empirical knowledge. I submit, and in Part II shall argue, that Hegel is right to agree with Kant that there is such a set of conceptions. These may be designated ‘pure a priori conceptions’, or alternatively ‘categorial conceptions’, because they have a basic role to play in our identifying any experienced particular whatsoever, and because identifying experienced particulars is required either to define or to acquire any empirical conception. Once concept empiricism is rejected, ‘empirical concept’ can be defined more broadly as any concept we can only define or acquire by reference to or experience of its instances. (This broad definition dispenses with the hopelessly restrictive, ill-defined requirement of alleged ‘elementary aconceptual sensory experience’.) In the ‘Consciousness’ section of the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel undertakes to justify the pure a priori status and the transcendental role of our conceptions of space, spaces, time, times, self, other, individuation, the identity of perceptible objects, and causality (Hegel 2016; Westphal 2009b). In Part II I contend that several of Hegel’s analyses and proofs of

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this key thesis are sound. In sketching a sound version of the ‘neglected alternative’ objection to Kant’s arguments for Transcendental Idealism (above, §33–35), I noted that the non-sequitur in Kant’s arguments is shown by assuming that our forms of intuition are spatial and temporal in the sense that they are only sensitive or receptive to stimulation by spatio-temporal objects or events. This possibility suffices to preserve (or at least not to contradict) Kant’s accounts of geometry and of the transcendental schematism of the Categories, whilst also allowing that space and time themselves are not forms of human intuiting, so that physical things have their own spatial and temporal characteristics, regardless of our cognitive activity. This objection suggests that developing a neo-Kantian realist epistemology would require positive demonstration that our human forms of sensory intake are spatial and temporal in the sense that they are only sensitive or receptive to simulation by objects or events in (mind-independent) space and time. It is not obvious how such a demonstration might be made, especially at the a priori level required by transcendental analysis. Hegel wisely approaches this issue differently, in a way much more closely related to Strawson’s approach in Individuals. Hegel proves (in ‘Sense Certainty’) that descriptions theories of reference are insufficient as they stand, because no description, however specific, suffices to determine, by itself, whether it is empty, definite or ambiguous because no, only one or more than one object (or objects) answer to it. With this point in view, Hegel argues that for human beings, the only way to individuate objects of demonstrative reference or, consequently, empirical knowledge, is by designating their spatio-temporal region. So doing also requires ascribing at least some characteristics to the occupant of that region, although such ascription alone cannot substitute for designating the particular in question spatio-temporally. Hegel’s conclusion thus coincides with Evans’ (1975) on this important count, and Hegel’s arguments for this thesis demonstrates cogently that sensibility and understanding can only function conjointly in any and all human empirical knowledge!17 This is, again, the Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference (above, §2.1). A third point to note, also in anticipation, is that a key problem bedevilling Kant’s Transcendental Idealism stems from Kant’s distinction between the transcendental causal principle (every event has a cause) and the metaphysical causal principle (every physical event has an external physical cause). Once Kant recognises this distinction, his Transcendental Idealism proves powerless to fill the gap this opens in Kant’s Critical system (KTPR 17

In Westphal (2008, 2014) I argue that Hegel’s analysis of these points is much more cogent than John McDowell’s proposals.

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§§30–59). Ultimately, however, this problem can be overcome by recognising that the transcendental causal thesis is in principle transcendent with respect to our cognitive semantics, to human experience and to human knowledge. Recognising that the sceptical problems apparently raised by the distinction between these two principles are ultimately a case of transcendental illusion requires expanding Kant’s key method of transcendental reflection (KTPR §§1–3, 60–64). This is precisely what Hegel undertakes to do with his phenomenological method and his justification of causal judgments in ‘Force and Understanding’ (PhdG, chapt. III; see below, §§54–59). When Hegel is on target, he’s astoundingly acute! 45 SOME REMARKS ON NATURALISM AND FALLIBILISM. Philosophical naturalism is a label for various kind of philosophical views. Recently ‘naturalism’ has been taken to connote highly reductive views, such as eliminative materialism. This is not the sense in which Hegel is a naturalist; accordingly, this is not how this term is used in this study. The sense of ‘naturalism’ relevant here recalls an older usage, which contrasts with Cartesian dualism. However, issues about mind/body dualism are not pertinent here.18 Pertinent here is the contrast between naturalism and Cartesianism in epistemology. In epistemology, Cartesianism is characterised by obsession with refuting Descartes’ evil deceiver, on the terms set by the deceiver, namely, nothing less than logically necessary truths suffice; sufficient cognitive justification is infallible (per Tempier). Descartes’ own attempt to justify empirical knowledge under these constraints generates not one, but five distinct, vicious circles (HER, 18–34). Empiricist variants on this Cartesian theme have never solved the problem infecting Descartes own epistemology – a problem, indeed, already familiar to Sextus Empiricus – of justifying any claims about how things in fact are based solely upon premises about how they seem to one to be. The commitment to infallibilism has gotten epistemologists precisely nowhere; accepting those terms of debate is to accept sceptical defeat from the very start. The kind of naturalism pertinent to this study is opposed to this kind of infallibilism, and is prepared not only to accept, but to argue that certain elementary facts about the world – facts that are logically, transcendentally, and metaphysically contingent – nevertheless play a fundamental role in any tenable account of empirical knowledge (see below, §§65–70, 107–110). Hegel’s transcendental analysis purports to show that some such facts are conditionally necessary for the possibility of self-conscious human experience. 18

For Hegel’s views on these, see deVries (1988) and Wolff (1992).

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Hegel’s proofs of such conclusions require identifying and taking into account various basic facts about who we are as cognisant subjects. This involves Hegel’s extending and redeploying Kant’s notion of transcendental reflection, i.e., reflecting on and identifying basic features of our cognitive capacities. Just how Hegel’s phenomenological method involves transcendental reflection, and just what kinds of features of the world and of our cognitive capacities he identifies as conditionally necessary for our self-conscious experience, is examined in Parts II, III. For now, it is important to indicate an important point about fallibilism, because it requires rescinding some still prevalent notions about knowledge and justification. Those notions can be identified by considering the ‘lottery paradox’ as an objection to accounts of justification that allow less than 100% guarantee of the truth of a belief. These are, of course, fallibilist accounts of justification, according to which cognitive justification sufficient for knowledge does not entail the truth of what is known. The intuitive appeal of the lottery paradox is that, in view of the marginal possibility that out of, say, 100,000 tickets, yours might win (so you can’t know in advance of the draw, though you can reasonably believe, that you won’t win). The point of this counterexample is that the truth condition for knowledge might not be fulfilled if one’s justification is even marginally less than 100%. No fallibilist must or should accept this as a genuine counterexample to empirical knowledge and justification. On a fallibilist account of justification, our justification for a belief need not provide 100% guarantee. However, on a fallibilist account of knowledge (at least for any fallibilist realism, such as Hegel’s), truth is still a requirement for knowledge. Hence the fallibilist should maintain that a belief counts as knowledge if the belief is true, and if we have adequate justification for it – however ‘adequate’ is understood, which will not be in Cartesian (or rather Parisian!) infallibilist, 100%-or-nothing, terms. Furthermore, the lottery paradox requires a closed set of alternatives. However, in empirical knowledge there is no conclusive justification of whether we have or have identified a complete set of alternatives. This fact, too, points us toward justificatory fallibilism. Fallibilist theories of cognitive justification cannot guarantee, that is, certify with 100% confidence, when in fact we know something, because our justification for that claim will be no ‘stronger’ than our justification, and yes, it’s (logically) possible to have adequate justification in some cases where the truth condition isn’t met. For this reason, fallibilists look, not only to prior and present evidence, but also to sustained future use and concomitant assessment of beliefs and their justification. Because the truth of any even modestly interesting empirical claim has implications which transcend any avail-

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able sets of evidence, claims to truth must be justified as well as possible on the basis of available evidence, and subjected to on-going assessment as their further implications are experienced. This circumstance entails that people, including of course philosophers, can reach genuine, well-considered disagreement about whether the truth condition for a cognitive claim is fulfilled. This can occur even if they agree that someone has adequate warrant for that belief; it can also occur if there is well-considered disagreement about whether the justification condition for a cognitive claim is fulfilled. Unfortunately, the character and significance of this point is too often obscured by speaking loosely of ‘any and every claim being revisable’. Certainly the justification of or warrant for any and every claim to empirical truth is in principle open to reassessment. However, the claim itself, if true, isn’t revisable. If it is approximately true, then it may be refined to make it more accurate, and so in this sense it is ‘revisable’. Unfortunately, philosophers too often tend to conflate the ubiquitous possibility of reassessment of evidence for the sceptical nightmare of the possibility of pervasive or indeed total error. This conflation is itself a rash error, and ought to be avoided! This conflation is the nerve of Cartesian scepticism, which is based upon generalising from the possibility, indeed the fact, of occasional error, to the supposedly genuine prospect of total error. The main point of Kant’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’, indeed of his ‘Transcendental Deduction’, is to block this generalisation (KTPR §62). The point Hegel retained from Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold is that total error would undermine self-conscious experience altogether, and thus also all worries about global perceptual scepticism. If you, dear all-too-human reader, can worry about the possibility of Descartes’ demon, there is no such demon to worry about. In order to substantiate this view, Hegel develops powerful regressive, transcendental proofs of commonsense realism. Due to the transcendental reflection required by such proofs, and due to the fallibilist character of the justification of Hegel’s claims to some key conditional epistemic necessities, both his conclusions and his proofs are of course subject to reassessment. That fact, however, does not of itself entail that his conclusions aren’t true or that his proofs are unsound or unjustified. Hegel is the first to insist that the justification of a philosophical view requires showing that the alternative views on that topic are untenable, though his method of internal critique and ‘determinate negation’ is also designed to identify and retain the insights of those alternatives. This entails that justification is always relative to the historically and currently known alternatives. When a new alternative, or a new variant of an old alternative, is developed, it is incumbent upon us to deter-

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mine whether it indeed handles or avoids the problems Hegel identified in previous views. This may seem to make justification impossible; arguments by elimination require a well-defined, delimited domain of alternatives.19 Hegel’s phenomenological method is based upon his claim that each form of consciousness devolves from some actual characteristic of human cognition (not necessarily one which is understood or acknowledged). Part of the import of this claim is that the mere logical possibility of an epistemology doesn’t suffice to legitimise it: any plausible epistemology must also account for what knowledge and its objects are like for us. This is central to Hegel’s replacing epistemology with phenomenology, and it shows in his criteria as the insistence on what knowledge and its objects are like for us in addition to our conceptions or theories of knowledge and its objects (see below, Part II). Because Hegel’s phenomenological method proceeds by showing (exhibiting), what matters for Hegel’s analysis is that the structures and relations he claims are there are to be found in the indicated form of consciousness; how fully articulated they may be is further issue. If we’re now in a position to ask more refined questions or consider more refined views than are presented by any of the forms of consciousness he presents, it is incumbent upon us to determine whether the points Hegel makes about these less refined forms of consciousness have telling analogues in the positions we wish he had considered. At the very least, since the instruction Hegel offers is for ‘us’ his readers, we must be willing to reconstruct what he displays in terms which both capture what he says, does and achieves in those presentations, whilst also addressing ‘our’ (contemporary, linguistic, hermeneutic or analytic) idioms for and approaches to the issues Hegel examines.20 46 CONCLUSION. I fully recognise that many important themes in Hegel’s mature philosophy are sounded in his early writings. However, due to the prominent role they give to an untenable, soon to be rejected intellectual intuitionism, even when disambiguated, Hegel’s early writings provide only very incomplete guides to 19 Regarding the analogous case of Kant’s argument by elimination in favour of his account of space, Rusnock and George (1995, 269) adroitly remark, ‘Apart from the difficulties involved in determining that no further possibilities exist, and the heuristic unpleasantness of apagogical [indirect] proofs, Kant’s method suffers from the problem common to all such arguments, namely, that the number of possible sources of absurdity increases exponentially with the number of premises. This type of argument works best in formal systems of great precision, where all premises and rules of inference but one are reliable’. 20 This is one reason I copiously cite further relevant research; see below, §§100–110. Philosophical insight requires focus, which cannot be achieved piecemeal.

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interpreting his mature philosophy, especially his epistemology. The predominant trend among Hegel scholars to treat Hegel’s views in terms of their supposed developmental history (Entwicklungsgeschichte) – going back at least to Haerring (1929) – has led to profound misunderstandings of Hegel’s views, and especially his epistemology, because that synoptic approach is biassed in favour of thematic – or at least, terminological – continuities whilst overlooking key problems guiding Hegel’s epistemological reorientation in Jena, especially in 1804, when he sets aside his copious manuscripts on logic and metaphysics to confront the problems of whether or how philosophical competence in such domains can be justified. This fact has been widely neglected by Hegel’s commentators, whose interests are rather more metaphysical, historical or exegetical, a problem exacerbated by their general lack of interest in and familiarity with epistemology. Most fundamentally: development or process as such do not, because they cannot, address issues of justification, which are normative, not (merely) descriptive. Yes, expounding Hegel’s views is difficult, but if Hegel starting from 1804 was engaged with epistemological issues of justification, such as justifying the ‘standpoint’ of the Logic, or of philosophical competence to know any truth, then neglecting these aspects of his texts and issues thwarts exegesis too. Credible philosophical exposition, however, requires understanding the key issues addressed and strategies of analysis used by a philosopher. All the more so if Hegel wrote for us sustained series of Parmenidean exercises! More exacting and epistemologically informed analysis of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology reveals a truly profound epistemologist at work, who developed views meriting great contemporary interest. The problems Hegel addressed are still our problems, and the views he developed to address those problems are often superior to current alternatives. Or so I shall now argue in Parts II and III.

PART II: Hegel’s Critical Epistemology in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit

CHAPTER 8

Hegel’s Manifold Response to Scepticism in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit 47 INTRODUCTION. For many reasons mainstream Hegel scholarship has disregarded Hegel’s interests in epistemology, and hence also his responses to scepticism – and more broadly, his concern not only to expound, but to justify his philosophical views. According to defenders and critics alike, ‘Hegel’ and ‘epistemology’ have nothing in common. This mis-impression results from lack of interest of most Hegel scholars in epistemology, and lack of interest of epistemologists in Hegel’s philosophy. Their grave misunderstanding accurately reflects one point: Hegel’s epistemology differs fundamentally from standard views in epistemology, whether empiricist, rationalist, Kantian, analytic, conventionalist or sceptical. However, the distinctness of Hegel’s epistemology may result from his having already recognised key insights – and also defects – in these more familiar kinds of epistemology. This claim may seem implausible regarding analytic epistemology. However, analytic epistemology has followed, more faithfully than often noticed, Russell’s (1922; CP 9:39) exhortation, ‘Back to the 18th Century!’1 Russell’s return to Hume’s first Enquiry rooted analytic epistemology deeply in the Cartesian tradition which Kant, Hegel and implicitly Hume (in the Treatise) identified as the key source of irresolvable epistemological difficulties. Strawson (1966, 29) declared that two of Kant’s key insights are ‘so great and so novel that, nearly two hundred years after they were made, they have still not been fully absorbed into the philosophical consciousness’. Failure to appreciate Kant’s achievements compounds difficulties grasping Hegel’s epistemology. This chapter identifies some of Hegel’s most important epistemological insights by summarising the main points of Hegel’s critical responses to scepticism in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. These points concern Pyrrhonian (§48), empiricist (§49), Cartesian (§50) and Kantian (§51) scepticism. Each of these topics introduces key issues and lines of argument central to the inves1

One of his most devoted followers in this regard is Quine (1969, 72, cf. 74, 76), who maintains, ‘on the doctrinal side [sc. epistemological justification], I do not see that we are farther along today than where Hume left us. The Humean predicament is the human predicament’. See below, §§100–110. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_009

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tigations developed below, in this Part II and in Part III. 48 PYRRHONIAN SCEPTICISM. Pyrrhonian scepticism is not a doctrine, but rather a collection of sceptical argument-strategies, ‘tropes’, which appear to occasion suspension of judgment (epoché), thus leading to tranquillity (ataraxia). The Pyrrhonist rescinds both affirmation and denial, thus gaining freedom from pointless, unhealthy controversy over hopelessly inconclusive claims about alleged knowledge of reality, whatever that may be (HER, 11–16). In his early essay on scepticism (1801) Hegel gladly appealed to Pyrrhonian tropes to undermine the pretensions of the ‘finite understanding’ to metaphysical knowledge (Forster 1989, Part I). Hegel then held that ‘infinite reason’ avoids scepticism through ‘intellectual intuition’ of the absolute. The utter poverty of this response to Pyrrhonism was brought home to Hegel by G.E. Schulze’s (1803) anonymous ‘Aphorisms on the Absolute’ (above, §40– 42). By summer 1804 Schulze’s essay had made clear to Hegel that also his ‘absolute idealism’ must scrupulously avoid petitio principii. Thereafter Hegel treated Pyrrhonian scepticism not merely as a useful source of arguments against inadequate accounts of knowledge (e.g., naïve realism2), but also as a profound philosophical opponent. Hegel took the threat of Pyrrhonian scepticism more seriously, and developed a far more incisive response to it, than any other epistemologist. (Core features of Hegel’s response are examined in §§60–64, 83–91.) Unfortunately, this advance by Hegel’s epistemology has proven to be a liability in the recognition of his achievement: Neither proponents nor critics have recognised Hegel’s engagement with Pyrrhonian scepticism, much less understood it (per above, §§11–14). The whole series of 17 Pyrrhonian tropes need not be considered here, nor Sextus Empiricus’ decisive criticism of indirect, representational theories of perception. (Hegel rejected such theories; Westphal 1998a, §§15.1) We begin with the classic Five Modes (tropes) of Agrippa, for they are the classic statement of the sceptical regress argument. 48.1 The Regress Argument. The regress argument consists in demanding, for any claim offered by anyone, a ground of proof for that claim, and likewise again a ground of proof for whatever ground of proof is offered. This regress supposedly leads to one of five untenable possibilities: a falsehood which grounds nothing, a dogmatic assertion and so a petitio principii, an infinite regress which grounds nothing, a circularity which grounds nothing, or a supposed self-justifying claim (Alston 1989a, 26–7). Pyrrhonists then offer further 2

See Düsing (1973), Graeser (1985).

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objections against ‘self-justification’ or ‘self-evidence’. These objections may be set aside, to focus on issues of vicious circularity, because Hegel rejected the essentially deductivist model of empirical justification which drives the regress argument and which has dominated mainstream epistemology from Descartes to Hume, and from Russell to William Alston (including, e.g., nonfoundationalists such as Dretske3). Even more than Kant, Hegel was antiCartesian. Hegel understood as well as Kant that human empirical knowledge is not built upon allegedly basic bits of sensory knowledge, nor can empirical knowledge be derived from such bits of knowledge. More thoroughly even than Kant, Hegel rejected the foundationalist model of empirical knowledge. Neither was Hegel a coherentist in any standard sense of the term; he recognised that both models are inadequate. 48.2 Equipollence. Sextus Empiricus averred that to any positive thesis an equally compelling antithesis can be offered (equipollence), so that we suspend judgment and achieve epoché. Hegel criticised (among others) Sextus Empiricus for being satisfied with mere refutation, with merely ‘abstract negation’, i.e. finding sufficient fault with a theory to reject it as inadequate, but stopping there without using those inadequacies to better understand the issues and its prospective solutions.4 In opposition to this Hegel maintains that a truly penetrating refutation consists in strictly internal critique which identifies both the insights and the defects of a philosophical view, and uses such critique to establish grounds of proof for a more adequate view. This Hegel calls ‘determinate negation’.5 At this general, programmatic level it cannot be determined whether Sextus could respond to such an Hegelian ‘determinate negation’ by offering mutually opposed ‘determinate negations’ of two competing views. Determining who is correct (or at least closer to the truth, or better justified) about this issue instead requires examining carefully actual internal criticism of various theories of knowledge. I have previously argued en detail that Hegel’s internal criticisms of the epistemologies of Descartes, Hume, Kant, Russell, Carnap, Quine, Alston, Dretske, Putnam’s ‘Internal Realism’, Frederick Schmitt’s ‘social epistemology’, van Fraassen’s ‘constructive empiricism’, McDowell’s neoHegelian account of our human form of mindedness, and Brandom’s ‘modal expressivism’ provide their ‘determinate negations’ and so provide considerable grounds of proof for Hegel’s own robust pragmatic realism.6 With all respect due Wilfrid Sellars, no other epistemologist has so acutely probed and 3

For discussion of Dretske, see Westphal (2003a), §§25–28; (2017f). PhdG, 9:57.7–14. Hegel’s remark also pertains, e.g., to Popper’s falsificationism. 5 PhdG, 9:57.1–12; cf. HER, 125–6, 135–6, 163. Hegel’s term is misused by Brandom (1999), 174. 6 HER, Westphal (1998a), (2000), (2002–03), (2003a), §§25–37; (2003b), (2013a), (2014), (2015a), (forthcoming b), below, §§132–138. 4

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exploited the views of his opponents; Hegel was a very acute epistemologist. 48.3 Vicious Circularity and the Dilemma of the Criterion. In Hegel’s view, two important Pyrrhonian tropes, circularity and the Dilemma of the Criterion, share a common solution. This is discussed briefly here, and detailed below (§§60–64, 83–91). Justificatory circularity is a problem, not because a series of grounds of proof mutually support each other, but because such a series appears to offer no independent proof to convince any dissenter. The problem appears to be that any philosophical view can be based neither on any mere assurance, nor on any proof, because the soundness of a proof can only be determined by criteria of soundness, and such criteria are as controversial as the assurances or even the proofs offered on behalf of a philosophical view. How can petitio principii be avoided, how can genuine standards of justification be established, whenever philosophical debate concerns fundamentally different philosophical views, and fundamentally different accounts, theories or standards of rational justification?7 This problem is unavoidable so long as reviewing one’s circle or network of grounds consists solely in affirmations. However, a circle or network of grounds of proof appears quite differently if reviewing it consists instead in persistent critical reconsideration of each ground of proof, and each justificatory link between those grounds. If such reconsideration is possible, then in principle any particular ground of proof or justificatory link within the circle or network may be affirmed, denied, revised, buttressed or replaced. In these ways, the circle or network of grounds of proof can be assessed and if need be improved, not merely reiterated. Is such critical reconsideration possible? Reconsidering the chain of grounds of proof must be critical, yet to avoid petitio principii and to identify one’s own errors this reconsideration must also be self-critical. A few epistemologists have noted in passing the importance of self-criticism.8 Hegel, uniquely, developed an exacting analysis of the possibility of productive self-criticism (detailed below, §§60–64, 83–91). If constructive self-criticism is possible, we are not locked into the forced options epitomised in the Five Modes of Agrippa. Two important points may be noted directly. First, Hegel’s criterion of epistemic justification directly entails a fallibilist account of philosophical justification. On Hegel’s view, a philosophical epistemology can only be justi7 Chisholm thought that any response to what he called the ‘problem’ of the criterion by sceptics, methodists and also particularlists (himself included) can and must commit a petitio principii against the other alternatives; see below, §§60, 84.1; HER 217. 8 E.g., Price (1932, 192), Sellars (EPM 113), Konzelmann, Lehrer & Schmid (2011). This latter collection is not merely en passant, but disregards the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion, and so never comes to grips with the key epistemological issues; note too is very recent date (as of time of writing).

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fied through pointed, not only prior but also on-going and future attempts to use its main concepts and principles in connection with their ‘objects’ (their intended domains of use) to account for human empirical knowledge. Hegel’s fallibilism also results from the circumstance, central to his account of ‘determinate negation’, that an epistemology can only be justified through thorough, strictly internal critique of alternative theories of knowledge. However, alternative theories of knowledge form no closed series. Since 1807 a wide range of new theories of knowledge has been developed, along with new variants of older theories. All of these must be carefully considered to reassess, and so far as possible preserve, improve or if need be diminish the justification of an epistemology, whether Hegel’s or any other. Plainly, Hegel’s epistemology and its attendant meta-epistemology requires of us lots of intensive homework; doubtless this is one reason philosophers have sought simpler, more straightforward theories of knowledge. One central aim of this study is to demonstrate why simpler options have failed, substantively and methodologically, and how Hegel’s Critical epistemology provides the methodological and substantive results required of a cogent philosophical account of human knowledge.9 The second important point is that Hegel’s epistemological criterion directly entails the rejection of semantic internalism. Hegel’s criterion directly implies that our experience of worldly objects and events is not restricted to the explicable content of our concepts of those objects. Instead, Hegel holds that the semantic content of our concepts is only partly a function of whatever semantic content can be explicated in terms of descriptions of those particulars or their features which concepts classify. On Hegel’s view, the content of our concepts is also in part a function of the objects (and their features) in connection with which we use our concepts, indeed in two ways: the content of a concept is partly specified by its paradigm instances (per Putnam), and also by the particular object(s) regarding which it is used on any particular occasion (per Evans 1975). This is to say, already in 1807 Hegel rejected the key thesis of descriptions-theories of semantic meaning and reference. In this way, Hegel avoids in advance both Kuhn’s main arguments for paradigm incommensurability (HER 146–7) and Putnam’s main arguments for ‘internal realism’ (Westphal 2003b). Hegel’s semantic externalism is supported by his transcendental proof of what is now called ‘mental content externalism’ (below, §§65–79). 9

I have spoken of ‘cognitive’ justification, to focus on the first-order domain of our experience and empirical knowledge of the world; I reserve ‘epistemic’ justification for the justification of any philosophical theory of empirical knowledge. This atypical usage helps avoid level confusions in epistemology (Alston 1989a, 153–71).

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In a word, Hegel was the original, robustly pragmatic realist. The key idea of pragmatism is put succinctly by Sellars: Above all, the [foundationalist] picture is misleading because of its static character. One seems forced to choose between the picture of an elephant which rests on a tortoise (What supports the tortoise?) and the [coherentist] picture of a great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its tail in its mouth (Where does it begin?). Neither will do. For empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once. (Sellars, EPM 113)

The supposed ‘Hegelian serpent’ was invented by Hegel’s expositors and critics, who neglected Hegel’s sophisticated account of constructive self-criticism and how it solves the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion. Exacting analysis of Hegel’s epistemology belies such serpents (HER 56–7). Roughly, we begin with our epistemological predilections, whatever they may be, and determine the extent to which they can be developed into an adequate epistemology which withstands continuing critical scrutiny – including self-critical scrutiny. If we are thorough and scrupulous about this, and if Hegel’s accounts of constructive self-criticism and ‘determinate negation’ are sound, we can develop considered convergence because we epistemologists, share the human cognitive constitution by which we engage with a common world and with one another – whatever each of these, oneself included, ultimately proves to be. (Regarding our common world, see below, §§65–70, 88–90, 111–121) 48.4 Epoché and the Greek ‘Ontological’ Conception of Truth. Characteristic of Pyrrhonian scepticism is its thorough indifference regarding any thesis or claim, whether negative or positive. Characteristic of Sextus Empiricus’s writings is his thorough indifference towards other philosophical views. However, Hegel identified one key substantive assumption made by Pyrrhonian scepticism. Pyrrhonian scepticism reduced all human experience to witnessing nothing but mere appearances by adducing the classical Greek ‘ontological’ concept of truth, according to which something is true only if it is utterly uniform, stable and unchanging. If truth requires this, then any human experience counts as untrue, as mere appearance, simply because it is transitory and variable. Precisely this absurd search for invariant yet manifest existence within the ever-variable realm of human experiences is one key point in Hegel’s internal critique of Pyrrhonian scepticism.10 Assuming that the truth must be stable and unchanging leads directly to the constant, implacable yet ever-unfulfilled Pyrrhonist search for truth (PH 1.226, 236).11 To the contrary, 10

PhdG, 9:120–21/¶205; below, §§68, 69. The other support for this (putative) constant search for truth is to avoid incoherently denying that knowledge is possible. If we were demonstrably incapable of knowledge, the 11

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Hegel maintained that we must and can only grasp truth within our variable and various experiences of the world. This view can only be developed and justified through Hegel’s entire epistemology. However, one step in this direction is already clear: Hegel holds a semantic, correspondence analysis of the nature (not the criteria) of ‘truth’ (below, §63). Hegel’s critique of naïve realism (in ‘Sense Certainty’, chapter I of the 1807 Phenomenology) argues that the Greek ontological conception of truth has no legitimate, justifiable use within human experience or knowledge. 49 EMPIRICIST SCEPTICISM. 49.1 Introduction. The history of empiricism frequently repeats a striking phenomenon: One begins with the plausible assumption that knowledge of the world must be sensory knowledge, yet ultimately one winds up espousing either subjective idealism or empirical scepticism. The grounds of this phenomenon are complex, and cannot be detailed here; it suffices to recall this tendency to frame Hegel’s critical rejection of empiricism. Empiricism was well represented in Germany at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, most prominently by G.E. Schulze.12 Schulze responded to Kant’s Critical philosophy by re-deploying Hume’s criticisms of induction and of our very concept of causality, though he didn’t recognise the problems besetting empiricism that Hume himself recognised (see below, §49.3).13 To assess empiricism critically, Hegel had to consider the paradigmatic empiricist, Hume, and that he did (Westphal 1998a). 49.2 Knowledge by Acquaintance. Characteristic of strong empiricist foundationalism is the thesis that we enjoy concept-free knowledge of sensed particulars. Although this doctrine was not espoused by most of the Scottish school – though Hume’s official ‘copy theory’ of ideas and impressions commits him to it – this thesis was commonplace among German empiricists, e.g. Hamann, Jacobi, G.E. Schulze and W.T. Krug; it was espoused later by Russell (1911, 1917). Such concept-free basic knowledge is supposed to justify any and all derived knowledge. Such knowledge is also supposed to enable us to avoid both the Dilemma of the Criterion as well as Hegel’s highly sophisticated response to it: If we enjoyed concept-free sensory knowledge of particulars, we could just look to see what are the relevant facts and thereby settle any disputes about claims to empirical knowledge. This strategy preserves the basic search for truth would be easy to rescind. However, if we were demonstrably incompetent in this way, we would know something after all. Pyrrhonists distinguished themselves in just this regard to Academic Sceptics, who argued that we are cognitively incompetent. 12 Kuehn (1987), Beiser (1987), 165–92, 266–84. 13 Regarding Schulze, see Westphal (2002–03).

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model of epistemological foundationalism (the distinction between basic and derived knowledge), which attempts to respond directly to the sceptical (classically, Pyrrhonist) regress argument. Against this strong empiricist foundationalism, Hegel argued that foundationalism cannot answer scepticism because there is no such concept-free basic knowledge, and because the foundationalist model of our empirical knowledge is seriously misleading. It is misleading because it views the justification of derived knowledge in essentially deductivist terms (rooted in the fundamental foundationalist distinction between basic and derived knowledge, and its basic aim of refuting scepticism), and because it views the justification of any basic bit of knowledge in terms of its independence of any other bits of basic knowledge (otherwise problems of circularity set in). If instead weaker forms of foundationalism admit ‘basing relations’ more generous than strict deduction, such forms cannot justify their preferred basing relations because foundationalism analyses justification solely in terms of derivation from basic bits of knowledge, in accord with whatever basing relations are chosen – for which no such foundationalist justification can be provided; indeed, no foundationalist justification can be provided for the foundationalist model of justification. Hegel aims to show that the original realist orientation of empiricism can be justified, not by empiricism, but only by Hegel’s own, robust pragmatic realism. One stage of Hegel’s justification of this thesis is the first major section of the Phenomenology, titled ‘Consciousness’, containing the chapters ‘SenseCertainty’, ‘Perception’ and ‘Force and Understanding’. In all three chapters Hegel argues (like Kant) that human empirical knowledge of any one worldly circumstance (an object or event) can only be achieved contrastively, by distinguishing it from other (relevant) possible and actual circumstances. Any one empirical state of affairs can be identified only by differentiating (discriminating) its spatio-temporal region from other spatio-temporal regions, and only by differentiating both its intrinsic and its relational characteristics from the characteristics of other actual and (relevantly) possible empirical circumstances. Moreover, these two forms of identification are mutually interdependent.14 If so, then we can have no allegedly basic knowledge of any one empirical fact independent of our knowledge of other empirical facts. Hence the justification of human empirical knowledge is weakly holistic: our justificatory grounds for any one empirical claim are interdependent with our justificatory grounds for other empirical claims. (This feature of empirical justification is weakly holistic due to Hegel’s account of constructive self-criticism.) 14

Hegel’s analysis concurs strikingly with Evans (1975); Hegel’s critique of ‘immediate knowledge’ holds of Russell’s ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ (see Westphal 2010a).

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Hegel’s criticism of alleged concept-free bits of basic knowledge relates directly to his critique of concept-empiricism, the thesis that any legitimate concept either names a simple object of sensory experience, or is a logical term, or can be exhaustively defined solely by conjoining these two kinds of terms.15 According to this thesis, as Locke and especially Hume showed, the supposed concepts ‘I’ and ‘thing’ simply cannot be defined, and so are not legitimate, whilst the concept of ‘cause’ can only be defined in terms of statistical regularities and psychological expectations. Hence concept-empiricism is a crucial pillar supporting empiricist scepticism.16 Concept-empiricism is also important because it distinguishes between a priori and a posteriori (or empirical) concepts. Any concept which can be defined in accord with concept-empiricism is empirical or a posteriori. Any concept which cannot be so defined is a priori. As the history of Logical Empiricism and ill-fated attempts to replace talk of ordinary objects or events with constructions of sense data both showed, by this criterion most of our concepts, including scientific concepts, are a priori. Generally unrecognised through these criticisms of concept empiricism is that some a priori concepts are also ‘pure’, in the sense that we must have and properly use these pure a priori concepts in order to have any self-conscious experience whatsoever, and so to have any occasion on which to learn, develop or to use the many rich empirical concepts we use in making any even moderately interesting claims, whether ordinary or scientific. This Kantian thesis about ‘pure’ a priori concepts has been widely rejected in Twentieth Century philosophy, though with insufficient consideration.17 Now that Kant’s grounds for maintaining the completeness of his Table of Judgments have been identified (Wolff 1995, 1998, 2000, 2017), this issue must be carefully reconsidered. The crucial questions about pure a priori concepts are two: whether indeed we have any, and whether we can use them in genuine claims to knowledge. Only if this latter condition is satisfied are pure a priori concepts legitimate. Rationalists overlooked this key question. Kant first posed it when adopting Teten’s technical sense of ‘realising’ concepts; Hegel followed suit. This is how and why deixis is crucial to assessing the possible legitimate cognitive use of a priori concepts. Otherwise the fate of transcendent metaphysics awaits us (KdrV Bxv), to 15

This ‘simple object’ need not be understood in phenomenalist terms, though typically it has been so understood in the Twentieth Century, following Hume’s use of it in connection with sensory impressions. 16 Concept empiricism is a semantic thesis about the meaning or content of concepts. It is distinct to verification empiricism (Hume’s Fork) which distinguishes two ways of justifying knowledge of two kinds of propositions, namely a priori knowledge of analytic propositions or a posteriori knowledge of synthetic propositions. 17 This way of distinguishing empirical from a priori concepts is too simple; some necessary refinements are indicated in §§44.6, 57.3, 67, 124.1.

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grope blindly, amongst nothing but mere concepts (intension), analyse them so much as one wishes. That has been the fate of too much literature on Hegel, and of rather too much contemporary ‘analytic metaphysics’.18 Hegel argues against concept-empiricism in ‘Sense Certainty’ that any empirical circumstance can be known, because it can be identified, only by our using pure a priori concepts of ‘I’, ‘other’, ‘time’, ‘times’, ‘space’, ‘spaces’, ‘number’, ‘individuation’ and ‘particular’ (thing, object, event or perception). In ‘Perception’ Hegel shows that the very concept of ‘perceptible thing’ is pure a priori. In ‘Force and Understanding’ Hegel argues that our concept of ‘perceptible thing’ is only intelligible through the concept of ‘cause’, which also is pure a priori (Westphal 1998a). The arguments Hegel provides show both that these basic concepts are pure a priori, and that our cognitive use of them is legitimate, because without them we could not even putatively identify or make even the most commonsensical claims about particular objects or events. Because the idea that we have pure a priori concepts has become so unfamiliar, it deserves brief discussion. 49.3 Hume on the Concepts of ‘Cause’ and ‘Body’. Hume’s analyses of the concepts ‘cause’ and ‘perceptible thing’ (‘the idea of body’, Hume called it) deserve close reconsideration. Kant recognised that Hume’s analysis of the concept of ‘cause’ undermined Hume’s own account of our causal beliefs. According to empiricist principles of generalisation through repeated experiences, only by many repeated experiences of particular (allegedly) causal relations amongst particular kinds of events; e.g. ‘Today the sun warmed this stone’, ‘Today the sun warmed that stone’, ‘Yesterday the sun warmed some other stone’, etc. can we (eventually) formulate and affirm the particular causal belief, ‘Sunshine warms stones’. This is only the first step. Only by comparing many, such particular causal beliefs can we (by those empiricist principles) formulate and affirm the particular causal principle, ‘each kind of event has some one kind of cause’. And only after comparing many, many more instances of this principle can we take the third step to formulate the general concept of causality, expressed in the statement, ‘Every event has a cause’. Kant noted (KdrV B240–1) that this Humean analysis is unsound because so often we experience only a supposed cause, though not its supposed effect; or likewise we experience only a supposed effect without experiencing its supposed cause. Consequently, by those associationist principles, we could hardly formulate, much less affirm, any beliefs in particular causal relations. Hence we could not formulate the particular causal principle, ‘each kind of 18

This decisive, basic point is crucial to Hegel’s Critical philosophy (see §§2, 55.1, 66, 68, 112.5, 114.3, 114.5, 127, 131), though it has been entirely neglected by Hegel’s expositors, including Sans (2004). This is a cardinal historical, philosophical and textual oversight, as significant than neglecting Tempier (1277).

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event has some one kind of cause’. Hence we could not formulate or affirm the general proposition, ‘Every event has a cause’. That we do formulate and affirm this principle, along with various particular causal beliefs, shows instead that we presuppose the general concept of causality, on the basis of which alone we can sort our quite mixed evidence regarding any particular causal relations (Beck 1978, esp. 121–9). This is why the principles Kant defends are not and cannot be high-level generalisations from experience, pace the criticisms of Kant by Schlick and Reichenbach, which are still widely accepted amongst analytic epistemologists as conclusive. Unlike his followers, whether in Germany circa 1800 or in the Twentieth Century, Hume noted precisely this problem, though only in passing in the difficult and unjustly neglected section of the Treatise (1.4.2), ‘Of Scepticism with regard to the senses’. The main aim of this section is to explain our ‘idea of body’, i.e., our concept of a perceptible physical object. The problem results from the fact that this concept is necessary for our very belief in ‘outer’ objects, though it cannot be defined in accord with concept empiricism. Any impression of sense instantiates the concept of unity; any group of sensory impressions instantiates the concept of plurality. However, the concept of the ‘identity’ of a perceptible object is distinct from both of those concepts, and cannot be defined on their basis, all the more so when we consider the changes we perceive in things. Hume observed: ‘Tis confest by the most judicious philosophers, that our ideas of bodies are nothing but collections form’d by the mind of the ideas of the several distinct sensible qualities, of which objects are compos’d, and which we find to have a constant union with each other. But however these qualities may in themselves be entirely distinct, ‘tis certain we commonly regard the compound, which they form, as ONE thing, and as continuing the SAME under very considerable alterations. The acknowledg’d composition is evidently contrary to this suppos’d simplicity, and the variation to the identity. (T 1.4.3.2)

To resolve these ‘contradictions’, Hume introduced psychological propensities by which we produce a ‘medium’ between ‘unity’ and ‘plurality’, namely the concept of ‘identity’ (T 1.4.2.29). Hume’s analysis is unsound. At best, Hume identified the occasioning causes, i.e., series of kinds of perceptual circumstances, which evoke our use of the concept of identity. He failed to define the content of this concept solely on the basis of concept-empiricism. (Could he have done so, he could have omitted his three additional psychological propensities.) In effect, his psychological propensities are propensities to use a priori concepts, in particular, the concept of a perceptible thing, i.e., its identity amidst its many perceived

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qualities and amidst is many perceived changes of qualities.19 In ‘Perception’ Hegel identified and critically analysed precisely this problem in Hume’s empiricist scepticism. Through his strictly internal critique of Hume’s analysis of our concept ‘perceptible thing’ Hegel established that this concept is pure a priori. To this extent, concept-empiricism provides no sound sceptical objection to our belief in, nor to our knowledge of, perceptible spatio-temporal particulars (Westphal 1998a). In the ‘Consciousness’ section (PhdG, chapts. I–III), Hegel justifies our use of the pure a priori concepts mentioned above (§49.2) by showing that without using those concepts we could have none of the alleged basic knowledge touted by (inter alia) empiricists. Without these concepts we could not even believe in ‘body’, that is, in perceptible things in space and time. Without them, neither could we have any awareness or knowledge of singular objects or events, whether commonsense or scientific. Hegel reinforces these results through his criticisms of Cartesian and Kantian scepticism (below, §§50, 51). 49.4 Induction. Before turning to these criticisms, some key points of Hegel’s critical response to Hume’s problem of induction should be mentioned. Hegel criticises several key assumptions of Hume’s problem, namely Hume’s justificatory infallibilism, deductivism and internalism. Hegel also notes that future events simply are not objects of knowledge because they do not presently exist. Hegel regards ‘inductive reasoning’ as an important form of analogical reasoning which enables us to ‘anticipate’ future events. Hegel’s term for this is ‘Ahnen’, which has extremely weak cognitive connotations (Enz. §190+Z). In effect, Hegel extends Kant’s account of the ‘Anticipations of Perception’ and his solution to the first Antinomy to the case of expected evidence or experience of future states of affairs or events (including observations). On Hegel’s view, empirical knowledge requires both predication and singular demonstrative reference to the object of knowledge. Ex hypothesi this latter condition cannot be fulfilled in the case of future events or observations. Hence ‘induction’ cannot be a case of knowledge; thinking otherwise 19

Quine (1953, 66, 73–4; 1960, 116; 1969, 71; 1995, 5) recurs to this section of Hume’s Treatise, sketching the error Hume ascribes to us in believing that there are physical objects. This appears to be Quine’s (1953, 44) main reason for referring to the ‘myth’ of physical objects. One key problem with Quine’s account is that he fails to recognise that if Hume’s official empiricism is true, we would lack the very concepts required to make this mistake. Quine (1969, 75; cf. 1974, 1) remained persuaded that one ‘cardinal tenet of empiricism remain[s] unassailable … to this day. … all inculcation of meanings of words must rest ultimately on sensory evidence’. By ‘ultimately’ Quine surely meant ‘solely’, although sound arguments for our having some non-logical, pure a priori concepts, by use of which alone we can learn or acquire any empirical concepts, were developed by Kant and Hegel, and revamped by C.I. Lewis (MWO). Indeed, Hume himself demonstrated that his official copy theory of impressions and ideas cannot at all account for the generality of thought (Westphal 2013a). For detailed, strictly internal critique of Quine’s semantics, see Westphal (2015b).

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is the problem. No event or state of affairs can be known prior to its occurrence: because it doesn’t obtain and so cannot be a known particular. If about some purported topic there is simply nothing to be known, that is no sceptical problem. The thought that, due to the universal claims at issue in inductive reasoning, our predictive fallibility precludes present knowledge of the alleged universal characteristics of things; or the thought that on a fallibilist account of justification the truth condition of knowledge may not be satisfied, are both infalliblist thoughts. Any sober fallibilist account of justification requires that the truth condition of knowledge is satisfied, even if sufficient (fallibilist) justification does not entail that this condition is satisfied (see below, §§52, 57.2, 57.4, 79.2, 85, 89, 90, 113.6). 50 CARTESIAN SCEPTICISM. Descartes was no sceptic. The problem, and the common name for this kind of scepticism, stem from the fact that the only philosopher ever convinced by Descartes’ anti-sceptical arguments was their author. Thereafter ‘Cartesian Scepticism’ means more or less the combination of dream scepticism and the possibility of the evil deceiver, developed in the first two Meditations. The refutation or dissolution, of Cartesian scepticism has been a central preoccupation of epistemology, especially in the Twentieth Century. Unfortunately, most attempted refutations have tried to develop a direct response to Cartesian scepticism, accepting the sceptical challenges as legitimate and trying to answer them, rather than to critically assess and reject the presuppositions of Cartesian scepticism. In this context, Kant’s anti-Cartesian re-orientation is extremely revealing, as Hegel recognised. Already in his early essays, ‘The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy’ (D; 1801) and ‘Faith and Knowledge’ (G&W; 1802b), Hegel pursued the insights of Kant’s ‘Refutation of Empirical Idealism’ in a way further developed in the 1807 Phenomenology, especially in ‘SelfConsciousness’ and also in ‘Observing Reason’. Hegel realised that Kant’s ‘Refutation’ receives powerful support from Kant’s doctrine of the ‘transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold’. Kant argued, namely, that the matter of our sensations is given us ab extra. Kant further argued that we are not able even to think, and hence are unable to identify ourselves (and so to be selfconscious), simply because we possess complete and intact cognitive capacities (i.e., understanding and sensibility). To be able to think we must be able to produce and to use concepts. We acquire our pure a priori concepts, the Categories, ‘originally’, insofar as they are generated sub-personally by our ‘transcendental power imagination’, upon stimulation by our manifold of

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sensory intuitions, and on the basis of the twelve basic forms of logical judgment.20 (Kant calls this the ‘epigenesis of pure reason’.21) On Kant’s view, empirical concepts are generated largely in accord with concept-empiricism, under guidance of the Categories and our powers of judgment, on the basis of repeated patterns of sensory experience. The main point in Kant’s analysis is that we cannot at all make cognitive judgments, and so can have no knowledge whatever (whether empirical knowledge or self-awareness) without using schematised categories (categories further specified so as to hold of spatio-temporal objects and events) – in particular, a schematised concept of substance which serves as the concept of a perceptible thing – nor without using empirical concepts. However, we can only have Categories, schematised categories and empirical concepts insofar as we – that is, our power of judgment – can and does detect both regularities and differences within the content of our manifold of sensory intuition. Such regularities and differences constitute what Kant calls the ‘transcendental affinity’ of the sensory manifold. Any world containing human beings but (somehow) lacking humanly detectable regularities and varieties amongst the contents of our manifold sensations is a world in which we may be flooded with sensations, but these would be to us ‘even less than a dream’ (KdrV A112), Kant notes. The ratio cognoscendi, the ground of proof, that this affinity is a necessary transcendental condition for possible self-conscious experience lies in the argument just sketched, to the effect that we could not be self-conscious, we could have no self-conscious experience whatsoever, unless such ‘affinity’ (recognisable regularity and variety) obtains among the contents of our sensations. Conversely, the ratio cognoscendi that such ‘affinity’ does obtain (if and when it does) is that we are self-conscious. However, Hegel noticed that the ratio essendi, the ground of existence, for this affinity is quite distinct from its ratio cognoscendi. Because the manifold content of sensation is given us ab extra, whatever ground or reason for there being ‘affinity’ (humanly detectible regularity and variety) amongst the contents of our sensations must also lie outside us; it must lie in those sensory contents and their source (whatever that may turn out to be). Hegel recognised (above, §30–36) that the ground of the regularity and variety amongst the contents of our sensations lies in our experiencing a sufficiently regular, natural spatio-temporal world. If that is correct, then Hegel’s reconstruction of Kant’s analysis of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold powerfully supports the conclusion to Kant’s ‘Refutation of Empiri20

See Wolff (1995, 1998, 2000, 2017) for brilliant explication and defence of Kant’s claim that there are 12 basic human forms of logical judgment. For a summary and chart of Kant’s sophisticated cognitive psychology, see Westphal (2018b). 21 KdrV B167, GS 17:492, 18:8, 12, cf. 7:222–3; Longuenesse (1998), 221 n. 17, 243, 252–3.

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cal Idealism’. The conclusion of Hegel’s combined and reconstructed Kantian proof is that we can be self-conscious only if we are conscious of a detectably regular, though changing natural world. If so, then we can only pose, consider or even formulate sceptical hypotheses regarding empirical knowledge, whether Pyrrhonian, Cartesian or Humean, if in fact we already have at least some genuine empirical knowledge, and so are able (upon reflection) justifiably to reject those sceptical challenges. This is one key to Hegel’s justification of his semantic and mental content externalisms. If sound, this argument directly blocks the common sceptical argument that first adduces admitted perceptual misjudgments, and then generalises perceptual misjudgment into thoroughgoing perceptual delusion by asking, in effect, ‘If you erred in those cases, how can you know now, how can you ever know, whether you deceive yourself perceptually now, in this instance?’ Attempting to respond to this challenge piecemeal leads inevitably to foundationalism (whether strong or weak), which attempts to secure piecemeal various definite instances of basic empirical knowledge. This strategy has never succeeded. Because Kant and, following his lead, Hegel rejected foundationalism, they are never tempted into this hopeless pursuit. Instead they purport to show, through the argument sketched above, that we can only be self-conscious if in fact we have at least some empirical knowledge. This blocks the sceptic’s attempted generalisation from (admitted) occasional to (possibly) universal perceptual error. Which empirical circumstances we correctly perceive, judge and know is a further issue. (How, after all, did honest epistemologists detect their occasional perceptual errors, exploited by sceptics, if not by subsequent reliable perception?) Which instances of purported empirical knowledge are genuine is determinable only through constructive self- and mutual criticism. If we had no empirical knowledge whatsoever, sceptical statements would merely beat the ear-drums of unselfconscious human bodies. Recall that Hegel’s response to the Dilemma of the Criterion consists in an account of how constructive self-criticism is possible; this account extends naturally to the possibility of constructive mutual criticism (see below, §§60–64, 83–91). Part of Hegel’s justification for his thesis that the natural world is the source of the ‘affinity’ among the contents of our sensations is provided by his internal critique of Kantian scepticism. This further supports Hegel’s semantic and mental content externalisms.

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51 KANTIAN SCEPTICISM. 51.1 Kant: Sceptic or Anti-Sceptic? Kant is now generally regarded as the great anti-sceptic, though the Critique of Pure Reason immediately won him a reputation as the most dangerous sceptic ever.22 The sceptical side of the first Critique is suggested by Kant’s famous remark, ‘Hence I had to delimit knowledge, in order to make room for faith…’ (KdrV Bxxx). That Kant espoused some form of scepticism is also indicated by his rejection of knowledge of things in themselves. Recent interpreters have argued that Kant’s distinction between appearances and things in themselves is not metaphysical, but rather epistemological.23 In reply, others have argued, rightly I believe, that Kant’s distinction is indeed metaphysical, and not merely epistemological.24 Kant’s transcendental idealism brings in tow scepticism regarding ‘transcendental’ reality, namely, about anything that exists, and whatever characteristics it may have, regardless of our human cognitive capacities and acts. Paradigmatic of Kant’s ‘changed method of thinking’ is ‘that we only know of things a priori what we ourselves contribute to them’ (KdrV Bxviii). One such human contribution, according to Kant, is causality itself. Kant held that only Transcendental Idealism can answer Hume’s scepticism about causality. 51.2 Hegel’s Strategic Response to Kant’s Idealism. Hegel was deeply critical of Kant’s metaphysical and ultimately sceptical distinction between appearances to us and things in themselves. Considered strategically, Hegel’s response in the 1807 Phenomenology to Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and its attendant scepticism lies in his attempt to validate human empirical knowledge without adopting Transcendental Idealism. In particular, if Hegel’s justification of our causal judgments in ‘Perception’, ‘Force and Understanding’ and ‘Observing Reason’ is sound, then he answers Hume’s scepticism about causality without appeal to Transcendental Idealism (nor to any such view). If so, Hegel showed that Kant erred that only transcendental idealism can reply effectively to Hume’s causal scepticism (cf. Westphal 2015a). 51.3 Hegel’s Critical Response to Kant’s Idealism. Considered critically, Hegel’s ‘changed method of thinking’ is rooted in his 1802 insight that Kant’s Transcendental Idealist justification of our causal judgments is unsound (above, §§25–29). This shift in the substance of Hegel’s views is so basic that it also requires changes in method, rooted in his reconsideration of philo22

Beiser (1987), 4–5, 173, cf. 270, 292–3. E.g., Bird (1962, 18–35; 2006), Praus (1974), Allison (1983, 1987, 2004), Buchdahl (1992). 24 Rescher (1981); Guyer (1987), 333–69; Ameriks (1992); Adams (1997); Langton (1998); Westphal (1998b), (2001) KTPR §§4–14. On this topic, Allison (2004) differs much from his (1983), but his later interpretation appears to be subject to his earlier objection to Praus’ view (discussed in my 2001). 23

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sophical justification sketched above. Officially, Kant aimed to justify transcendentally the proposition, ‘Every event has a cause’, yet this principle is insufficient to justify our causal judgments about worldly objects and events. Those causal judgments require the more specific principle, ‘Every physical event has an external physical cause’. This specific principle does not follow from Kant’s transcendentally justified general causal principle. Kant saw this gap in his proof in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and noted it again in The Critique of Judgment, where he confirms that the more specific principle of external causality can only be proven ‘metaphysically’, not merely ‘transcendentally’ (above, §§28.3.2, 29.2). Kant attempted to close this gap with his metaphysical justification of this more specific causal principle in the Metaphysical Foundations. Ultimately, however, Kant recognised that even this further argument is invalid. The grounds for this are complex (above, §28.2). Here it suffices to note first, that Kant’s metaphysical cum sceptical distinction between human appearances and things in themselves provides no sound reply to Hume’s causal scepticism. Second, by 1802 Hegel identified exactly this problem with Kant’s analysis, without any knowledge of Kant’s private notes to the same effect. Hence Hegel, too, had overwhelming grounds to alter fundamentally his ‘method of thinking’. 51.4 Hegel’s Direct Response to Kant’s Idealism. Hegel’s Phenomenology provides not only a strategic (§51.2) and a critical (§51.3), but also a direct objection to Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, and thus to Kant’s sceptical distinction between appearances to us and things in themselves. Kant argued that the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold is satisfied because it is a ‘transcendentally ideal’ condition of integrated self-conscious experience. Such conditions are satisfied due to the structure and functioning of our human cognitive capacities, not due to mind-independent features of the world. Hence, Kant argued, only Transcendental Idealism can explain the satisfaction of this condition (above, §§31–32). However, Kant’s arguments for this conclusion are unsound because each of his four supporting arguments conflates the ratio cognoscendi and the ratio essendi of the satisfaction of this condition. Kant’s analysis of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold provides the ratio cognoscendi for knowing that this condition is satisfied: We can be self-conscious only if this condition is satisfied; whenever we are self-conscious, this condition is satisfied. However, this line of reasoning does not explain how or why this condition is satisfied; it does not provide its ratio essendi. Hegel knew this by 1801 (above, §34, 35). Hegel exploited this insight in the 1807 Phenomenology in ‘Self-Consciousness’ to show first, that genuine transcendental proofs can be

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developed without Transcendental Idealism. In this regard, Hegel’s view is in league with recent ‘analytic transcendental arguments’ (e.g., Stern 2000). More importantly, Hegel exploited this insight to show second, that a sound refutation of idealism, closely following Kant’s own ‘Refutation of Empirical Idealism’, can be built upon the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold, though Hegel’s refurbished refutation holds not only against what Kant called ‘empirical idealism’, but also against Kant’s own Transcendental Idealism. The ratio essendi of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold ultimately grounds realism (sans phrase) regarding natural, perceptible things in space and time (above, §35). On Hegel’s view, then, the justification of commonsense knowledge of particulars, e.g., Hegel’s knowledge of the pen with which he wrote, is complex. Hegel’s transcendental proof of realism and his transcendental justification of our use of such pure a priori concepts as ‘physical object’ justify the kind of empirical judgment represented by this example. Any particular case of this kind is justified in part by one’s experiential evidence for it, and in part by a reliabilist account of our perceptual systems. Hegel was deeply influenced by Aristotle regarding the proper functioning of our cognitive psychology and physiology, and recognised the role for this within Kant’s account of sensation and sensory experience (see deVries 1988; below, §§129, 130). 52 THE PERSISTENCE OF INFALLIBILISM. Further features of Hegel’s transcendental proof of realism are discussed in Parts II and III.25 A word here should be said about a bevy of objections which may have occurred to the reader, who may think of such things as renewed dream scepticism, brains in vats, perhaps ‘narrow’ construals of mental content or even a ‘grand coincidence on a cosmic scale’, amongst other contemporary philosophical commonplaces. A common nerve runs through these examples, taken as sceptical counter-examples, as disproofs of alleged genuine cases of perceptual knowledge. We’re professionally trained to spot many kinds of logical gaps and defects in our own views and those of others. This is an important and instructive philosophical technique. However, a danger lurks in its unrestricted use in epistemology: it strongly encourages the implicit assumption that genuine justification must be deductively sound, even in the case of empirical justification. This assumption made Descartes into the father of Cartesianism, this assumption drives global perceptual scepti25

In Westphal (1998c) I develop the argument independently of Hegel’s texts, and argue inter alia that it provides a much stronger bases than Crispin Wright’s (1992) ‘cognitive command’ and ‘cosmological scope’ for rescinding a minimalist and adopting a strong correspondence analysis of truth.

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cism, and this assumption has been used to undermine analyses of knowledge ever since – that is, ever since March 1277! The pervasiveness and apparent persuasiveness of this assumption is indicated by the wide-spread conviction amongst epistemologists that ‘fallible (empirical) justification’ is an oxymoron and that ‘fallibilism’ is incoherent.26 It is indicated too by the widespread use of the lottery paradox to argue against fallibilism and for 100% conclusive justification. It is also indicated by the deeply deductivist orientation of ‘analytic transcendental arguments’, which, interesting as they are, have systematically failed to answer scepticism.27 It would not be too much to say that this infallibilist assumption has played a role in Twentieth Century epistemology directly analogous to the role played in Pyrrhonian scepticism by the ‘ontological’ concept of truth (above, §48.4). Insisting that justification must be deductively sound directly restricts human knowledge to logic, maths (depending on one’s view of sets) and the merely apparent contents of one’s own present thoughts and experiences. The history of epistemology from Descartes to the present day ought to convince us this deductivist assumption cannot be correct. We need, in short, to ‘change our method of thinking’, as Kant urged (Bxviii). Change it to what? To transcendental-pragmatic accounts of justification, one sophisticated version of which has been sketched in this chapter, and developed in the remainder of this study. Hegel is the grandfather of robust pragmatic realism, and he showed that pragmatism has far richer resources than is commonly supposed, even by its advocates.28 Hegel showed, namely, that pragmatism not only is consistent with, but when thoroughly thought through, it requires realism about the objects of empirical knowledge (and also strict objectivity about basic moral norms). Hegel showed, too, that pragmatism is consistent with genuine transcendental proofs, proofs which (inter alia) block global perceptual scepticism – provided, of course, that we change our ‘method of thinking’ sufficiently to understand and appreciate such proofs. 53 CONCLUSION. The standard responses to scepticism have not been striking successes. This unfortunate track record strongly indicates that we need to ‘change our method of thinking’. Given the animosity towards the views (mistakenly) associated with ‘Hegel’ which characterised the formation and development 26

See, e.g., Kim and Lehrer (1990). Their key argument against fallibilism is valid – but only on one (strongly internalist) interpretation, an interpretation no fallibilist ought to accept; see below, §§52, 107. 27 See Grundmann (1994), Bell (2000), KTPR, §§1, 63. 28 Westphal (2010b), (2017e), (2018c); an exception is F.L. Will (1997).

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of analytic philosophy, I realise how paradoxical it is to suggest that Hegel in fact had already gone where we now need to go. Please do not mistake Hegel’s views for those of his would-be expositors, especially those of the last century when these battle lines were drawn, who didn’t care for epistemology, didn’t notice Hegel’s epistemology and most often didn’t have the acuity to identify Hegel’s views beneath his apparent rhetoric! If Hegel’s philosophy is read in terms of dichotomies standard in the field – such as Agrippa’s Five Modes – the result is gibberish. This has been typical amongst his readers, whether critical or sympathetic. What is lost to such readers is the fact that, and the ways in which, Hegel challenged what he identified as false dichotomies. Even if everything Hegel wrote were deeply mistaken, we should still have to study his writings carefully, for they are the most powerful antidote to the worst of philosophical diseases: hardening of the categories. To lay scepticism to rest requires a ‘changed method of thinking’. Genuine such changes are difficult, and cannot be effected by a few bright ideas. Hegel already contributed so much to a genuinely changed method of thinking that it behoves us to consider his views, analyses and methods very carefully indeed.

CHAPTER 9

Hegel’s Pragmatic Critique and Reconstruction of Kant’s System of Principles I: The 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit 54 INTRODUCTION. Peirce’s study of Kant, and later of Hegel, and Dewey’s retention of much of Hegel’s social philosophy are recognised idealist sources of pragmatism.1 I now argue that the transition from idealism to pragmatic realism was already achieved by Hegel. Hegel’s Science of Logic is an exercise in ‘transcendental logic’, the study of the legitimate cognitive roles and use of our basic conceptual categories and principles. Kant’s transcendental method centrally requires identifying sufficient grounds to justify a priori certain synthetic propositions (KdrV A216–8/B263–5). Central to Hegel’s transformation of Kant’s Critical philosophy are two key points. First, Hegel recognised that sufficient necessary conditions for the legitimate use of our a priori categories must include the legitimate use of empirical conceptions of spatio-temporal phenomena. Second, Hegel recognised that determining the legitimate use of fundamental conceptions and principles (whether a priori or empirical) requires critical assessment of their content in order to determine whether, in what regards or to what extent they ‘can be true’ (WdL II, 12:27.17–20, 28,8–18), a task initiated in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (Westphal 2009b, c). Hegel’s Science of Logic is thus concerned, not only to articulate, explicate, order, integrate, inter-define and assess our basic categories – whether traditional or new, whether categorial, natural-scientific, anthropological or teleological – but also to specify their scope of legitimate possible cognitive use within their proper domains and within specific kinds of cognitive judgments, even though the Science of Logic prescinds from specific cognitive claims (WdL II, 12:20) to focus upon the content, scope and proper domains of our categories and cognitive principles. Hegel contends, e.g., not only that ‘becoming’ is distinct to and yet integrates ‘being’ and ‘nothing’, he contends that a ‘truthful quantitative infinity’ (das wahrhafte Unendliche) is exhibited – this concept is realised – in infinitesimal analysis, in which a constant quantitative relation holds between vanishing quantities tending to zero, quantities which them1

See Renault (2012); on Dewey, see Shook and Good (2010).

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selves are not and cannot be numbers (WdL I, 21: 254–5). To have real sense, infinitesimal calculus, too, requires corresponding concrete objects (WdL I, 21:271, 282, 296, 299, cf. 300). Hegel’s critical assessment of Cauchy’s landmark ‘first reform’ of mathematical analysis (Wolff 1986) is central, not incidental, to his Science of Logic, which is Hegel’s successor to Kant’s ‘Systematic Presentation of all Synthetic Principles of Pure Understanding’ (KdrV A158/B187). That is Kant’s title for Book Two of his ‘Transcendental Analytic’; Kant expressly claims completeness: all synthetic principles. Hegel tells us that his ‘Objective Logic’ corresponds in part to Kant’s ‘Transcendental Logic’, which includes both the Transcendental Analytic and the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason (WdL I, 21:47.1–3). Although Hegel devotes some detailed critical remarks to various aspects of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, their significance requires further explication, to identify enthymemes undergirding both those remarks and also Hegel’s broader indications about relations between his Science of Logic and Kant’s Critical philosophy. The ascription of enthymemes requires care, especially when the issues are complex and far-reaching and the texts intricate. My proposals will disregard various scholarly commonplaces; I guide my analysis by Hegel’s method of thorough, strictly internal critique, a method as challenging as it is rewarding, and far more specific and informative than one might expect. Whatever exegetical questions my approach may raise but not yet answer are compensated by its philosophical rewards. My primary concern is with relations between idealism and pragmatism, not what may be believed, said or written about their relations, even by their protagonists. Hegel’s re-analysis of Kant’s Critical philosophy is the first and still one of the most sophisticated and adequate pragmatic – specifically pragmatic realist – accounts of the a priori. By his own methodological lights, Hegel owes us a detailed, thorough, sound and strictly internal critique of Kant’s Critical philosophy. This Hegel did not publish, though if we delve into Kant’s philosophy rigorously, we can confidently and accurately identify many sound points of Hegel’s implicit, strictly internal critique of Kant’s Critical philosophy. Hence my present aims are hermeneutical: To better identify what is philosophically at stake in Hegel’s critical reassessment of Kant’s Critical philosophy, and how Hegel’s reassessment may contribute to or indeed constitute a sound pragmatic realism. Only with such guides in place can we undertake the exegetical and critical questions of whether, how or how well Hegel may have formulated or justified his views, or whether they contribute to the philosophical transformation I claim to identify in Hegel’s core texts, and to advocate. To those who protest my departure from the received wisdom about Hegel’s Science of Logic

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I reply that too few of Hegel’s commentators have critically assessed their own natural ideas about knowledge and its objects in the ways undertaken in Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology, and too few have taken seriously Hegel’s profound epistemological, conceptual and semantic achievements in that work, which retained its status as the proper introduction to Hegel’s philosophical system, although it did not retain its status as Part One within that system (Fulda 1975, Collins 2012). I begin with these suggestive correspondences between Hegel’s Logic and Kant’s first Critique: Hegel’s ‘Doctrine of Being’ (Book 1) is his counterpart to Kant’s ‘mathematical principles’, namely to Kant’s ‘Axioms of Intuition’ and ‘Anticipations of Perception’; Hegel’s ‘Doctrine of Essence’ (Book 2) is his counterpart to Kant’s ‘Analogies of Experience’; Hegel’s ‘Doctrine of the Concept’ (Book 3) – together with its preceding two Books – is his counterpart to Kant’s ‘Postulates of Empirical Thought as Such’ and to Kant’s ‘Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection’, and also in part to Kant’s ‘Transcendental Dialectic’. Hegel expressly faults Kant for relegating concepts of reflection to an Appendix to his Transcendental Logic (WdL II, 12:19.34–38). Hegel’s faulting Kant in this regard is closely linked – textually and analytically – to his faulting Kant for treating reason as ‘only dialectical’ and as ‘merely regulative’ (WdL II, 12: 23.12, .16–17). The next section examines three important yet often neglected features of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason which, I contend, are key enthymemes undergirding Hegel’s critical reconstruction of Kant’s Critical philosophy. Next I summarise some perhaps unfamiliar features of the philosophical context within which Hegel begins to re-assess and reconstruct Kant’s Transcendental Logic (§56), and then review several key steps in this direction Hegel undertook in the 1807 Phenomenology (§57).2 55 THREE UNJUSTLY NEGLECTED FEATURES OF KANT’S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. 55.1 Kant’s Semantics of Singular Cognitive Reference. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously declares that thoughts without (sensory) intuitions are empty, whilst intuitions without concepts are blind (KdrV A51/B75). This slogan is significant in two regards: one methodological, the other epistemological. The methodological point Kant adopted from Tetens (1777), who coined a specific sense of ‘realise’ in connection with concepts: to ‘realise’ a concept is to show that objects corresponding to it can be given, that is, located and identified by us. Central to Kant’s aim to demonstrate the objective validity of our a priori Categories – in contrast to Ideas of Reason – is to show 2

I indicate ‘some’ advisedly; I do not claim that these are Hegel’s only concerns, but they are as important as they are underappreciated.

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that objects or events which instantiate the Categories can be identified, localised within our experience. This methodological use of the term ‘realise’ is often reflected in Hegel’s use of the same term (e.g., WdL II, 12: 101.1–10).3 The second, epistemological point is simple to state, yet profoundly wideranging, though Kant left it to his readers to find it in the joint implications of two widely separated parts of the Critique of Pure Reason, the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ and the ‘Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection’.4 Taken together, Kant’s complementary analyses demonstrate that for any synthetic proposition to be so much as a candidate cognitive judgment or claim requires that the cognisant subject in question, the renowned S, must refer his or her claim, judgment or statement to some particular(s) s/he has (putatively) localised within space and time.5 To know any one spatio-temporal particular requires both correctly ascribing characteristics to it and locating it within space and time. These(proto-)cognitive achievements are mutually interdependent. Integrating them both is required for predication, not as a grammatical or judgmental form, but as a cognitive act: whether for knowledge of, or error about, that particular individual. Only through singular sensory presentation and competent use of conceptions of ‘time’, ‘times’ (periods of time), ‘space’, ‘spaces’ (spatial regions), ‘individual’, and ‘individuation’ can we locate any particular object or event – together with (at least some of) its aspects, parts or characteristics – within space and time. Only through ostensive designation can we ascribe the predicates used in our (perhaps implicit) description or our judgmental classification(s) to any one, putatively known particular. Therefore, predication as an ascriptive act is required for singular, specifically cognitive reference to any sensed, spatio-temporal particular. Only through this kind of predication as a cognitive achievement can anyone specify (even approximately) the relevant spatio-temporal region (putatively) containing the particular one purports to designate ostensively – by specifying its occupant, the (putatively) known particular. Only in this way can one notice, specify or delimit which spatio-temporal region to designate, in order to grasp this (intended, ostended, presented) particular, and to ascribe to it any manifest characteristics, all of which is required to make any candidate 3 Cf. Sans (2004), who examines many relevant passages, but neglects Tetens’ definition of ‘realisieren’, and its use by Kant (KdrV B179, 185–6, 300–1, 598; MAdN 4:478) and Hegel; see KTPR, §33; and below, §§68, 114.3, 114.5, 127. (Hegel owned Tetens (1777), according to the Versteigerungskatalogue of his private library (Nr. 252, 253; Rauch 1832, 11; Schneider 2010, 83), though the term and the concept ‘realisieren’ are central to Tetens (1775).) 4 These implications were brought to my attention by Melnick (1989). I develop them further in KTPR; very much the same implications are developed by Bird (2006). 5 Merely for expository simplicity I set aside here Kant’s analysis of his a priori synthetic claims about the transcendental conditions of the very possibility of self-conscious human experience and knowledge; on these, see KTPR.

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cognitive judgment or claim (whether presumptive or accurate) about that particular. Determinate, significant cognitive judgments or claims are thus possible for us only through conjoint spatio-temporal delimitation of, and predicative ascription of characteristics to, any particular(s). Recognising any particular object or event requires conceptually identifying both the region it occupies and at least some of its manifest characteristics. How precisely we may identify either the features of any particular or its region is a further issue; approximations suffice, provided they are sufficiently accurate to discriminate between and identify particulars and their locations and durations. Whilst not denigrating the importance of descriptions within philosophy of language (nor mutatis mutandis within philosophy of mind), analyses of the meanings of our terms, or of the contents of our conceptions or descriptive phrases, do not because they cannot, suffice for epistemology. Only by analysing these cognitive dimensions of predication can we understand how the terms or conceptions we use in our judgments, claims, statements or assertions can have specifically cognitive significance, in addition to their linguistic meaning or conceptual content (intension). This Thesis is neutral about whether an epistemology is formulated in terms of concepts, statements, beliefs or judgments; it is also neutral about the analysis of conceptual content or linguistic meaning. To summarise this point I re-state the following THESIS OF SINGULAR COGNITIVE REFERENCE: Terms or phrases have meaning, and conceptions have classificatory content (intension), as predicates of possible judgments, although in non-formal, substantive domains no such statement has specifically cognitive significance unless and until it is incorporated into a candidate cognitive judgment which is referred to some actual particular(s) localised (at least putatively) by the presumptive judge (a cognisant subject, S) within space and time. Cognitive significance, so defined, is required for cognitive status (even as merely putative knowledge) in any non-formal, substantive domain. This point about cognitive reference is necessary, though not sufficient, for knowledge, in part because it says nothing about justification. More importantly, this point about cognitive reference is necessary for either truth or falsehood, or for approximation or accuracy. Successful cognitive reference, as specified here, is necessary also to evaluate the truth, falsehood, or accuracy of a judgment, statement or claim, and it is necessary to assess its justification or justificatory status. ‘Cognitive reference’, so understood, is necessary for any substantive claim, judgment or statement to have cognitive status, as a putative truth (in contrast to an arbitrary utterance, sentence or descriptive phrase).

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It may help to note that Kant’s Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference accords with, though is more specific than, Frege’s (1892a, b) tripartite distinction between concepts, particulars and ‘modes of presentation of something designated’ (»Arten des Gegebenseins eines Bezeichneten«), where „Arten des Gegebenseins eines Bezeichneten“ are not restricted to conceptual content or linguistic intension, but may (as especially Evans (1982) emphasised) be sensory or perceptual. ‘Modes of presentation’, on Frege’s view, are ways in which particulars are individuated and presented to us. In mathematics uniqueness, existence or non-existence proofs may suffice as Arten des Gegebenseins; within the empirical domain they cannot. Frege’s classic example of modes of presentation, ‘The Morning Star’ and ‘The Evening Star’, indicate not only objects – or rather: an object, Venus – but also circumstances in which they (or rather: it) may be perceived by us from Earth. (Why in empirical knowledge Arten des Gegebenseins des Bezeichneten are required, and neither ‘knowledge by description’ nor ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ suffice – nor are humanly possible – is indicated below, §57.1.) 55.2 The Completeness of Kant’s Transcendental Doctrine of the Power of Judgment. As mentioned (§29.1), Kant makes some very strong claims on behalf of his transcendental doctrine of the power of judgment (transscendentale Doctrin der Urtheilskraft), including the following: Distinctive of transcendental philosophy is this: that besides the rule (or rather, the universal condition for rules) which is given by the pure concept of the understanding, it can at once also indicate the instance to which it is to be applied. The reason for its advantage in this regard over all other substantive sciences (excepting mathematics) lies in this: that it concerns concepts which are to connect to their objects a priori, so that their objective validity cannot be demonstrated a posteriori, for that would leave their dignity entirely untouched; instead transcendental philosophy must at once indicate, in general though sufficient [sic] marks, the conditions under which objects corresponding to those concepts can be given, without which they would lack content, and thus would be mere logical forms and not pure concepts of the understanding. This transcendental doctrine of the power of judgment contains two main chapters: the first treats of the sensible conditions under which alone pure concepts of the understanding can be used, i.e. the schematism of the pure understanding; the second however treats of the synthetic judgments which issue from pure concepts of the understanding under those conditions a priori and which underlie a priori all other cognitions, i.e., the principles of the pure understanding. (KdrV A135–6/B174–5)

Kant’s chapter on the Schematism of the categories only considers temporal conditions; he noted in his marginalia that the Schematism also requires spa-

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tial conditions.6 This suggests that Kant’s ‘transcendental doctrine of the power of judgment’ in the Critique of Pure Reason is neither so complete nor so systematic as Kant claims it is and must be (KdrV A158/B187). 55.3 The Integrity of Kant’s Principles of Causal Judgment. Paul Guyer demonstrated that Kant’s three Analogies form a tightly integrated set of mutually supporting principles governing causal judgment.7 Guyer’s incisive finding may be summarised briefly: Each causal principle defended in Kant’s Analogies governs one kind of causal change: The persistence of substance through changes of its states, the causal change of states of any one substance, and the causal interchange between any two substances whereby they effect changes of state in each other. To judge that an observed event exhibits any one of these specific kinds of causal change requires distinguishing that change and its kind from the other two (causally possible) kinds. Causal judgments are fundamentally discriminatory. In brief, the empirical criterion of succession is lack of reversibility of the type of sequence of appearances produced by one or more objects; the empirical criterion of co-existence is the reversibility of the type of sequence of appearances produced by one or more objects. Determining that either co-existence or succession occurs requires determining that the other does not in the present case; both determinations require that we identify objects which persist through both the real and the apparent changes involved in the observed sequence of appearances. We cannot directly perceive time or space, and the mere order in which we happen to apprehend appearances does not of itself specify any objective order of objects or events. Consequently, the only condition under which we can determine which states of affairs precede, and which are concurrent with, which others is if there are enduring, perceptible particulars which causally interact, thereby producing changes of state in one another. Enduring perceptible, causally interacting particulars are necessary for us to identify specific spatial locations, to identify changes of place and to identify non-spatial changes objects undergo. To determine whether a change of appearances is a function of one object, previously in view, moving out of view when displaced by another, or instead is a function of one object rotating to reveal a different aspect (side or face), or instead is a function of one spatially stable object undergoing a nonspatial change of state, requires that we are able to, and do, identify places, changes of state and objects which change place or state, and that we are able to distinguish these different kinds of scenario in the actual case. To make any one such identification or distinction requires conjoint use of all three 6 Cf. Selbständige Reflexionen im Handexemplar der KdrV (A), Refl. Nos. LXXX (re: KdrV A182, GS 23:30.19–21), LXXXIII (re: KdrV A183, GS 23:31.18–19). 7 Guyer (1987), 168, 212–14, 224–25, 228, 239, 246, 274–75.

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principles of causal judgment defined and defended in Kant’s Analogies. None of the principles of causal judgment defended in the Analogies stands alone; they all stand together, or not at all. Beck (1978, 149 n. 4) noted that Kant’s model of causality in the Second Analogy is Leibnizian; Guyer identified the reason for this: Kant’s Second Analogy only concerns causal sequences of changing states of any one individual substance. Only in the Third Analogy does Kant consider – and argue for – causal interaction between any two (or more) substances (KTPR, §§36–38). Against Hume’s merely correlational account of causal relations, Kant justifies a transeunt account of causality, according to which a causally active power extends beyond some one physical substance to effect a change of state in another. Kant’s ‘answer to Hume’ is not in the Second Analogy, but in the conjoint implications of all three Analogies.8 Furthermore, Hegel is correct that Newton’s Mechanics is not merely kinematical, but instead requires and empirically justifies a causal dynamics of transeunt gravitational forces.9 56 LIVE ISSUES FROM HEGEL’S EARLY STUDIES. 56.1 It is often noted to Peirce’s credit and as central to his pragmatism, that he was not only a philosopher but also a trained and practising scientist (e.g., Kuhn 1996). Too little noticed (even by his devotés) is that Hegel, too, was well-versed and competent in mathematics and in exact sciences, unanimously elected in 1804 as Assayer to the Jena Mineralogical Society.10 At his Gymnasium Hegel excelled in mathematics, and so commanded the background to understand and appreciate his instruction in physics in Tübingen by C.F. von Pfleiderer.11 Pfleiderer criticised various attempts to prove physi 8 Kant’s analysis and proof is examined and defended in KTPR, where I further argue that Kant’s analysis is justified independently of his Transcendental Idealism. Watkins (2005) claims that Kant does not reply to Hume; however, he has insufficient command of Hume’s views and issues to substantiate this negative claim. (This was plainly evident at the ‘author meets critics’ session on his book at the Pacific meeting of the American Philosophical Association, March 2005.) I am aware of no evidence that the Classical Pragmatists noted this important Kantian analysis of causal judgment and its transcendental – and material – conditions. 9 See Harper (2011), on which see Hugget et al (2013); see Westphal (2014) on how the Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference strongly supports Newton’s physical analysis and proofs of transeunt gravitational force. 10 Hegel was one of three official assayers. The international founding membership of this society is listed in Lenz (1804) 1:7–48. The journal continued with this title until 1811, and until 1825 as Neue Schriften der Großherzogliche Societät für die Gesammte Mineralogie in Jena. On scientific activities in Jena during Hegel’s time there, see Ziche (1997), (1998), (2002). 11 Hegel taught analysis in Nürnberg and noted, e.g., in the Science of Logic that precisely because any number can always be increased or decreased by 1, ‘infinity’ is not and cannot be a number. Kant thus errs in defining infinity as ‘great beyond all comparison’ (WdL I,

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cal laws by a priori or purely mathematical means. For example, he (1804, 120–47) showed that collision and rebound cannot be understood purely a priori on the basis of impenetrability and the law of inertia (as, e.g., Descartes purported); elasticity, angle of impact, shape and centre of gravity must all be taken into account. Likewise in hydrostatics he (1804, 211–3) criticised Newton’s attempted a priori proof that all parts of a homogenous unmoved fluid exert equal pressure (Principia Bk. 2, Prop. 29). In connection with the inverse square law of gravitational attraction, Pfleiderer (1804, 334–6) again argued that this law cannot be understood or derived a priori by analogy with light by assuming gravitational rays. Pfleiderer’s (1804, 160) criticisms of such purported a priori proofs reflects his clear awareness of the difference between mathematical relations and the determination of their instantiation in nature by any physical system, e.g., regarding uniform acceleration in free fall (Galileo). The need to determine carefully whether any mathematical function is, or which mathematical functions are, exhibited by natural phenomena also shows in Pfleiderer’s (1804, e.g., 241–2) clear awareness of idealisations in laws and experimental conditions, a recurrent theme in his lectures. Pfleiderer (1804, 29, 114, 118, 184f., 432–41) often highlighted how the same kind of mathematical function is exhibited in apparently diverse phenomena; e.g., in levers, pendula, hydrostatics, hydrodynamics, collisions and the composition of forces. These mathematical analogies may be physically significant; so demonstrating requires carefully determining the boundary conditions and physical factors involved in these different physical phenomena. Pfleiderer devoted ample attention to Principia, Bk. II, the modern source book for applied mathematics in terrestrial physics (cf. Smith 2002a, b). It is quite possible that Hegel learned to be suspicious of a priori proofs of laws of nature from Pfleiderer (see below, §114). At the least, Pfleiderer repeatedly and clearly reinforced the lesson only empirical inquiry can determine which if any mathematical function is instantiated by any natural phenomenon, and why it is. Hegel would thus have been suspicious from the start of Kant’s (unsuccessful) attempt to provide a priori foundations for the mathematical quantification of natural phenomena, and in particular, for Newton’s laws of motion, in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (above §§25–29). 56.2 By 1802 Hegel realised that Kant had proven by transcendental analysis that we could not be self-conscious if we were not aware of a spatio-temporal world which presents us sufficient, humanly identifiable regularity and variety amongst appearances both to stimulate and to facilitate our comprehending objects and events under general conceptions in cognitive judg11:155.29–156.23/21:239.3–240.6). On Pfleiderer see Ziche’s introduction to Pfleiderer (1804).

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ments. Hegel also realised that Transcendental Idealism cannot account for this condition’s satisfaction (its being fulfilled by our actual world). This sound analysis undermines Kant’s main direct arguments for Transcendental Idealism. These insights enabled Hegel to defend the thesis of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism, that ‘inner experience in general is only possible through outer experience in general’ (KdrV B278–9), to turn this thesis against Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, and to defend this thesis on a (broadly, non-reductively) naturalistic basis (above, §§ 30–36). 56.3 Consequently, Hegel recognised that Kant’s distinction in kind between the a priori and the a posteriori had to be rescinded, along with Kant’s very strong modal claims about ‘apodeictic necessity’, and Hegel recognised that causal forces must be accepted as a fundamental feature of natural spatio-temporal objects and events (above, §28). Accordingly, by 1802 Hegel replaced the dichotomous distinctions in kind between the a priori and the a posteriori, and likewise between the analytic and the synthetic, with continua ranging between the a priori and the a posteriori, on the one hand, and between the analytic and the synthetic, on the other. This shift marks a major step towards a pragmatic (and realist) account of the a priori, and indicates a central theme in Hegel’s critical reassessment of Kant’s Critical philosophy. These findings also provide Hegel’s first (documentable) clues about how to disentangle Kant’s transcendental method of analysis and proof from Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Prising them apart is a central achievement of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit.12 57 FIVE CENTRAL POINTS FROM THE 1807 PHENOMENOLOGY. In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel argues for several substantive views which have direct methodological and substantive implications for his Science of Logic and philosophical Encyclopaedia, and for Hegel’s pragmatic realist transformation of Kant’s Transcendental Logic. Five are important here. 57.1 Hegel’s Defence of Kant’s Cognitive Semantics. Russell (1911) famously claimed we can have empirical knowledge either by aconceptual acquaintance with, or alternatively by description of, particulars. Less often noted is that the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘know’ in Russell’s famous article have no justified or tenable sense, because Russell’s accounts presuppose rather than analyse our capacity to locate and identify any relevant particular; indeed, for reasons already established by Kant’s Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference (§55.1). Hegel recognised that Kant’s semantics of singular cognitive reference 12 Hegel’s success in this regard is also reflected in the clearly Kantian structure of his cognitive psychology, in his ‘Philosophy of Subjective Spirit’; see deVries (1987), Surber (2013) and below, §§127–131.

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is independent of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. In ‘Sense Certainty’ (PhdG, chapt. I) he justifies this semantics of cognitive reference through strictly internal critique of aconceptual knowledge by acquaintance and in the closing paragraphs also of purported knowledge merely by description (Westphal 2002–03, 2010a). Hegel argues that, in principle, however extensive or detailed, specificity of description (or analogously, specificity of conceptual content; intension) is insufficient in principle to secure unique reference: Whether a description is empty, determinate or ambiguous because it describes (and in that way purportedly refers to) no, to only one or to several particular objects or events is determined, not by that description alone, but also by what in the world exists or occurs. Hence in principle there can be no empirical knowledge simply by description (Westphal 2002–03). Within any nonformal, substantive domain, to make any specifically cognitive claim (whether true or false, vague or precise, justified or not) requires not only stating that claim, but also localising within space and time the particular(s) to which one’s claim pertains, either directly or indirectly (as evidence, or via instruments). So doing is required for predication, not as a mere grammatical form, but as a cognitive achievement, which is required for making a claim to know something, and for assessing both the truth or accuracy and the justification of that claim. Consider Quine’s favourite example of a purportedly definite description, ‘The shortest spy’. Grammatically it is definite, but in the field there may be triplets of the same slight stature, all pursuing the same clandestine profession. Russell’s (1911) examples all presuppose that we know there is only one relevant individual; his analysis cannot account for his own presupposition: ‘The man with the iron mask’ may in fact be a team sharing the one notorious mask; by his own account, Russell cannot and does not know otherwise. Deixis is decisive, but cannot be secured aconceptually! Purported aconceptual knowledge by acquaintance can only be knowledge of some (physical or empirical) particular if one identifies that particular by locating it within one’s surroundings and discriminating it from its surroundings, both spatio-temporally by identifying (at least approximately) the region it occupies and by identifying (at least approximately) some of its manifest features. These two kinds of identification through discrimination or differentiation are mutually interdependent: We can identify the boundaries of the region a particular occupies only by identifying some of its manifest characteristics as filling the region marked by that boundary, and we can identifying manifest characteristics as manifest characteristics of any one particular by discriminating (at least approximately) the spatio-temporal region that particular occupies (Westphal 2000).

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Accordingly, not only are causal judgments discriminatory, as Kant argued: The judgments by which we identify particulars – and identify them as objects of our putative cognitive claims or judgments – are discriminatory. Hegel’s justification of the Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference is altogether independent of issues in ontology about idealism, realism or sense data. This is major virtue of Hegel’s method of determinate negation via strictly internal critique of opposed views. Hegel shows in advance that the term ‘knowledge’ has no sound analysis, and no justified use, in Russell’s (1911) famous article (Westphal 2010a). Furthermore, Hegel is correct that Kant’s concepts of reflection, treated in the Amphiboly (KdrV A260–89/B316–46), are constitutively significant for transcendental reasons, insofar as effective, appropriate and justifiable use of the concepts of ‘identity’, ‘difference’, ‘compatibility’, ‘incompatibility’, ‘inner’, ‘outer’, ‘form’ and ‘matter’ (‘whole’ and ‘part’ should also be included), are required to identify and to differentiate (discriminate, individuate) any particular(s) about which we make even putative cognitive judgments (WdL II, 12:19.34–38; cf. below, §§112.5–112.7). Very briefly, this is also why Frege was right to distinguish not only concepts and objects, but also Sinne as modes of presentation (above, §55.1). 57.2 Justificatory Fallibilism in Principle. The Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference has the important methodological and epistemological implication that, within substantive (non-formal) domains, statements of mere logical possibilities have no cognitive status, and so cannot undermine the justification of cognitive claims which are otherwise well supported by relevant evidence. This provides strong, cogent justification for fallibilism about rational justification in all substantive domains (Westphal 2014). This is a central tenet of pragmatism. 57.3 Pure A Priori Concepts. The Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference also entails that the conceptions of ‘unity’, ‘plurality’, ‘object’, ‘differentiation’, ‘time’, ‘times’, ‘space’, ‘spaces’ and ‘I’ are a priori, insofar as their possession and competent use is required to localise any spatio-temporal particular(s) or their feature(s) so as to be able to learn or to define any empirical conception or term. Hegel argues for the a priori status of these and other related conceptions by strictly internal critique and reductio of the concept-empiricist account of them. Though the classical American Pragmatists eschewed the a priori, C.I. Lewis (MWO), who understood his Kant much better than they, recognised and argued for the thesis that our conceptual classifications are in important regards always a priori, insofar as they include not only the concepts just indicated, but also specific descriptive content (intension) which can never be exhaustively specified or justified by empiricist means (see Westphal 2010b, 2013a).

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57.4 The Binding Problems. The discriminatory character of perceptual judgments by which we identify, individuate and locate particulars in our surroundings is underscored in Hegel’s brilliant internal critique of Hume’s analysis ‘Of scepticism with regard to the senses’ (T 1.4.2) in ‘Perception’ (PhdG, chapt. II; Westphal 1998a). Locke (Es 1.4.18) claimed we obtain the concept ‘substance’ by an ‘inadvertency’, when we mistake a group of frequently cooccurring sensed qualities for some one thing. Hume realised that concept empiricists must explain how we can construct the concept ‘body’ (or: physical particular), since it is – by the standards of concept empiricism – an utter fiction: How is Locke’s ‘inadvertency’ even psychologically possible, if empiricist principles are true of us human beings? Examining this phenomenon led Hume to confront what is now called the Binding Problem. This problem arises at two levels. First: 1. Within our total current, continuing sensory field, how can we (sub-personally) select and group together any plurality of sensations as sensations of any one physical particular amongst those several surrounding us? This question arises both synchronically and diachronically; it also arises for each sensory modality and across our sensory modalities. The second level is intellectual: 2. How are we able to recognise various sensed qualities or features as being those of any one physical particular (whether object, event or process), distinct from any others in our surroundings? Kant addressed these questions with his doctrines of perceptual and judgmental synthesis. Hegel exploited Hume’s exacting analysis to demonstrate four important results: 1. The conception ‘physical particular’ is a priori. 2. The relation ‘thing/property’ is neither reducible to, nor replaceable by, the relations ‘one/many’, ‘set/member’, ‘part/whole’ or ‘product/ingredient’. 3. The conception ‘physical object’ integrates the opposed quantitative sub-concepts ‘unity’ and ‘plurality’ or ‘number’. 4. Competent use of the conception ‘physical object’ requires competent use of the conception ‘cause’, indeed, as a central factor in solving these binding problems. All of these results Hegel justified without appeal to Transcendental Idealism, nor to any comparable view (Westphal 1998a, 2009b). Hume himself all but admits the first result, whilst condemning the conception ‘body’ as a ‘fiction’. The third result directly anticipates a finding Hegel explicates in the Science

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of Logic (Wdl I, 11:258–90, cf. Wolff 2009b), that the opposed conceptions of reflection ‘unity’ and ‘diversity’ must and can only be used conjointly in identifying any concrete object, event, structure or phenomenon, so that the dialectical relation between these quantitative conceptions does and must have positive constitutive significance (cf. below, §118). Hegel’s results also accord with Lewis’s (MWO) approach to the a priori status and use of our concepts and classifications (cf. below, §§60–64).13 57.5 Deflating Global Perceptual Scepticism. In ‘Force and Understanding’ (PhdG, chapt. III), Hegel uses the Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference (inter alia) to rebut empiricist scepticism about causal powers, to undergird Newton’s Rule 4 of Experimental Philosophy and to defend Newton’s causal realism about gravitational force (Westphal 2014, 2015a).14 In ‘Self-Consciousness’ (PhdG, chapt. IV), Hegel uses his semantics of singular cognitive reference to argue that global perceptual scepticism (whether Pyrrhonian, Cartesian, Empiricist or contemporary) is based upon mere logical possibilities, none of which has any cognitive standing within the non-formal, substantive domain of empirical knowledge because none can be referred to any localised particulars. In principle global perceptual ‘sceptical hypotheses’ are cognitively idle transcendent speculations, coupled with self-alienation from one’s own share in human cognition (see below, §§60–64). The fact that, as a matter of deductive logic alone, all of our perceptual beliefs could have just the contents they do and yet all be false (e.g., Stroud 1994b, 241–2, 245), is no reason for scepticism, but rather for distinguishing between strictly formal domains and the substantive domain of empirical knowledge, within which cognitive justification requires more than deductive logic and a host of claims merely about ‘appearances’ – if ‘appearances’ are presumed to be distinct from the objects, events and people surrounding us, as global perceptual sceptical hypotheses require. Global sceptical hypotheses cannot be ‘realised’, in Kant’s and Teten’s sense of the term. (This insight also underlies O.K. Bouwsma’s (1949) brilliant critical exposé of Cartesian scepticism.) In ‘Force and Understanding’ Hegel criticises a representative range of such presumptive global distinctions between mere appearances to us and reality, showing that these distinctions are epistemologists’ (or sceptics’) own creations, all of which are cognitively vacuous because they fail to satisfy the 13 Because Hegel’s examination of ‘Perception’ focuses upon perceptual synthesis, and so addresses the binding problems, it can be operationalised for contemporary cognitive science; see Ziemke (1992, 1994), Ziemke and Breidbach (1996). 14 Newton’s (1999, 796) Rule 4 of Experimental Philosophy states: ‘In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be considered either exactly or very nearly true not withstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions’.

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requirements of the semantics of singular cognitive reference. Positively, Hegel argues that philosophical theory of knowledge must take the special sciences into very close consideration (see Part III). He argues for this claim en detail in ‘Observing Reason’ (PhdG, chapt. VA), by arguing (inter alia) that the empirical findings of the special sciences are very much intellectual and methodological achievements which belie both empiricism and rationalism – and both historia and scientia – and exhibit and substantiate human reason’s power to know nature, in part by identifying genuine natural kinds, species and laws of nature (Ferrini 2007, 2009b). All of these findings are highlighted in Hegel’s concluding chapter, ‘Absolute Knowing’, not least because they are central to the substance and to the method of Hegel’s Science of Logic (de Laurentiis 2009, Collins 2012). 57.6 Hegel’s Refutation of Empirical Idealism. In the first part of ‘Self-Consciousness’, ‘Self-Sufficiency and Self-Insufficiency of Self-Consciousness’, Hegel defends (in effect) the conclusion of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism, that we human beings can only be self-conscious by distinguishing ourselves from our physical surroundings, by strictly internal critique of the thesis that each or any individual constitutes the world of which s/he is aware (below, §71– 82). In these several regards Hegel continues, extends and deepens Kant’s profound anti-Cartesian revolt (Westphal 2007), in part by justifying these results without appeal to Transcendental Idealism, nor to any similar view (below, §§65–70). Instead, Hegel argues by reductio that one can be solely selfconscious in being conscious of an object only in the case of beholding one’s own artifacts, though producing artifacts requires figuring out how to cope with and transform independent natural materials. This is an important first lesson in how theoretical reason is rooted in practical reason, and how practical reason is rooted in our bodily interactions with our natural (and social) surroundings (below, §§60–70). This fundamental theme Hegel shares with Classical Pragmatists; indeed, the designation comes from pragma – practices – and their primacy in understanding human thought, knowledge, language and their roots in purposive action, which is rooted in our physiological and psychological human nature, and in the natural environs we inhabit. 57.7 Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology and the Logic’s Point of Departure. These specifics about the Phenomenology are crucial to understanding the character, aims and method of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Throughout his career, and not withstanding its various other introductions, Hegel stressed that the 1807 Phenomenology is the sole ‘deduction’, ‘justification’ and ‘proof’ of the starting point of the Science of Logic, centrally because it alone justifies our cognitive

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competence within philosophy.15 Most centrally: the 1807 Phenomenology alone justifies Hegel’s initial premiss that the Science of Logic can and does examine ‘objective determinations of thought’ (objektive Denkbestimmungen), which are fundamental structures of things – their constitutive features, species and differentia – which we comprehend through genuine conceptions. Accordingly, the subject matter of the Science of Logic is not individual things (Dinge), but rather the fundamental concept or the constitutive structure of kinds of things, which Hegel designates as their ‘Sache’.16 That we are cognitively competent to comprehend and analyse Sachen (in this sense) is the central premiss of Hegel’s Science of Logic which is justified by the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. This premiss is justified by the Phenomenology in large measure by re-analysing the scope and character of knowledge within the special sciences. Hegel’s concern with the scope and character of knowledge within the special sciences is prominent throughout the Science of Logic as well. In particular, central to the revisions of the second edition of the ‘Doctrine of Being’ (Book 1) are extensive analyses of infinitesimal calculus (Wolff 198617) and of the intricate relations between quantity and quality (Ferrini 1988, 1991–92). These issues are central to the proper use – and to the proper understanding and assessment of the proper use – of quantification in the special sciences. Hegel treats them in the Science of Logic under the heading ‘measure’, extensively revised in the second edition (Ferrini 1988, 1991–92), plainly in anticipation of the more thorough and concrete re-analysis of their use in the Philosophy of Nature, in connection with rational physics, i.e. the conceptual foundations of physical science, e.g., the centre of gravity of a system of bodies (‘Absolute Mechanism’, WdL II, 12:143.1–15), or ‘chemism’ (WdL II, 12:148–152; Burbidge 1996, Renault 2002). 58 PRAGMATIC REALISM AND NATURAL SCIENCE. Today’s neopragmatists hold ontology captive to their preferred meta-language, and – like rather too many others – accordingly tend to reduce ‘scientific theories’ to thumb-nail sketches of their main principles. The inevitable result of these ‘moves’ is to make it difficult, especially in the wake of Kuhn and Rorty, to distinguish scientific theories from story telling. To the contrary,

15

See WdL I, 11:20.5–18, 20.37–21.11, 33.5–13; 21:32.23–33.4, 33.20–34.1, 54.28–55.5; Fulda (1975), Collins (2012), esp. 440–61. 16 See WdL I, 21:14.20–21, 15.6–16, 17.13–29, 33.27–34.1, 35.2–10, 12:20; Enz. §§19, 24Z1, 25, 28. 17 Wolff shows how mistaken was Peirce’s early misjudgment, that ‘… Hegel had the misfortune to be unusually deficient in mathematics’ (CP 1.368).

179 … in the choice of these man-made formulas [viz., quantitative laws of nature] we can not be capricious with impunity any more than we can be capricious on the commonsense practical level. We must find a theory that will work; and that means something extremely difficult; for our theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences. It must derange common sense and previous belief as little as possible, and it must lead to some sensible terminus or other that can be verified exactly. To ‘work’ means both these things; and the squeeze is so tight that there is little loose play for any hypothesis. Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is.

This is very tough-minded talk from that reputedly tender-hearted philosopher, William James (1975, 104); it should be taken seriously, especially by anti- and irrealists about the objects of empirical knowledge, especially in the sciences. The difficulty in devising a theory that ‘works’, as James put it, lies in devising a quantitative theory of natural regularities, a theory that ‘can be verified exactly’ and that is more than simply a device for calculating observations. The mathematical formulae must describe not only possible, but plausible natural means or mechanisms which produce the observed phenomena. The use of mathematics to discover and to describe natural regularities was and is central to modern science, and mathematical analysis was and is used (with methodological and more general rational or ‘metaphysical’ considerations playing a supporting role) to determine the very terms or factors into which to analyse some complex natural phenomenon. The use and centrality of mathematics in modern science was misunderstood by empiricists and rationalists alike, as well as by Kant, and too often is still misunderstood. In discussing the relevance of the almost purely mathematical framework Newton develops in Principia Books I and II to his ‘system of the world’ (Book III), De Gandt (1995, 267) observes: ‘The solidity of the inductive fabric is due to its mathematical framework, which makes it possible to establish an extremely tight network in which observation and theory advance on and regulate each other’. Borrowing terminology from logical empiricism, this may suggest that Newton’s mathematics forms the ‘correspondence rules’ between his theoretical and observational language. That is too glib. Newton’s mathematical framework is constitutive for his theoretical postulates and, as De Gandt explains, for the mutual regulation of theory and observation. This mutual regulation defies the fundamentally deductivist model of rationality common to empiricism, rationalism, logical positivism and falsificationism. This mutual regulation is fundamentally pragmatic – in the broadly naturalistic, realistic sense of ‘pragmatism’ found in classical American philosophy.18 18 Harper (2011) shows how Newton’s Principia devised mathematical analyses which enable his gravitational theory to use both orbital and terrestrial phenomena to measure, very robustly, forces of gravitational attraction. Hegel did not understand this crucial

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59 INTERIM CONCLUSIONS. By disentangling Kant’s incisive Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference from Kant’s Transcendental Idealism; by using that thesis to justify fallibilism within all non-formal domains, including empirical inquiry as well as philosophy; by arguing that human thought is fundamentally rooted in human action and that both are rooted in our concretely practical living in the world with one another; and by arguing en detail that epistemology must take actual empirical inquiries into very close philosophical consideration, Hegel already – in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit – pioneered a very robust pragmatic realism. However, by disentangling Kant’s transcendental methods of analysis and proof from Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, Hegel recast these powerful methods for pragmatic realism, including powerful transcendental proofs of externalism about mental content, linguistic meaning (intension) and cognitive justification. Amongst the pragmatists, such considerations were developed only by C.I. Lewis (MWO) and F.L. Will (1997, 1–18). Part III pursues these same issues in Hegel’s Science of Logic and his philosophical Encyclopedia – after considering the details of Hegel’s explication and defence of the very possibility of constructive self-criticism in the following chapter.

feature of Newton’s dynamics, but did expose and resolve conceptual stumbling blocks impeding its appreciation. Avoiding realism by recourse to any meta-language runs afoul of the internal problems thwarting Carnap’s (1950b) ‘Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology’ (see Westphal 2015b), of Carnap’s explication of ‘explication’ (below, §§100–110) and of Hegel’s moderate externalisms regarding mental and semantic content (intension) and regarding cognitive justification; cf. below, §§65–70.

CHAPTER 10

Hegel’s Solution to the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion 60 INTRODUCTION. Rather recently, problems about epistemic circularity, and more recently, Sextus Empiricus’ ‘Dilemma of the Criterion’ have been receiving thoughtful attention from contemporary epistemologists. Epistemic circularity is involved in using a source of belief in the process of assessing or justifying that source of belief; the Dilemma of the Criterion (quoted below, §61) concerns establishing basic criteria of justification in highly disputed domains. Because there are diverse and controversial views on this issue, how can basic criteria of justification be established without infinite regress, vicious circularity, or petitio principii? These problems deserve careful attention; I don’t believe contemporary epistemologists have fully realised how sophisticated a response Pyrrhonian skepticism requires.1 Roderick Chisholm (1982, 65–6) contends that there are three kinds of response to what he calls the ‘Problem’ of the Criterion’: Particularists believe they have various particular instances of knowledge, on the basis of which they can construct a general account of the nature and criteria of knowledge. Methodists believe they know the nature and criteria of knowledge, and on that basis can distinguish genuine from illegitimate particular instances of knowledge. Skeptics believe that no particular cases of knowledge can be identified without knowing the nature or criteria of knowledge, and that the nature or criteria of knowledge cannot be known without identifying particular cases of genuine knowledge. Chisholm (1982, 75, cf. 67) favours particularism, but thinks that any attempt to solve the problem must beg the question.2 1

The main points of Pyrrhonian scepticism are summarised in HER, 11–6. Robert Amico (1993, 112-5) proposes to ‘dissolve’ the Problem of the Criterion by showing that the skeptic presupposes an impossible condition for justification, namely, settling both what count as proper criteria of knowledge and what count as proper instances of knowledge before providing an account of knowledge. Amico is right that this is an impossible condition, but wrongly ascribes to the Pyrrhonian skeptic a definite position on the nature of justification (ibid., 114). Thus he converts sophisticated, flexible, and undogmatic Pyrrhonian skepticism into dogmatic Academic skepticism. Sextus is far more subtle. Amico closes by noting that the interesting questions only begin once this impossible condition on justifying a theory of knowledge is rejected. Hegel’s analysis begins where Amico’s leaves off, with these interesting questions. 2

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Paul Moser (1988, 260–5) has sought to avoid the dogmatism which arises from accepting either methodism or particularism by proposing to reach a ‘reflective equilibrium’ between our considered judgments about epistemic principles and our clearest intuitions about particular cases of knowledge or justified belief. There may be merit to this suggestion, but convincing reasons must be provided to suppose that we would equilibrate toward genuine principles of justification and genuine cases of knowledge or justified belief. Moser apparently discounts this problem due to his staunch justificatory internalism, which permits him to consider propositions as justified for particular persons, even if their principles of justification are not truth-conducive. As his subsequent work reveals, this is much more a capitulation, rather than a solution, to serious sceptical challenges to knowledge and to our understanding of it. Subsequently, Moser (1993, 57) argued for ‘conditional ontological agnosticism’, the view that no agnostic-resistant, non-question-begging evidence for ontological claims (whether idealist or realist) can be found. He contends that philosophy nevertheless can undertake important semantic, explanatory and evaluative projects. His ‘explanatory project’ addresses whatever constitutes the correctness of one’s explanatory epistemic standards regarding the nature of justification; his ‘evaluative project’ addresses whatever constitutes the correctness of the evaluative epistemic standards one uses to ‘discern’ justified beliefs. These projects must avoid the dilemma of being either naïve or viciously circular. Moser’s ‘semantic project’ purports to solve that dilemma through informative answers to questions about the point and significance of one’s standards.3 The explanations his three projects involve are avowedly ‘perspectival’ because they are supported ultimately by the various semantic commitments, explanatory ends, and standards of success, i.e., by the conceptually relative ‘standpoints’, adopted by individual epistemologists.4 Moser (1993, 74–5) contends that the dilemma he identifies for his explanatory and evaluative projects is more basic that Sextus’ Dilemma of the Criterion. In part this is because he accepts Chisholm’s formulation of the ‘Problem’ in terms of justification,5 rather than the criterial terms Sextus actually used. This precludes Moser’s recognising how basic a problem Sextus poses and how sophisticated he is in parlaying that problem into objections to all 3 Moser (1993), 70–74; 60–151. Moser’s ‘semantic project’ specifies ‘in informative terms, what it means to say that something (for example, a proposition or a belief) is epistemically justified’ (60). It requires answering the question: ‘What, if anything, constitutes the correctness (at least for myself) of my semantic standards for ‘epistemic justification’ as an answer to the semantic project regarding what it means to say that something is epistemically justified?’ (72). 4 Moser (1993), 227; on his conceptual relativism see 98–9, 152–87. 5 Moser (1993), 75; on Chisholm’s ‘Problem’ of the Criterion, see HER, 217.

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sorts of philosophical endeavours. Moreover, Moser’s (1993, 41–57) case for ontological agnosticism is tantamount to the less sophisticated, more dogmatic cousin of Pyrrhonian scepticism, Academic scepticism. Most important, however, is the fact that Moser doesn’t recognise that direct permutations of Sextus’ Dilemma and its associated sceptical tropes arise for any attempt to assess the various explanations and evaluations offered by different epistemologists. Indeed, they arise for any attempt to assess the merits of various ‘semantic commitments’ made by different epistemologists or of various ‘standpoints’ they adopt. Acquiescing in ‘ontological agnosticism’ and avowing ‘conceptual relativism’ does not evade Sextus’ challenging questions; quite the contrary. Having once argued that epistemic circularity need not be vicious, William Alston soon reconsidered: What I take myself to have shown in ‘Epistemic Circularity’ is that epistemic circularity does not prevent one from showing, on the basis of empirical premises that are ultimately based on sense perception, that sense perception is reliable. But whether one actually does succeed in this depends on one’s being justified in those perceptual premises, and that in turn, according to our assumptions about justification, depends on sense perception being a reliable source of belief. In other words, if (and only if) sense perception is reliable we can show it to be reliable. And how can we cancel out that if? Here is another way of posing the problem. If we are entitled to use belief from a certain source in showing that source to be reliable, then any source can be shown to be reliable. For if all else fails, we can simply use each belief twice over, once as testee and once as tester. … Thus if we allow the use of mode of belief formation M to determine whether the beliefs formed by M are true, M is sure to get a clean bill of health. But a line of argument that will validate any mode of belief formation, no matter how irresponsible, is not what we are looking for. We want, and need, something much more discriminating. Hence the fact that the reliability of sense perception can be established by relying on sense perception does not solve our problem. (Alston 1989b, 3; cf. idem. 1993, esp. 120–40)

Alston proposes several criteria for justifying doxastic practices. It counts in favour of a practice if it is more firmly established. This involves a practice being more widely accepted, more definitely structured, more important to guiding action, more difficult to abstain from, more innately based, or having principles that seem more obviously true. An acceptable doxastic practice cannot generate massive inconsistency, and persistent massive inconsistency between two practices indicates that at least one is faulty. Alston adopts a negative coherentism: An established doxastic practice is prima facie rationally acceptable in the absence of significant disqualifying reasons. More positively, a practice may generate ‘self-support’ if it grounds our abilities to investigate how that practice is possible or grounds our abilities to engage in

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other effective practices. The more such self-support a doxastic practice generates, the more that counts in its favour. The failure to generate such ‘selfsupport’ is a demerit. Analysing doxastic practices in light of these criteria may help establish a rank ordering to which to appeal when massive conflicts arise among or within them. The aspirations of such ‘free-wheeling’ philosophical analysis, within which every claim is open to criticism, are modest.6 Even showing that there is no practical and rational alternative to believing that our general belief-forming practices are reliable faces epistemic circularity, and someone who does not accept the basic reliability of a source of belief cannot be justified in accepting it by an epistemically circular argument.7 Robert Fogelin has examined contemporary foundationalism, reliabilism, coherentism and externalism, with Sextus’ scepticism in view. He concludes: What I have tried to show, using a number of exemplary cases, is that Pyrrhonian skepticism, when taken seriously and made a party to the debate, is much more intractable than those who have produced theories of empirical justification have generally supposed. As far as I can see, the challenge of Pyrrhonian skepticism, once accepted, is unanswerable. (Fogelin 1994, 194, cf. 203)

Fogelin draws this conclusion whilst focussing on Aggripa’s ‘Five Modes’ (133f.), but neglecting the Dilemma of the Criterion. Solving the Dilemma requires responding to the Five Modes, and also solving the level-regress and reflexive problems involved in establishing criteria of truth or of justification. I’m happy to add Fogelin’s case studies (of Bonjour, Goldman, Nozick, Dretske, Chisholm, Lehrer and Davidson) to my own (of Descartes, Hume, Kant, Russell, Carnap, Quine, Alston and van Fraassen) to show that Sextus’s scepticism is a serious problem deserving serious consideration. Unlike Fogelin I believe that our epistemological situation is good, not dire. The surprise is that the proper response to Pyrrhonian scepticism is provided by a philosopher widely supposed to have had no theory of knowledge at all: Hegel. Hegel is an enormously sophisticated epistemologist whose views have gone unrecognised because his problems have gone unrecognised. Placing the Dilemma of the Criterion in the foreground solves this problem. In one way or another, the solutions posed in the literature require that we be self-critical in order, e.g., to avoid dogmatism (Chisholm), to distinguish justifying from arbitrary reflective equilibria (Moser), to distinguish appropriate or adequate 6

Alston (1989b), 13–20. On Alston’s views, also of Sextus’ Dilemma, see HER, 68–90. Alston (1989b, 19–22) develops the argument for the ‘practical rationality’ of accepting our current belief-forming practices (subject to on-going scrutiny). He (1994, 41–43) recognises the epistemic circularity facing even that modest sort of argument, and (1989a, 328, 334) that no one who denies the reliability of a source of belief can be justified in accepting it by an epistemically circular argument. 7

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conceptualisations from inferior alternatives (Moser), or to distinguish genuine from sham self-support (Alston). Though not widely recognised, the real problem raised by Sextus’ Dilemma is to understand how self-criticism is possible for us. Hegel recognised this problem and developed a very sophisticated and powerful analysis of it. Some of the importance and also the difficulty involved in self-criticism can be seen by considering how Chisholm’s three responses to his ‘Problem’ of the Criterion highlight the fact that different philosophers make different assumptions about human knowledge and about how to analyse it. Such assumptions inform a philosopher’s entire approach to epistemology and condition if not determine what, if anything, a philosopher will accept as credible. Because a philosopher’s assumptions inform his or her theoretical formulations and his or her judgments about credibility, there is conceptual interdependence amongst the assumptions, principles and paradigm examples comprised in any philosopher’s basic approach to epistemology.8 Philosophers take many different assumptions as points of departure; not all are equally credible. Can we distinguish more from less credible basic assumptions? If so, how? A further difficulty is reflected in Alston’s point about the limits of proof involved in (virtuous) epistemically circular arguments: There is a conceptual distinction between evidence one has and evidence one accepts. In particular cases of knowledge or belief, as well as in particular epistemic analyses, there may be a significant divergence between evidence someone has and the evidence s/he accepts. This contrast reflects the conceptual distinction between apparent evidence and genuine evidence; in any particular case there may be a significant divergence between them. These two distinctions are themselves distinct; part of our challenge, both as cognisant agents and as epistemologists, is to align them, both in principle and in practice. With these points in view, both the importance of and the difficulties involved in self-criticism can be indicated more precisely. In view of these four points – the interdependence among the basic assumptions, principles, and favoured cases comprised within an epistemology; the distinction between having and accepting evidence; the distinction between apparent and genuine evidence; and the distinction between these two distinctions – can philosophers’ basic epistemic assumptions be submitted to critical scrutiny? Can 8

This introduces an element of holism independent of considerations about conceptual meaning. Hegel is a (moderate) holist about meaning, but that doctrine cannot be adduced in formulating a response to Sextus’ Dilemma without petitio principii. However, Hegel’s response to Sextus’ Dilemma is sensitive to issues raised by holistic theories of conceptual meaning and so lends itself to confronting issues about realism and relativism raised by recent analytic philosophy of language.

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they be assessed without petitio principii? If so, how – and how well? Hegel’s solution to the Dilemma of the Criterion provides a very sophisticated and powerful answer to these questions. Hegel’s solution presents a series of ‘forms of consciousness’ (explained in §62), each of which adopts a distinct set of assumptions about human knowledge and applies the principles implied or embedded in those assumptions to relevant examples of putative knowledge. The structure Hegel ascribes to forms of consciousness affords an internal critical assessment of the various assumptions and principles of knowledge those forms of consciousness advocate or illustrate. Even if we cannot justify a theory of knowledge to a sceptic who refuses to take any evidence or principle as credible, we still face substantial problems providing critical assessment of various epistemic assumptions and principles and achieving rational agreement amongst more credulous and credible epistemologists. Hegel solves this methodological problem, and in his substantive analysis of knowledge shows how unwarranted is the radical sceptic’s refusal to count anything as evidence or justification.9 Hegel thus provides a theoretical solution to the Dilemma which avoids vicious circularity, infinite regress, self-certifying intuition and petitio principii. The assumptions he makes do not appear as premises in his proof and ultimately they can be discharged through self-critical assessment of them (see below, §§71–91). Hegel’s solution does involve epistemic circularity, which is inevitable in any critique of reason, but through ‘determinate negation’ (i.e., the internal critical assessment) of alternative epistemologies he provides much more persuasive reasons to justify his epistemology than those suggested by Alston. This chapter now examines the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion and its epistemological significance (§61). As a first step in presenting Hegel’s solution to this Dilemma, I discuss his conception of ‘forms of consciousness’ (§62). Hegel’s main solution to the Dilemma involves explicating a conception of knowledge as a relation between knower and known (§63). I conclude by briefly discussing a problem confronting Hegel’s solution to this Dilemma (§64). Although here I only consider epistemology, the problem and reconstruction I offer extend quite directly to Hegel’s further concerns with morals and action (below, §§88–90). 61 THE DILEMMA OF THE CRITERION AND ITS EPISTEMOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE. Hegel states that the aim of the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit is to provide 9 This chapter considers some core features of Hegel’s method. On the structure of his substantive epistemological argument in the 1807 Phenomenology, see Westphal (2009b). Hegel’s case against radical scepticism is examined below, §§65–70.

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‘insight into what knowing is’.10 Because there is severe and sustained disagreement on this topic, providing insight into the actual nature or structure of knowledge requires assessing competing views and defending one’s own view. The methodological problem Hegel confronts in the Introduction to the Phenomenology is how differing views of knowledge can be assessed, and indeed how this can be done without lapsing into dogmatism or committing a petitio principii against those who disagree. This problem was classically stated as an argument purporting to show that no such assessment can be made because no criterion for such assessment can be established. This is the Pyrrhonian ‘Dilemma of the Criterion’ (quoted above, §12). The problem posed by that Dilemma is one of settling disputes – disputes about appropriate criteria for assessing knowledge claims. This kind of second-order dispute about what knowledge, truth or justification is can quickly develop from disputes about the way the world is. (I will call claims about the world ‘first-order’ knowledge claims.) Insofar as establishing first-order knowledge claims involves demonstrating that those claims are warranted, second-order claims about what knowledge is and how to distinguish it from ignorance and error would be invoked. These second-order claims, too, require assessment or warrant. Thus the problem of adjudicating among divergent claims to first-order knowledge recurs on a higher level as a problem of adjudicating differing claims to second-order knowledge about what knowledge is. At this point, when what is called for are coördinated warrants for three types of claims (first-order claims, second-order claims about the principles warranting those first-order claims, and claims warranting these second-order claims), the problem may look insoluble. Sextus may well seem the wiser for having been compelled to suspend judgement by the multitude of divergent first principles propounded in various philosophies (PH 1.170, 178). Sextus uses this Dilemma to try to undermine first-order knowledge claims. Hegel takes a methodological cue from Sextus’s Dilemma in recognising that the dilemma arises and must be met at the second level of epistemological debate. What can be done to solve this Dilemma? What can be done to defend the claims made by or for a theory of knowledge? One ordinary strategy for defending claims to knowledge is unavailable here. In making claims about everyday things our beliefs are often justified by something that is not itself a belief or claim, such as perceiving something. In the present case, however, no such appeal can be made; we don’t perceive what knowledge is in anything like the way we perceive tables or chairs. Justifying a theory of knowledge involves appealing to further claims, which in turn require justification. 10

PhdG Preface, 9:25.16–17/¶29; cf. Intro. 9:58.13–14/¶81.

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One negative condition for an adequate account of knowledge derived from Kant, and adopted by Hegel, is that any account of knowledge which cannot be known in accord with its own principles is self-refuting: its very promulgation demonstrates cognitive abilities unaccounted for by that theory.11 This is a powerful condition. However, this condition does not distinguish between theories of knowledge which are reflexively self-consistent in this way and a theory that is, in addition, true or justified. Furthermore, Kant’s condition doesn’t address the problem of reaching agreement amongst dissenting epistemologists. Something more is required to respond to Sextus. What resources are there for addressing this problem? On the one hand, simply accepting various claims about what knowledge is leads to dogmatism and Hegel called the trustworthiness of these claims into question. (One cannot simply accept all prima facie claims about knowledge because these at least some of these claims are mutually inconsistent and so cannot all be true.12) On the other hand, simply rejecting such ideas altogether would leave us bereft of terms for even posing the problem, to say nothing of solving it. Thus some sort of prima facie cognitive abilities and terminology for analysing these abilities must be granted in order to have a problem and a discussion of it at all. If there are reasons for questioning those prima facie abilities, then any solution to these difficulties will have to lie in the possibility of selfcritically revising our prima facie understanding of knowledge. It must be critical revision because there are reasons to suppose that our understanding of knowledge is inadequate; it must be self-critical revision because there is need to avoid petitio principii and dogmatism. Hegel’s procedure for determining which prima facie claims are true or warranted is to examine a series of ‘forms of consciousness’, each of which adopts a specific set of prima facie claims about knowledge and its objects. Hegel holds that the actual nature or structure of knowledge can be comprehended through examining the defects and proficiencies of a range of accounts of knowledge and its objects based upon these prima facie ideas. 62 FORMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. What is a ‘form’ (Gestalt) of consciousness? A form of consciousness is an expository device consisting of a pair of basic principles. One principle speci11

Kant may not have stated this condition explicitly, but it is plainly an implication of his ‘Refutation of Idealism’ (KdrV B274–9) and so of his response to Hume. 12 According to Jacobi’s doctrine of ‘immediate knowledge’ there is no conceptual or inferential mediation in knowledge. On his view, prima facie knowledge claims count as knowledge, indeed, as the basic knowledge upon which any other knowledge depends. Hegel notes that Jacobi’s view faces precisely problem (Enz. §75; below, §§92–99).

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fies the kind of empirical knowledge of which a form of consciousness presumes itself to enjoy; the other principle specifies the general structure of the kind of object which that form of consciousness presumes to know. Taken together, these two principles constitute what Hegel calls a form of consciousness’ ‘certainty’ (Gewißheit). Idiomatically expressed, these principles specify what a form of consciousness is sure the world and its knowledge of it are like. The principles at issue are categorial ones, e.g. whether intuitive (a-conceptual) knowledge is humanly possible, or whether an ontology of sensa is adequate. In the body of the Phenomenology, Hegel specifies a form of consciousness’ principles by describing its ‘certainty’. Part of Hegel’s point in labelling this pair of conceptions a ‘certainty’ is to argue that, assurances to the contrary not withstanding, ‘certainty’ is no infallible, indubitable or incorrigible cognitive starting point, but rather is an end result of (successful) cognitive inquiry, and a corrigible one at that; the initial assurance of each form of consciousness that its principles are true is time and again undermined and superceded through Hegel’s examination and assessment. Considering these principles as a ‘form of consciousness’ is neutral between a particular individual’s consciousness and a group’s collective outlook. Similarly, this device is neutral between historically identifiable, and summarily presented possible, views of knowledge and its objects. If Hegel is correct, historical epochs and extant philosophies are variations on, if not instances of, the forms of consciousness scrutinised in the Phenomenology. This is because both forms of consciousness, and also historically identifiable positions, all devolve from genuine (if non-evident) characteristics of consciousness. This is one point Hegel makes in claiming that his Phenomenology of Spirit presents ‘the path of the soul which makes its way through the sequence of its own transformations as through way stations prescribed by its very nature …’ (PhdG, 9:55.36–39/¶77). By grasping some aspect of its own nature as a cogniser, each form of consciousness adopts a particular principle concerning what knowledge is. An epistemic principle implies some constraints on the character of the objects of such knowledge. Thus adopting an epistemic principle requires a concomitant ontological principle. To take examples from the first section of Hegel’s book, the form of consciousness designated as ‘sense certainty’ holds that knowledge is unmediated by conceptions, inferences, judgments or reasons, and that the world contains nothing but sheer particulars which can be grasped immediately. The form of consciousness called ‘perception’ holds that cognition occurs by perceiving objects and using observation terms, and that the world contains perceptible things with multiple features. The form of consciousness called ‘understanding’ holds that, in addition to perception,

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cognition requires inferences based on judgmental use of causal concepts and laws of nature, and that the world contains causally interacting substances structured by forces. To take a pair of epistemic and ontological principles as a form of consciousness allows latitude for developing from less to more sophisticated accounts of knowledge and its objects based on each pair of principles. To take this pair of principles as a form of consciousness is to consider them only as they can be adopted and used by consciousness – by a representative, generic homo sapiens sapiens – in attempts to comprehend the world13 – to make the kind of claims sanctioned by a conception of knowledge about the kinds of objects specified by a conception of objects. Indeed, a form of consciousness’ epistemic principle is precisely a principle concerning how to use its conception of objects in order to comprehend the world. Hegel’s neutrality about who holds a given pair of such principles allows him to focus on the more important issue of the principles themselves in connection with their putative domains of use. The most general conceptions Hegel proposes to examine in the Phenomenology include those of subject, object, knowledge and world. These terms are too abstract to specify much of anything. So Hegel proposes to examine particular sets of specific versions of these conceptions through examining their ideal employment by each form of consciousness. ‘Each’ does entail ‘every’ here; Hegel thinks he can give an exhaustive list of the forms of consciousness. Hegel’s defence of his own views about knowledge rests upon their resulting from an internal, self-critical assessment of every form of consciousness and on that basis rejecting all alternative accounts of knowledge and its objects, whilst gleaning their genuine insights. (I comment on his problematic claim to completeness in §64.) Noting the proficiencies and deficiencies of each form of consciousness, and through that of each more specific interpretation of these abstract conceptions, is to enable us, Hegel’s readers, to understand and assess the adequate specification of these abstract conceptions which Hegel purports to present, and to have justified, at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel’s argument is thus a sort of argument by elimination, where he seeks to eliminate the errors yet retain the insights of less adequate views through a self-critical process of revision. 63 KNOWLEDGE AS A RELATION. Hegel’s defence of the possibility of self-criticism rests on two main points. 13 Hegel states: ‘the moments of truth present themselves, not as abstract, pure moments, but in the peculiar determinateness of being as they are for consciousness, or as consciousness itself appears in relation to them’ (PhdG, 9:61.33–36/¶89).

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First, being conscious is fundamentally a cognitive relation to the world, whether we realise it or not. This may seem to commit a petitio principii favouring realism, but it does not; subjective idealism, too, must to account for the apparent dualism of subject and object. This claim may also seem to be a mere assertion about the structure of consciousness. However, Hegel discharges this claim by attributing it to common sense (see below, §63.1) and by examining a form of consciousness which adopts precisely this position, ‘sense certainty’ (PhdG, 9:64.15–22/¶93). Second, this cognitive relation to the world (implicitly) has a structure which affords critical assessment and revision of these leading conceptions of knowledge and of the world. If such self-criticism is possible, then Sextus is apparently mistaken to suggest that vicious circularity and petitio principii are ineluctable. 63.1 The Problem. Hegel begins his analysis of the structure of cognition by appealing to a common sense realism according to which the cognisant subject both relates itself to a known object and distinguishes itself from that object (PhdG, 9:58.23–35/¶82). Insisting that knowledge is a relation between subject and object does not appear to enable self-criticism. Indeed, it seems only to highlight the very problem to be solved. If knowledge is a relation between subject and object, how can one tell whether the object is as it seems to be? As Hegel notes, To be sure, the object seems to be for consciousness only as consciousness knows it; consciousness seems, as it were, unable to get behind the object in order to see it, not as it is for consciousness, but as it is in itself. Therefore consciousness also seems unable to examine its own knowledge by comparing it with the object. (PhdG, 9:59.35–37/¶85)

Because knowledge is a relation, any knowledge claim involves at least the conceptual distinction between the object itself and the object as it is taken to be. This conceptual distinction may well harbor a further distinction between the actual structure or features of the object and the content of the subject’s cognitive state – ignorance, if not error. Hence on the face of it, any particular knowledge claim requires assessment or validation. However, any validation would involve further knowledge and claims. These further states and claims would involve the same conceptual distinction between object and cognitive state or claim and the same possibility of ignorance or error. How then can any cognitive state or claim be assessed or validated? One cannot simply compare one’s putative knowledge with an unconceptualised ‘object itself’, knowledge by direct acquaintance is not humanly possible,14 so what could one do? Are we trapped within an opaque veil of representations? If not, how does insisting upon knowledge as a relation between subject and 14

Hegel argues for this claim in the chapter I of the Phenomenology, ‘Sense-certainty’.

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object help to show we’re not? If this problem can be solved, it must be by using putative, apparent knowledge in a virtuously circular, yet constructively self-critical manner. Surprisingly, as Theunissen (1978, 330) notes, Hegel seems to try to solve the problem of the circle of representations simply by reiterating the very problem itself. Hegel states: But the difference between the in-itself and the for-itself is already present in the very fact that consciousness knows an object at all. Something is to it the in-itself, but knowledge or the being of the object for consciousness is to it still another moment. It is upon this differentiation, which exists and is present at hand, that the examination [of knowing] is grounded. (PhdG, 9:59.37–60.3/¶85)

Hegel claims here that the distinction between the object known (the ‘initself’) and the knowledge of it (the ‘for itself’) is ‘available’ (vorhanden) to consciousness, so that consciousness can examine its own knowledge of the object. In what sense, exactly, can this differentiation between the object and the knowledge of it be ‘available’ or accessible? As was noted just above, this distinction is involved in the conception of knowledge as a relation, so that upon reflection one could recognise this conceptual distinction. Does simply recognising the problem solve it? Hardly. There is a crucial ambiguity in Hegel’s text between two senses of ‘in-itself’ and there is an important set of distinctions that Hegel marks by using different grammatical cases. (Here I shall be brief about these arguments.) Cataloguing these distinctions generates a list of four aspects of knowledge as a relation between subject and object. Furthermore, because the ‘object’ of any form of consciousness is two-fold, both the world as an object of empirical knowledge and empirical knowledge as an object (or aspect) of self-knowledge, the initial list of four aspects of knowledge must be doubled into eight aspects of consciousness as a cognitive relation. 63.2 Eight Aspects of Knowledge as a Relation. Hegel begins to explain how a form of consciousness can provide and revise its own criterion or standard of knowledge by refining a common sense notion of knowledge as a relation between subject and object. He states: In consciousness, one moment is for an other; … At the same time, this other is to consciousness not only something for it; it is also [to consciousness] something outside this relationship or in itself: the moment of truth. Therefore, in what consciousness within its own self declares as the in-itself or the true, we have the standard by which consciousness itself proposes to measure its own knowledge. (PhdG, 9:59.8–13/¶84)

This passage bears close scrutiny because the ambiguity of the phrase ‘in-

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itself’ and an important grammatical case distinction are found here. 63.2.1 Two Senses of ‘In-itself’. One sense of ‘in-itself’ is that the object of knowledge is something unto itself, regardless of what may be known, thought, believed, said or claimed about it. The preposition ‘in’ is not important; important is the object being what it is, with all of its features known and unknown. In order to avoid petitio principii, Hegel makes few claims about the structure of this object before the end of the Phenomenology, and what claims he does make are justified by strictly internal critique of forms of consciousness which advocate those claims. This sense of ‘in-itself’ may be labelled as The Object Itself (simpliciter), or ‘the object as such’. The second sense of ‘in-itself’ is crucial to Hegel’s project, for it is the standard that consciousness gives itself in order to assess (‘measure’) its own knowledge. Hegel describes this aspect of knowledge as ‘what consciousness within its own self declares as the in itself or the true …’ (ibid.). Hegel’s inclusion of the word ‘declares’ (erklärt) here requires distinguishing this sense of ‘in-itself’ from the previous one. If the object itself is something ‘outside’ its relation to consciousness, then that object cannot simply be ‘declared’ by consciousness, for anything created by a declaration originates from, and so is what it is only within, some relation to consciousness. Furthermore, if the object itself were something created by consciousness’ declaration, it would be mis-described by calling it an ‘in itself’.15 Hegel here points out that by adopting naïve realism, common sense adopts a conception of the world as being something unto itself. That consciousness has a conception of its object, Hegel signals by the phrase, ‘declares from within itself’. Adopting a conception of the object known is precisely what happens in recognising that the object known may not be as one takes it to be. What consciousness ‘posits’ is the conception that the object it knows is what it is regardless of its being known. Hegel states: From this being for another, however, we distinguish the being in itself; that which is related to knowledge is at the same time distinguished from it and is posited as existing outside this relationship too. The side of this in-itself is truth. (PhdG, 9:58.29–31/¶82)

This conception of the object is to be used as the standard for consciousness’ cognitive self-examination. (How this conception can fulfill such a function is considered shortly.) To highlight that this aspect of knowledge concerns what consciousness takes its object to be, this aspect may be designated: The Object According to Consciousness or alternatively, Consciousness’ Conception of Objects. 15

This simple but significant fact was kindly pointed out to me by Hans-Friedrich Fulda.

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63.2.2 A Grammatical Case Distinction. In half a dozen passages in the Introduction Hegel distinguishes between those objects or aspects of knowledge that are for consciousness and those that are something to consciousness, a distinction between accusative and dative cases.16 What is the significance of this distinction?17 In the above passage, Hegel says that something’s being for consciousness indicates that consciousness knows that something, that consciousness is cognitively related to it. However, this is an aspect of knowledge rather than the whole relation. Hegel agrees with Kant that sensory intuitions without conceptions are blind (and argues incisively for this in ‘Sense Certainty’). Accordingly, there is no knowledge of an object without using conceptions to identify, discriminate and localise it. The object’s being something for consciousness results from combining the two aspects distinguished above as two senses of ‘in-itself’: An object is something for consciousness when consciousness refers its conception of objects to an object itself. To put the same point slightly differently, an object is an object for consciousness insofar as consciousness takes that object to instantiate its conception of objects. This aspect of knowledge may be called: The Object for Consciousness. Hegel’s distinction between dative and accusative (grammatical) objects of consciousness marks a distinction between levels of explicitness. What is ‘for’ consciousness is something of which consciousness is explicitly aware; what is ‘to’ consciousness is something of which consciousness is aware, but not explicitly so. Hegel’s dative construction designates features of an object itself closely related to those features of that object explicitly captured by consciousness’ conception of objects, but which are not themselves explicitly captured by that conception. These features of the object itself consciousness has, so to speak, latched onto without yet understanding them. Consciousness’ mis-takings are never the less takings. The mis-taken features of the object itself fall into two cases: there may be features of the object itself of which consciousness is cognisant, but which do not figure centrally into its conception of objects; and there may be features of the object itself of which consciousness is not cognisant, but which are closely related to those features of the object captured by consciousness’ conception of objects. These ‘incidental’ features of an object itself are the first consciousness confronts in discovering the inadequacy of its conception of objects. This aspect of knowl16

PhdG, 9:58.24–31, 59.8–10, 59.21–22, 59.27–28, 59.31–34, 59.38–60.3/¶¶82, 84, 85. The importance of Hegel’s distinction between dative and accusative cases has been highlighted by Theunissen (1975, 326–30 + n. 5) and by Dove (1982, 30). However, Dove does not notice that the two distinct dative objects in Hegel’s analysis, he does not notice the ambiguity of the phrase ‘in itself’, and he does not develop these distinctions into an analysis of the structure of Hegel’s conception of a form of consciousness. (See the next note.) For sake of simplicity I have suppressed the second dative object here; it concerns how initially implicit conceptions become explicit for consciousness; see HER, 115–28. 17

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edge may be called: The Object to Consciousness. The four aspects of knowledge as a relation so far distinguished are: The object according to consciousness. The object for consciousness. The object to consciousness. The object itself. For convenience, I sometimes designate the first of these ‘consciousness’ conception of objects’, and the last as ‘the object as such’.18 63.2.3 Consciousness as Reflexive; the List Doubled. So far, knowledge has been treated generically as a relation between subject and object. What objects does consciousness putatively know? In general, two: the world as an object of empirical knowledge, and empirical knowledge as an object (or aspect) of self-knowledge.19 Self-knowledge is important to Hegel’s method because the possibility of self-criticism requires consciousness to be able to reflect upon itself, its activity and its fundamental conceptions and their use. Indeed, consciousness takes on a particular form (and so is a particular form of consciousness) precisely by adopting, if implicitly, some conception of what it, as a cogniser, is.20 Consciousness’ conception of knowledge both constrains its conception of the world and guides the use of that conception in knowing the world. Because the ‘object’ of any form of consciousness is this pair of objects – its own knowing as well as the object known – the four-fold list of aspects of knowledge as a relation explicated above forms two parallel lists of four aspects: one list concerns the ontological side, the other concerns the noetic side, of knowledge. Each of these four-fold distinctions of aspects of knowledge is generated in strict parallel to the above explication, by taking 18

This four-fold distinction of aspects of consciousness (and its subsequent elaboration below) has been developed independently, though it is similar to Theunissen’s (1978, §1). He notes an ambiguity in Hegel’s use of ‘Ansich’ and distinguishes between the object itself and the object for consciousness (ibid., 326). He stresses Hegel’s point that the object is also an object to consciousness (327f.) and emphasises that according to Hegel consciousness declares something from within itself as the in-itself or truth (330). Thus he notices each of the four aspects I have distinguished, though he does not, within one brief section, attempt to systematise them; neither does he analyse this ‘declaration’ as the adoption of a conception, nor develop the double list of aspects presented just below. 19 Twice in the Introduction Hegel indicates that the reflexive character of human consciousness, that we are self-aware, is crucial: ‘But since consciousness is for itself its own concept, it immediately transcends what is limited, and, because this limitedness is its own, it transcends itself’ (PhdG, 9:57.25–26/¶80); ‘… consciousness is on the one hand consciousness of the object, on the other hand it is consciousness of itself …’ (PhdG, 9:59.31–32/¶85); cf. Philosophische Propädeutik, „Bewußtseinslehre für die Mittelklasse“ (1809ff.) = „Fragment zur Psychologie“, §1 (GW 10:515/MM 4:111/Hegel 1986, 55). 20 This is one point to Hegel’s claim that ‘consciousness is for itself its own concept’ (PhdG, 9:57.25–26/¶80).

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‘the object’ of knowledge to be first, the world, and then, empirical knowledge as itself an object (or aspect) of self-knowledge. Hence there is no need to repeat that derivation again for these two special cases. Because cognition or knowledge as an activity is central to Hegel’s issues and analyses, I here use the verb ‘knowing’ rather than the noun ‘knowledge’. The complete list of aspects of knowing as a relation is as follows: Conscious Knowing as a Relation and as Self-relation 1. Consciousness’ conception of the world: The World ACCORDING TO Consciousness.

A.

Consciousness’ conception of knowing: Knowing ACCORDING TO Consciousness.

2. The world taken as instantiating consciousness’ conception of the world: The World FOR Consciousness.

B.

Knowing taken as instantiating consciousness’ conception of knowing: Knowing FOR Consciousness.

3. Aspects of the world closely related to, yet not included in, consciousness’ conception of the world: The World TO Consciousness.

C.

Aspects of knowing closely related to, yet not included in, consciousness’ conception of knowing: Knowing TO Consciousness.

4. The world as it actually is, with all its features known and unknown: The World ITSELF.

D.

Knowing as it actually is, with all its features known and unknown: Knowing ITSELF.

This doubled quadruple distinction of aspects of consciousness as a cognitive relation to objects is only tenuously indicated in the text of Hegel’s Introduction. However, distinctions are to be found in his text, and only by making these distinctions can one construe the difficult remainder of Hegel’s Introduction (HER, 91–139), and also Hegel’s ensuing Phenomenology of Spirit. This shows that these distinctions are operative in Hegel’s Introduction. If Hegel’s analysis of knowledge as a relation is as rich as here indicated, he has great resources to explicate and defend the possibility of constructive self-criticism. Tugendhat (1979, 303) rejects the attempt to understand conscious or intentional relations with ‘unclarified’ notions of ‘positing’ and ‘subject/object’ relations and faults Hegel for so doing. Tugendhat entirely misses that Hegel agrees with him on these points, contra Fichte and Schelling. My exacting explication of these passages shows that Hegel does not leave those notions undeveloped; indeed when all is told Hegel’s account not only covers, but significantly augments and supercedes Tugendhat’s (1979, 325) suggested alternative!

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Some readers may in this regard think of recent distinctions between ‘narrow’ and ‘broad’ senses of mental content, where the former is what some person S is directly and fully aware of thinking or experiencing, or can easily become fully aware of it by simple reflection, whilst the latter may involve extra-mental contextual circumstances, whether somatic, environmental or social. Such distinctions are not unrelated to Hegel’s, but have the opposite aim, namely to preserve some form of first-person mental ‘self-transparency’ or ‘access internalism’, regardless of extra-mental contextual circumstances. In contrast, Hegel’s distinctions – and his ensuing use of them within his phenomenological analyses and assessments – aim to highlight how such apparently self-transparent content is rooted in and parasitic upon much richer contextual factors, regardless of whether we may be aware of these factors first-person. Like Burge (1979, 2010), Hegel highlights partial understanding, though unlike Burge, Hegel explicates how it is possible for us, and how important it is to self-assessment and to resolving the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion. The enormous resistance to Burge’s observations and analyses is symptomatic of inherited, unself-critical Cartesianism, rendered yet more incorrigible by its proponents’ dismissal of the philosophical relevance of historical philosophy (see below, §§100–110). 63.3 Hegel’s Criterial Inference. The crucial question now is: Can an observed form of consciousness determine whether its conception of the world corresponds to the world itself, if consciousness has no access to the world itself except insofar as the world is for consciousness? Likewise, can an observed form of consciousness determine whether its conception of knowing corresponds to knowing itself, if consciousness has no access to knowing itself except insofar as knowing is for consciousness? Hegel’s answer to this double question can be seen by examining the eight aspects of knowledge as a relation listed above. Since the correspondence of conception and object is something an observed form of consciousness is to assess or to recognise when it may be achieved, consciousness must be able to recognise this correspondence on the basis of its explicit awareness of some aspects of knowing or knowledge. The aspects of which consciousness is (or at least comes to be) explicitly aware are its conceptions of the world and of knowing and the world and knowing for it (aspects 1, A, 2, and B). It may seem that if these aspects are all consciousness can work with, then its criterion of knowing must be hopelessly subjective, as the relevant standard would be ‘the object itself’, not merely whatever consciousness may take it to be. This objection misses the main insight of Hegel’s response to Sextus’s challenge: Because the world for consciousness and knowing for consciousness (aspects 2, B) result from consciousness’ use of its conceptions of the

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world and of knowing (aspects 1, A) to comprehend the world itself and knowing itself (aspects 4, D), the world itself and knowing itself figure directly into the world and into knowing for consciousness (aspects 2, B). Because the world itself and knowing itself are central to the world and knowing for consciousness (i.e., the world itself and knowing itself are apparent for consciousness), if the world and knowing for consciousness coincide with consciousness’ conceptions of the world and of knowing, then these conceptions also correspond to their objects, the world itself and knowing itself. Conversely, if consciousness’ conceptions of the world or of knowing do not correspond to the world itself or to knowing itself, then the theoretical and practical inferences and inquiries consciousness bases upon these conceptions result in expectations which diverge from the actual behaviour of the world or from actual cognitive activities or practices. The experience of defeated expectations makes manifest a divergence between the world or knowing for consciousness and consciousness’ conceptions of the world or of knowing, and so between these conceptions and their objects. What consciousness takes to instantiate its conception of knowing or its conception of the world would be found not to instantiate those conceptions. This is why it is important to Hegel’s method to consider principles as used within their putative domains: so long as principles of knowing or its objects are inadequate, any examples from those domains will be far richer in kind than is allowed by the principle conceptions under examination. By thorough and scrupulous use of its own epistemic and ontological principles, features of objects in their domains unaccounted for by those principles can be revealed. Such discoveries may only require reconsidering the importance of previously recognised, though discounted, features of those objects, or they may involve recognising previously unknown features of knowing or of the world. This is how categorial features of knowing or of the world which are initially objects merely ‘to’ consciousness can become explicit for it. For example, the form of consciousness called ‘sense certainty’ finds that it is utterly unable to account for its ability to designate the particulars it knows without admitting the use of conceptions, and so must rescind its principle of aconceptual knowledge; the form of consciousness called ‘perception’ finds that perception alone cannot determine that the perceived white, cubical and sour properties all belong to one and the same grain of salt, and so must grant that there is more to empirical conceptions than observation terms; causal conceptions are also required. By making previously unaccounted or unrecognised features of the world or of knowing manifest in this way, defeated expectations supply information that can be used to revise conceptions of the world and of knowing. The internal coherence of a form of

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consciousness is only possible if its conceptions of the world and of knowing correspond to the world itself and to knowing itself. This thesis grounds Hegel’s confidence in the internal self-criticism of observed forms of consciousness.21 There is, of course, an important distinction between the actual incoherence of an inadequate form of consciousness and the recognition of that incoherence. Only persistence in using and elaborating a pair of epistemic and ontological principles, together with intellectual integrity in assessing their adequacy, affords the detection of otherwise unrecognised incoherence, inadequacy or error. Hegel’s criterion is thus a conditio sine qua non for the truth and the justification of any such pair of principles, and he advocates fallibilism. However, due to the second-order level of his inquiry, and due to the systematic interrelations of the various categorial features of the objects under investigation (that is, the philosophically salient features of empirical knowledge and of empirical objects in general22), Hegel can reasonably contend that meeting the negative condition of the absence of detected incoherence in the long run is a very rigorous criterion for the positive condition sought, namely, for the correspondence of a pair of conceptions of knowledge and its objects with the actual structure of human knowing and with the actual structure of the objects of human knowledge. If Hegel’s criterial inference still seems implausible, note how sophisticated is his criterion. First, recall that this criterion is employed by a subject which is inherently related both to the world itself and to knowledge itself. In order for self-criticism to be possible, this claim simply needs to be true; no particular form of consciousness need also to know that this is true in order to be self-critical. Accordingly, even when there is a discrepancy between the object according to consciousness and the object for consciousness (and hence a discrepancy between these aspects and the object itself), an object’s being for consciousness is nonetheless the object’s being for consciousness, 21 Hegel’s criterial inference may suggest Davidson’s (1984) view of how ‘coherence generates correspondence’, except that Hegel’s project has both ‘externalist’ aspects (see note 38) and a meta-level, categorial concern with the truth of theories of knowledge, neither of which pertain to Davidson’s view. Hegel’s criterial inference is closer to Haack’s (1993) ‘foundherentist’ view that joint experiential anchoring and coherent integration within a comprehensive set of beliefs provides truth-conducive justification. Hegel’s criterial inference is designed to ‘ratify’ (as Haack says) principles of justification as being truth-conducive. However, Hegel has higher aspirations for such ratification, in part because he thinks he can give an informative critique of all relevantly human kinds of theories of knowledge. (For critique of Davidson, see Haack 1993, 60–72; Westphal 2016b.) 22 For example, our abilities to use tokens of demonstrative terms is directly related to our ability to use conceptions of individuation, space, and time competently (this point is crucial to Hegel’s refutation of ‘sense certainty’); the occurrent properties of things are directly related to their dispositional properties (this point is crucial to Hegel’s transition from ‘perception’ to ‘force and understanding’).

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even if that object is misconstrued; and the object itself is an object to consciousness throughout. Second, no single correspondence of object and conception is sought. Consciousness must not only reconcile its conception of the world with the world for it, and its conception of knowing with knowing for it (with its manifest cognitive activity), this pair of reconciliations must be mutually compatible; indeed, they must mutually support one another. It does not suffice to eliminate discrepancies between one’s account of knowing and one’s cognitive activity only to wind up unable to justify claims about the kinds of objects one takes oneself to know. Third, as an aspect of overcoming what Hegel calls merely ‘natural ideas’ on these topics, consciousness must not only have conceptions adequate to its manifest cognition and objects of knowledge, it must comprehend that it has adequate conceptions and what these conceptions are. Given Hegel’s concern to avoid petitio principii and his use of determinate negation, the adequacy of these conceptions can only be known by comprehending the proficiencies and deficiencies of less adequate conceptions. Finally, Hegel holds that, to be adequate, a theory of knowledge and its objects must be knowable in accord with its own principles. Taken together, these points form a set of five integrated criteria: 1. No detectable discrepancy between the world for consciousness and the world according to consciousness (between aspects 1 and 2). 2. No detectable discrepancy between knowing for consciousness and knowing according to consciousness (between aspects A and B). 3. No detectable discrepancy between (1) and (2) (between the pairs of aspects 1 & 2 and A & B). 4. A matched pair of accounts of the genesis, introduction and use of these conceptions of knowing and of the world which indicates how they were generated and justified by critical assessment of less adequate alternatives. 5. An account of how these conceptions of knowing and of the world and their introduction and use can be learned, used and understood on the basis of those same conceptions and usage. This set of criteria, to be satisfied conjointly, is very rigorous. They do not address first-order problems of theory selection in philosophy of science because they operate at a level of generality at which different conceptions of knowing require different conceptions of the objects of knowing, and viceversa. However, at the second-order epistemological level of inquiry pursued by Hegel, these criteria may be plenty. Indeed, it is far from obvious that any epistemology has ever satisfied them, including Hegel’s.

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Hegel’s criteria of adequacy for any philosophical view or account of human experience or knowledge, starting with his sophisticated criterial inference based upon the complex of required mutual correspondences and corroborations (warrant, justificatory support) amongst the four explicit aspects of a form of consciousness’ putative knowing of the world and of its own key cognitive capacities and conceptions, and running through his set of five conjoined criteria, are all designed to meet Tetens’ requirement, adopted by Kant, that we must be able to ‘realise’ our key concepts and principles, by demonstrably indicating at least some of their proper instances, even when we ourselves qua cognizant agents are to be one of those instances. Not only are Hegel’s criteria designed to meet Tetens’ cognitive-semantic requirement, they are designed to be able to meet that requirement demonstrably, i.e., evidently, and to do so without relapsing into scepticism, conventionalism, relativism, dogmatism or aconceptual knowledge by mere acquaintance. All of this Hegel achieves by explicating the commonsense notion of knowledge as a relation between a cognizant subject and an object, though with keen awareness of Kant’s use of Tetens’ requirement, the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion, his own early, nascent yet incisive internal critique of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and keen appreciation of the Parmenidean exercises required to acquire, assess and master philosophical knowledge.23 The convergence of these considerations are further developed and corroborated throughout the remainder of this study. Hegel’s criterial inference rests upon several logically contingent doctrines, which I have postponed to focus on the logic of his criterion. These further doctrines need only be true for his criterion to work. If constructive self-criticism is possible, then we can ultimately determine whether these further doctrines are true. (In a word, this is how Hegel discharges his initial assumptions.) Amongst the doctrines presupposed by Hegel’s criterion is that memory generally is reliable, that the ‘K-K’ thesis (knowing that x entails knowing that one knows that x) is false, and most importantly, that although there is no knowledge of objects without applying conceptions to them, our experience of those objects needn’t be restricted to just those features of an object captured by the content of one’s general conception of objects, where that content would be parsed by a description. In the Introduction, Hegel’s recommendation for his criterion is programmatic: Accepting his criterion allows for the possibility of constructive self-criticism, and so for the possibility of responding to the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion; rejecting Hegel’s criterion is to succumb to Sextus’ scepticism at the second level of epis23 Cf. Plato, Parm. 135c–136d, Theat. 162, 168; Aristotle, Met. 1:985a1, 2:994b32–995a20, 4:1005b1; Hegel G&W 4:207.15–25, 211.20–28; Enz. §81Z2; Hegel (2000), 327–8; VGP 8:34/ MM 19:79-81/H&S 2:57-58.

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temological inquiry. Hegel’s refutation of scepticism at the first order of empirical knowledge must be a substantive result of his presentation, not a mere corollary of his second-order criterion. 64 THE ISSUE OF COMPLETENESS. Hegel claims to present the complete series of forms of consciousness, and his justification of his own views depends upon critically rejecting all (relevant) alternatives. Certainly Hegel has not considered every logically possible position, and has provided neither proof nor claim that he has. What plausibility can Hegel give to his claim to completeness? Three points may be briefly mentioned on this topic. Perhaps Hegel’s main support for his claim to completeness is his teleological philosophy of history, according to which the series of forms of consciousness he recounts is the series required to complete the principal development of the world-spirit, by which the world-whole achieves self-knowledge through our achieving knowledge of it, and of ourselves within it. If Hegel could make this part of his philosophy of history independently plausible, then he may have powerful grounds for his claim to completeness. This topic cannot be explored here, but I confess some doubtful. Setting aside Hegel’s philosophy of history, there is still something quite strong that Hegel can say in his defence. He claims that each form of consciousness devolves from some characteristic feature of human cognition and its objects. Part of the import of this claim is that the mere logical possibility of an epistemology, or of a conception of knowing and its objects, does not suffice to legitimise it: an adequate epistemology must also account for what knowing and its objects are like for us. This is central to Hegel’s replacing epistemology with phenomenology, and it shows in his criteria as the insistence on what knowledge and its objects are like for us (aspects 2, B) in addition to our conceptions or theories of knowledge and its objects (aspects 1, A). Where Kant’s transcendental reflections led him to inventory our most basic forms of judgment and of sensory intake, Hegel takes a methodological cue from Kant’s (GS 8:17) historical reflections, that the capacities of our species are not manifest in any one individual, because we each develop some but not all of our abilities and talents, and we do so within cultural and material circumstances not of our own choosing. Instead, the capacities of our species are more clearly identifiable cross-culturally and historically, because such comparisons can reveal the range of abilities and talents typical of, because possible for, members of our species. By examining and assessing ‘knowing as a phenomenon’ as it appears in cultural and intellectual history

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and within our contemporary world (PhdG 9:55/¶¶76, 77), Hegel develops an alternative strategy to inventory our most basic (apparent, manifest, candidate) cognitive capacities, capitalising upon Kant’s suggested ‘History of Pure Reason’ (KdrV A852–6/B880–4). This strategy is his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. Its proof-structure parallels Kant’s objective and subjective deductions, which aim to demonstrate that and how we are able to use a priori concepts and principle legitimately, in justified cognitive judgments about our worldly surroundings. However, Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology develops a social and historical account of our capacities to use these concepts and principles competently. Hegel’s account parallels and undergirds Kant’s own account of our cognitive functions and functionality, Kant’s cognitive architecture, so to speak, but defers Hegel’s account of cognitive psychology to his systematic encyclopedia (below, §§140–146). (The structure of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology and its proof-structure are charted in Westphal 2009b, 28–29.) Even if we grant that the adequacy of any epistemology requires its plausibly being an account of our human cognitive capacities, it would be too much to say that Hegel had already treated every possible nuance within the domain of plausibly human accounts of knowledge. However, because Hegel proceeds by showing, where we are supposed to reap the philosophical benefits of those displays, the line between what is strictly speaking to be found in Hegel’s text and what may only be able to be read into or out of it may simply not exist. What matters for Hegel’s phenomenological enterprise is that the structures and relations he claims there are, are there to be found in the indicated form of consciousness; how fully articulate they or their assessment may be is another matter. If we’re now able to pose more refined questions or consider more refined views than any form of consciousness Hegel examines represents, it is incumbent upon us to determine whether the points Hegel makes about those less refined forms of consciousness have telling analogues in positions we may wish he had considered. Because the instruction Hegel offers is suppose to be for ‘us’ his readers, we should be willing to reconstruct what he displays in terms which, on the one hand, capture what he says and does in those displays, whilst also addressing ‘our’ (contemporary, linguistic, hermeneutic, analytic or perhaps post-modern) idioms for and approaches to the issues he discusses.

CHAPTER 11

Hegel’s Transcendental Proof of Mental Content Externalism 65 INTRODUCTION. This chapter addresses two questions important to understanding the aims, structure, results and significance of Hegel’s analysis of ‘Self-Consciousness’ in the 1807 Phenomenology. Franco Chiereghin (2009, 55–8) notes the apparent oddity that Hegel explicates his own concept of thought (Denken) only after examining the Lord and Bondsman (in §A), in the introduction to §B, ‘The Freedom of Self-Consciousness’. Chiereghin explicates Hegel’s concept of thought and provides several important reasons why Hegel explicates his concept of thought at this specific juncture. Here I aim to augment Chiereghin’s answer to the question, why Hegel explicates his concept of thought only at this juncture, in order to answer a further question: If Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology is to examine – and indeed to establish – the reality of absolute knowing1 by examining a ‘complete’ series of forms of consciousness (PhdG 9:56.36–7/¶79), why and with what justification, if any, does he omit the familiar Cartesian ego-centric predicament, according to which we know our own thoughts, feelings and sensory contents, though nothing about any physical or natural world ‘outside’ ourselves?2 Answering these questions requires examining, if briefly, Hegel’s semantics of singular cognitive reference (§66) and how he presents and justifies this semantics in ‘Consciousness’ (§67) and in §A of ‘Self-Consciousness’ (§68). These points afford an illuminating answer to the second question, why the Cartesian ego-centric predicament does not appear in the series of forms of consciousness examined in the 1807 Phenomenology (§69). Here I cannot reconstruct Hegel’s analysis in ‘Self-Consciousness’ in detail; instead I highlight some important aspects of Hegel’s analysis which have not yet received their due. I postpone examination of Hegel’s Intersubjectivity Thesis, that we can only be self-conscious if we are self-consciously aware of other self-conscious agents (see below, §§71–91), and all other issues in ‘Self-Con1

PhdG 58.13–14/¶81; cf. PhdG 25.16–17/¶29. Beiser (2005, 174–91) contends that Hegel’s analysis of the Lord and Bondsman aims to refute solipsism, an important component of the ego-centric predicament. Critical reservations about Beiser’s analysis are developed below, §§76–77. 2

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sciousness’, to focus on Hegel’s concept of thought and his cognitive semantics. The present conspectus, I submit, becomes much more telling when considering in detail the experiences of the relevant forms of consciousness, for as Harris notes (HL 1:54), Hegel’s phenomenological “Science of experience’ is meant to be the remedy for ‘formalism’ of all kinds’. 66 HEGEL’S SEMANTICS OF SINGULAR COGNITIVE REFERENCE. Analytic philosophy began by raising semantics, as the analysis of conceptual or linguistic meaning and reference, to the rank of first philosophy, thus supplanting both prior claimants to that rank, metaphysics and epistemology respectively. Following Gettier’s (1963) devastating critique of contemporaneous, anti-naturalistic epistemology, which rested entirely upon conceptual analysis and dismissed concerns about our actual cognitive functioning, analytic philosophy has developed a host of significant criticisms of Cartesianism. Yet the aim to supplant epistemology by semantics persists in the work of, e.g., Davidson and Brandom. Yet all of these interesting developments have occurred whilst disregarding that the first great anti-Cartesian was Kant, who already recognised that resolving key epistemological issues requires a sound semantics of specifically cognitive reference to particular spatio-temporal objects or events.3 The centrality of cognitive semantics to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is evident in statements such as this: It is possible experience alone that can give our concepts reality; without it, every concept is only an idea, without truth and reference to (Beziehung auf) an object. Hence the possible empirical concept was the standard by which it had to be judged whether the idea is a mere idea and thought-entity or instead encounters its object in the world. (KdrV B517, tr. Guyer & Wood)

Following Tetens, Kant means by the ‘reality’ of a concept the real possibility of its referring to one or more specifiable spatio-temporal objects, events or structures (henceforth: ‘particulars’). Kant’s express attention to the issue, whether our concepts can or under what conditions they do ‘connect’ or refer to (sich beziehen auf) objects, indicates his central concern with issues of singular reference, i.e. determinate reference to specific, localised particulars. Kant’s contention that our concepts can only be referred to specific particulars in cognitive judgments in which we identify those localised particulars indicates his concern with specifically cognitive reference to particulars. Kant’s critique of Leibniz in the ‘Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection’ 3

See KTPR, Westphal (2007). Bird (2006) explicates substantially the same semantic theory within Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

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shows that descriptions alone cannot secure singular cognitive reference because no matter how specific or detailed a description (or analogously any combination of concepts in a proposition or judgment) may be, in principle this conceptual specificity (classificatory content, intension) alone cannot determine whether this description is empty, definite or ambiguous because it refers to no, only to one or to several particulars. Whether a description refers at all, and if so, to how many particulars, is equally a function of the particular contents of the world. Accordingly, securing singular cognitive reference requires locating relevant particulars within space and time. Locating these particulars requires singular sensory presentation, either directly by simple perception or indirectly by observational instruments. One central result of Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ and ‘Amphiboly’ is nicely formulated by Evans: … the line tracing the area of [ascriptive] relevance delimits that area in relation to which one or the other, but not both, of a pair of contradictory predicates may be chosen. And that is what it is for a line to be a boundary, marking something off from other things. (Evans 1985, 36; cf. 34–37)

Evans’ analysis shows that specifying the relevant boundary for the use of either member of a pair (or set) of contrary (i.e., mutually exclusive) predicates is only possible by specifying the region relevant to the manifest characteristic in question, and vice versa, where this region will be either co-extensive with or included within the spatio-temporal region occupied by some particular. Hence predication requires conjointly specifying the relevant spatio-temporal region and some manifest characteristics of any particular we self-consciously experience or identify. I shall call this the ‘Evans Thesis’. Kant recognised that these conjoint specifications may be rough and approximate. More importantly, he recognised that spatio-temporal designation of, and ascription of manifest characteristics to, any particular are conjoint, mutually interdependent, specifically cognitive achievements which integrate sensation (‘sensibility’) and conception (‘understanding’). Both are required to sense, to identify and to integrate the various characteristics of any one particular we sense into a percept of it, which requires distinguishing it from its surroundings by identifying the spatio-temporal region it occupies along with at least some of its manifest characteristics.4 Integrating the sensed characteristics of any one particular, and distinguishing them from those of other particulars surrounding it, requires perceptual synthesis guided in part by competent use of a priori concepts of ‘time’, ‘times’, ‘space’, ‘spa4

In the second edition Deduction (§26) Kant stresses identifying the spatial ‘form’ (Gestalt), hence the boundary, of a perceived house (KdrV B162); see below, §112.7.

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ces’, ‘I’, ‘object’, ‘individuation’ and ‘cause’.5 Hegel recognised the great importance of Kant’s semantics of singular cognitive reference. He further recognised that most of Kant’s central results in the Critique of Pure Reason, both theoretical and practical, can be justified by Kant’s cognitive semantics without invoking Kant’s transcendental idealism. Indeed Hegel argues for Kant’s semantics of singular cognitive reference far more directly than Kant, beginning in ‘Sense Certainty’ with his internal critique of putative aconceptual knowledge of particulars, now familiar as Russell’s ‘knowledge by acquaintance’.6 67 HEGEL’S JUSTIFICATION OF HIS SEMANTICS OF SINGULAR COGNITIVE REFERENCE IN ‘CONSCIOUSNESS’. Hegel develops his semantics of singular cognitive reference beginning in ‘Sense Certainty’.7 Sense Certainty holds that sensation is sufficient and conception unnecessary for our knowledge of spatio-temporal particulars, e.g., the night, this tree, that house. All it claims about any particular it knows is that ‘it is’ (PhdG 9:63.17/¶91). It cannot articulate any more specific claim without conceding the role of concepts within sensory knowledge. However, the abstractness of its cognitive claim reveals that Sense Certainty can be neither a commonsense nor a tenable view. Because its cognitive claim is so abstract, it is falsified by the passage of time, during which either sensed particulars themselves change or we shift the focus of our sensory attention. Obviously we all know how to distinguish between and to designate various particulars and our various sensory experiences of them. So doing, however, requires our possession and competent use of concepts of ‘time’ and of ‘times’, 5

These concepts are a priori because they cannot be defined or acquired in accord with concept empiricism; instead they are presupposed for identifying any particular, including any particular sensory quality, on the basis of which alone we can either define or learn empirical concepts. ‘Cause’ enters this list because, Kant argues, causal judgments are discriminatory and we can only individuate particulars by identifying some of their causal characteristics (KTPR, §§22, 23, 36–39, 62). 6 In Westphal (2000), (2002–03) I examine in detail and defend Hegel’s justification of the Evans Thesis in ‘Sense Certainty’; below I examine some of the role of Hegel’s semantics of singular cognitive reference in ‘Consciousness’ and ‘Self-Consciousness’ (§§54–59). Though my discussion (§60) relies on those previous analyses, it also augments them. Westphal (2010a) defends Hegel’s critique of Russell’s ‘knowledge by acquaintance’; my (2013a) shows (in effect) how Hegel’s critique of ‘Sense Certainty’ holds against Hume; my (2002–03) shows how it holds against several of Hegel’s German contemporaries; all support my attribution to Hegel of this specific cognitive semantics. 7 Hegel’s chapter titles are set in quotes, e.g.: ‘Sense Certainty’; the corresponding form of consciousness is designated with capitals without quotes, e.g.: Sense Certainty; the core philosophical view espoused by a form of consciousness is designated by the relevant phrase, though without quotes or capitals, e.g.: sense certainty.

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i.e., periods of time during which any particular is experienced. Hegel makes analogous points about the roles of the concepts ‘space’ and ‘spaces’ (regions of space) by considering a shift in attention from a tree to a house (PhdG 9:65.24–30/¶98). We know how to distinguish trees from houses and how to keep track of their respective locations and viewings. Hegel’s point is that this commonsense know-how is not merely sensory; it requires competent (if implicit) use of the concepts of ‘space’ and ‘spaces’ (regions of space) to designate and mentally coördinate the locations of the various particulars we sense on various occasions. To maintain its core view, in the second phase of its phenomenological examination Sense Certainty restricts its central conception of knowledge by maintaining that, within the context of each of its own cognitive claims, its knowledge of its object is immediate, direct and aconceptual (PhdG 9:66.7–8, .12–15/¶¶100, 101). Regarding this retrenchment Hegel observes that one person claims ‘I see a tree’ whilst another claims ‘I see a house, not a tree’ (PhdG 9:66.17–19/¶101). Both claims are equally legitimate, and yet ‘one truth vanishes in the other’ (PhdG 9:66.21/¶101). Why? These two claims are only inconsistent with each other if one fails to distinguish between subjects of knowledge who make various claims. This is Hegel’s point: the strictly aconceptual, entirely sensory model of knowledge of particulars espoused by Sense Certainty provides neither an account of, nor even a basis for, our doing what we all commonsensically do, namely, to distinguish our own perceptual claims from those of others, in part by self-reference using tokens of the first-person pronoun type, ‘I’, in contradistinction to second- or third-person, and to first-person plural, types of pronouns and their token usage. This capacity is not, Hegel here shows, simply sensory; it is also a conceptual ability based in our recognising that any specific use of the term ‘I’ in sensory knowledge is significant and can be understood only by recognising that its use presumes that the speaker serves as the point of origin of an implicit spatio-temporal framework, reference to which is required to identify the relevant spatio-temporal region designated by the speaker when designating sensed particulars, and distinguishing her or his own claims from those made by others. In this way, Hegel makes the complementary point about ‘I’ which he made previously about ‘this’, ‘now’ and ‘here’. Sense Certainty attributes these difficulties to its attempt to export its cognitive claims to others outside its own cognitive context. Accordingly in the third phase of its phenomenological examination it holds that aconceptual sensory knowledge of any particular is possible only within any one specific cognitive episode in which it senses that particular, which can be designated solely by ostensive gesture, without using token demonstrative terms

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(specific uses of, e.g., ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘now’), nor any other concepts (PhdG 9: 67.27–30/¶106). Sense Certainty now grants equal priority to the object and to itself as cognisant subject and stresses that the key point is the direct, immediate cognitive relation it (purportedly) has to its object (PhdG 9:67.12–15/ ¶104). By disregarding other subjects and other instances of knowledge and by seizing upon any one particular cognitive connection, Sense Certainty proposes to avoid problems with spatio-temporal scope and to obtain immediate, aconceptual knowledge of some one sensed particular. Hegel’s main critical point is that scope problems are neither avoided nor resolved by recourse to ostensive gestures. The punctual here and now neither contains nor specifies any sensed particular, whilst any extended here and now which can contain or designate a sensed particular requires specifying conceptually the relevant region of space and period of time in which that particular is located and sensed, where any region of space contains an indefinite plurality of punctual ‘heres’ and any period of time contains an indefinite plurality of momentary, vanishing ‘nows’ (PhdG 9:68.29–33/¶108). In our sensory knowledge ostention cannot be pointilistic, though if sense certainty is tenable it must be (PhdG 9:68.18–20/¶107). Our cognitive use of ostention, too, has sense and performs an experiential or a cognitive role only within a presupposed, implicit yet conceptually structured spatio-temporal framework within which the cognisant subject occupies the point of origin.8 In conclusion Hegel considers one last, desperate effort by exponents of aconceptual sensory knowledge of particulars (i.e., naïve realists) to preserve the mutual independence of sensation and conception within our sensory knowledge of particulars (Westphal 2002–03). To designate the spatio-temporal particulars she claims to know, the naïve realist now describes them. Beginning with the hopelessly indefinite ‘absolutely individual thing’, which indifferently describes any and every ‘individual thing’; s/he then improves this with, e.g., ‘this bit of paper’, although any and every bit of paper is a ‘this bit of paper’; then s/he embarks upon the infinite task of exhaustively describing any one particular. Yet no matter how extensive and specific is her description, by itself no description, even if it is grammatically definite or singular, determines whether it is ‘logically’, referentially empty, definite or ambiguous because it describes no, only one or indifferently several particular (e.g.) bits of paper. To resolve this problem, the consciousness under ob8 How one can understand something both implicitly and yet conceptually appears puzzling on the nominalist presumption that concepts and their understanding can be exhaustively specified by the use of terms, that is, words. Hegel rejects nominalism in part by justifying the legitimate cognitive use of a range of a priori concepts which are generated, as it were, spontaneously by the human mind. These issues require careful consideration which cannot be provided here; their proper understanding is facilitated by Pinker (1994), Wolff (1995) and Hanna (2006).

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servation finally combines its linguistic descriptions with demonstrative reference, thus conceding that both are required for, and both are integrated within, any actual instance of sensory knowledge of spatio-temporal particulars (PhdG 9:70.21–29/¶110). Once it recognises the roles of both sensation and conception (including both demonstrative reference (deixiH) and descriptive attribution of sensed qualities) in our sensory knowledge of particulars, the observed consciousness admits the ineliminable roles of concepts and of predicative ascription or classification and spati0-temporal delimitation, within sensory knowledge and advances to Perception. Hegel’s examination of Perception further supports his semantics of singular cognitive reference by showing that the relation ‘thing-property’ is distinct and irreducible to the quantitative relations ‘set-member’ and ‘onemany’, or to the relations ‘whole-part’ and ‘product-ingredient’. Two key aspects of any one perceptible thing, its unity and its plurality of properties or features, are interdependent: there is no single, unitary thing without its plurality of properties and there are no properties without some one thing to which they are proper. Something is a perceptible thing if and only if it unifies a plurality of properties, and conversely: Something is a plurality of properties if and only if they are unified in some one thing. Hegel’s demonstration of this conclusion involves showing that only by identifying its properties can we identify any one thing, and conversely, only by identifying that one thing can we identify a plurality of sensed qualities as its properties. Hegel thus joins Hume and Kant in recognising that our perceptual knowledge must solve what in contemporary neuro-psychology is called the perceptual ‘binding problem’: How do we determine whether one and the same particular (instead of several) stimulate, e.g., different receptors in the retina, or which stimulate different receptors in different sensory modalities? This problem must be solved in order for us to engage at all in predicative judgments (ascriptions of features), which are required for perceptual knowledge in the ways identified by Kant, Hegel and Evans, who show that predication requires distinguishing any one sensed particular from its surroundings by identifying its spatial boundary by discriminating some of its manifest characteristics from those of other particulars surrounding it. Hegel’s justification of the transition from ‘Perception’ to ‘Force and Understanding’ recognises, like Kant, that only through competent (if implicit) use of causal judgments can we identify manifest, sensed characteristics as properties of some one thing which causally integrates and manifests them; the integration of various features wthin any one thing is due to its causal integrity. The conclusion to these aspects of Hegel’s critique of Sense Certainty and of Perception is tantamount to the Evans Thesis, which concerns predication,

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a central component of perceptual knowledge. To this thesis Hegel adds that these conceptual abilities are enabled by our possession and competent use of a series of pure a priori concepts, including ‘time’, ‘times’, ‘space’, ‘spaces’, ‘plurality’ (number and individuation), ‘I’ (oneself) and ‘object’ (thing). Like Kant, Hegel embeds Evans’ semantic thesis in a richer epistemological context, because they recognise the distinction between the semantic content of concepts or terms as such (roughly, their intensions or connotations) and the specifically cognitive significance concepts or terms (singly or in combination) obtain when they are referred to spatio-temporally localised particulars. This second semantic element is cognitive because only when referred to localised particulars can thoughts, statements or judgments be either true or false, accurate or inaccurate, and justified or unjustified. Neither descriptions nor concatenations of concepts (propositions) are even candidates for truth or falsehood (etc.) unless and until they are referred to specific, localised particulars. I stress ‘localised’ to recall that the presumptive judge, some cognizant Subject, must locate the relevant particular(s) within space and time, however approximately or putatively. This is a key reason why philosophy of language cannot supplant epistemology, and why contemporary philosophers should take very seriously Kant’s and Hegel’s semantics of singular cognitive reference. In ‘Force and Understanding’ Hegel makes two key points which are based, in part, on his semantics of singular cognitive reference and which link this semantics with his concept of thought (see below, §68). First, Hegel contends – rightly, I submit – that the very concept of ‘law-like relations’, and likewise the very concept of ‘force’, both require inter-defined factors into which causal phenomena can be analysed.9 Hegel contends that adequate scientific explanation provides the sole and sufficient grounds for determining the constitutive characteristics of the objects and events in nature, by providing maximally precise, quantified specification of their constitution, parameters and interrelations, including their interactions. An adequate scientific explanation justifies ascribing causal forces to material phenomena because so far as logical, metaphysical or mathematical necessities are concerned, natural phenomena could instantiate any mathematical function whatsoever, different functions at different times or no such function at all. The fact that a natural phenomenon exhibits a mathematical function indicates, as nothing else can, that something within that phenomenon is structured in accord with the mathematical function it exhibits. That ‘something’ is the structure of the causes which generate that phenomenon. Though we may be mistaken about the laws governing the causal structure of phenom9

PhdG 93.7–94.28/¶¶152–4; see Westphal (2015a).

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ena, this is a matter to be determined by empirical investigation, not by metaphysical speculation nor by empiricist scepticism.10 Hegel justifies realism about causal forces in part by using his semantics of singular cognitive reference to rule out various empiricist and infallibilist objections to causal realism which stress various ‘logical gaps’ involved in causal realist interpretations of scientific theories. According to such critics, ‘logical gaps’ in a line of scientific reasoning count as gaps in the cognitive justification (purportedly) provided by that scientific reasoning. This prevalent premiss faithfully if unwittingly follows Tempier (1277). Hegel’s point to the contrary is that treating logical gaps as cognitive, justificatory gaps presumes infallibilist models of justification which are suited only to formal domains, and in principle are irrelevant to the non-formal domains of empirical (whether commonsense or natural-scientific) or moral knowledge. In non-formal domains mere logical possibilities have no cognitive status because they lack reference to any localised particulars. Thus in principle they cannot provide counter-examples to justificatory reasoning in non-formal domains. This basic point of Hegel’s semantics of singular cognitive reference undercuts a broad swath of considerations widely held to support anti- or non-realism about causal forces (cf. below, §68, 112, 116–121, 123–125). Furthermore, Hegel’s analysis of the integration of general laws with the specific laws they subsume, through the successive re-introduction of specific systems of particulars and their initial conditions, has an important cognitive-semantic component. Hegel contends that statements of general scientific laws, such as Newton’s three laws of motion, are expressly and necessarily abstractions. As abstractions, they lack determinate semantic and cognitive content or significance because they lack determinate reference to localised spatio-temporal particulars. Statements of general laws of nature only acquire truth values when they are referred to localised particulars through their complement of more specific laws, theoretical auxiliaries, system parameters, initial conditions, instrumentation and observational or experimental techniques. This important conclusion is a direct implication of Hegel’s semantics of singular cognitive reference, according to which neither concepts or descriptions (propositions), nor uncontextualised use of token demonstrative terms, alone suffice for cognitive reference to particulars. Instead, only by integrating conceptual content with contextualised use of token demonstrative terms can we obtain determinate cognitive reference to any particulars. (It suffices for Hegel’s purposes to show that this conclusion is correct and is justified; the issue of how we are able to integrate these two factors within successful acts of cognitive reference to particulars can be 10

On Hegel’s responses to various forms of scepticism, see above, §§47–53.

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addressed properly only after Hegel demonstrates, in the 1807 Phenomenology, that philosophy is cognitively competent to comprehend truth; see below, Part III).11 68 ‘SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS’, THOUGHT AND THE SEMANTICS OF SINGULAR COGNITIVE REFERENCE. The basic point of Hegel’s explication of thought at the beginning of §B of ‘Self-Consciousness’ is that the content of a thought about an object is instantiated in that object, and nevertheless is thought, so that this object is not foreign to the cognisant subject, but rather is the object thought about by that self-conscious subject.12 This point may appear to be a trivial corollary to Hegel’s semantics of cognitive reference. Indeed Hegel states this point already in the penultimate paragraph of ‘Force and Understanding’ (PhdG 9: 101.25–7, .30–5/¶164). This raises a double question: Why hasn’t Hegel established his cognitive semantics at the end of ‘Consciousness’, and why does he postpone his explication of thought to §B of ‘Self-Consciousness’? Part of the answer is that in ‘Consciousness’ Hegel demonstrated his semantics of singular cognitive reference and his explication of thought to his philosophical readers, though not yet for the forms of consciousness observed within the Phenomenology. Though correct, this answer is not very helpful. An adequate answer requires considering Hegel’s transitions from ‘Consciousness’ to ‘Self-Consciousness’ and from there to ‘Reason’. In the penultimate paragraph of ‘Force and Understanding’ Hegel states the following about consciousness and selfconsciousness: The necessary progression from the preceding forms of consciousness, to which its true was a thing, something other than itself, expresses just this, not only that the consciousness of a thing is possible only for a self-consciousness, but indeed that this alone is the truth of those forms. However, only for us is this truth available, not yet for the [observed] consciousness. Initially selfconsciousness has become for itself, not yet as unity with consciousness as such. (PhdG 9:102.1–7/¶166)

Here Hegel restates and claims to have demonstrated – to us his readers – the Kantian point that our self-consciousness is necessary for our consciousness 11

It suffices for Hegel’s purposes to show that this conclusion is correct and is justified; the issue of how we are able to integrate these two factors within successful acts of cognitive reference can be addressed properly only after Hegel demonstrates, in the 1807 Phenomenology, that philosophy is competent to know the truth. 12 PhdG 9:116.30–117.12/¶197; see Chiereghin (2009, 55–8) for detailed discussion of Hegel’s explication of thought; cf. HER, 164–5, and below, §§111–115, 127–131.

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of objects. He also claims that the observed form of consciousness now to be introduced as Self-Consciousness does not recognise that human self-consciousness requires consciousness of objects. This suggests that Self-Consciousness mistakes a necessary condition for our consciousness of objects – that we are self-conscious – for a sufficient condition of our consciousness of objects. This indeed is the initial claim to self-sufficiency made by Self-Consciousness. When introducing Self-Consciousness as an observed form of consciousness Hegel first states his own view: … in fact self-consciousness is the reflection out of the being of the sensible and perceived world, and essentially the return out of other being. (PhdG 9: 104.7–10/¶167)13

Here Hegel adds the complement to his previous claim (that self-consciousness is necessary for our being conscious of objects), that our consciousness of objects is necessary for our being self-conscious. This is Hegel’s counterpart to the conclusion of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism,14 though he argues for it by appeal to his semantics of singular cognitive reference, without invoking transcendental idealism (nor any such view), or Kant’s analysis of time-determination. Hegel’s method involves establishing his own positive claims through strictly internal, phenomenological critique of forms of consciousness which espouse and seek to substantiate claims opposed to Hegel’s. The Thesis of Self-Consciousness is that our self-consciousness does not depend upon our consciousness of particulars; instead, our own self-consciousness suffices to account for the whole range of our experiences of particulars. This is the (purported) ‘self-sufficiency’ of self-consciousness announced in the title of §A of ‘Self-Consciousness’, viz.: ‘The Self-Sufficiency and Self-Insufficiency of Self-Consciousness; Lord and Bondsman’. Though less idiomatic than the standard English rendering, this translation is more literal and more accurate; ‘independence’ and ‘dependence’ too readily connote the social dynamics of the initial struggle for recognition and of the Lord and Bondsman, whilst distracting us from the circumstance that Hegel discusses these idealised social relations within the context of this more basic issue regarding the purported sufficiency of our self-consciousness to account adequately and exhaustively for our manifest consciousness of particulars, stressed in Hegel’s introductory discussion of ‘The Truth and Self-Certainty’ of Self-Consciousness.15 13

Cf. Bykova (2009a), 267–9, 275–7. Kant: ‘The mere, though empirically determined consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me’ (KdrV B275); see KTPR. 15 Please recall the scope of the present analysis, indicated in §65. 14

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Hegel states this core position of Self-Consciousness in these terms: Through that first moment [of ‘other-being, as a being, or as a distinguished moment … for’ self-consciousness], self-consciousness is as consciousness, which for it contains the entire breadth of the sensed world; yet at the same time it is as related only to the second moment, the unity of self-consciousness with itself; and herewith it [sc., the entire sensible world] is for self-consciousness something persisting, but which is only appearance, or a distinction which in itself lacks being. This opposition between the appearance of this distinction and its truth has, however, only the truth, namely the unity of self-consciousness with itself, as its essence …. (PhdG 9:104.14–23/¶167)

Hegel reiterates this point in the remainder of this paragraph, where he also indicates that Self-Consciousness aims to substantiate its self-conception as self-sufficient unto itself, despite its rich range of sensory experiences of the manifold, variegated world, so that it can substantiate its fundamental selfidentity (PhdG 9:104.24–31/¶167), which it presumes to require its independence from the world of which it is conscious. This ‘Self-Sufficiency Thesis’, as I shall call it, Hegel must refute in order to establish, both for observed forms of consciousness and for his readers, his concept of thought and his semantics of singular cognitive reference. Hegel designates the self-proclaimed self-sufficiency of self-consciousness with Fichte’s phrase, ‘I am I’ (PhdG 9:104.13/¶167). Yet Hegel’s use of Fichte’s phrase does not restrict Hegel’s examination of Self-Consciousness to Fichte’s views, nor does it indicate that Hegel examines specifically Fichte’s views. Though many Fichtean themes and elements appear in Hegel’s examination of ‘SelfConsciousness’ (Chitty 2007, Redding 2008), only in his earliest writings did Fichte venture anything so strong as this Self-Sufficiency Thesis.16 This indicates that Hegel sets his own agenda in the Phenomenology of Spirit; other philosophical views are arrayed as exemplary forms of consciousness espousing the opposed views Hegel critically examines. Even when Hegel shares some of Fichte’s issues and aims, most centrally, to demonstrate that theoretical reason is rooted in practical reason (Bykova 2008a, 2008b, 2009b), Hegel must devise his own demonstrations of these theses in accord with his much more subtle and stringent standards of justification (per above, §§60–64). The Self-Sufficiency Thesis examined in ‘Self-Consciousness’ is but the first of a series of such theses examined also in ‘Reason’ and ‘Spirit’ (PhdG, Parts III, IV). This series includes ‘Stoicism’, ‘Scepticism’ and ‘The Unhappy 16

E.g., ‘For everything else to which it should be applied it must be shown that reality is transferred to it from the I ’ (Fichte 1971, 1:99); Although ‘presentation in general’ can be thought possible only ‘on the assumption of a check occurring to the infinitely and indeterminately active reaching out of the self’, ‘Yet according to all of its determinations the I should be posited altogether through itself, and hence completely independently from any possible not-I’ (Fichte 1971, 1:248–9).

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Consciousness’ from §B of ‘Self-consciousness’ (Chiereghin 2009), the selfsufficiency of rational thought proclaimed as ‘The Certainty and Truth of Reason’ (Ferrini 2009a), the three forms of consciousness considered in ‘The Actualisation of Rational Self-consciousness through itself’ and the three considered in ‘Individuality which is Real in and for itself’ (Pinkard 2009), especially in ‘The Animal Kingdom of the Spirit’. It includes the dogmatic selfassurance of both Creon and Antigone and the presumed sufficiency of rule by edict both in ‘Legal Status’ (J.B. Hoy 2009) and in ‘Absolute Freedom and the Terror’ (Stolzenberg 2009, 203–4). It includes the Enlightenment individualism and the struggle between the Enlightenment and Faith examined in ‘Self-alienated Spirit: Enculturation and its Realm of Actuality’ (Stolzenberg 2009), along with the varieties of moral individualism examined in ‘Law-Giving Reason’, ‘Law-Testing Reason’ (D.C. Hoy 2009) and ‘Morality’, especially in ‘Conscience’ (Beiser 2009). These forms of presumed individual rational self-sufficiency have precursors in the problem of petitio principii and the Dilemma of the Criterion in Hegel’s Introduction and in the second phase of ‘Sense Certainty’ (above, §67).17 This dense series of distinct individualist theses cannot be examined here, yet they are important to note in order to identify the specific aim of Hegel’s critique of the Self-Sufficiency Thesis examined in ‘Self-Consciousness’. Noting this series suggests why Hegel can only fully articulate and justify his own Intersubjectivity Thesis at the very end of ‘Morality’ (see below, §80).18 This thesis, Hegel reiterates at the beginning of §A, is that Self-Consciousness is self-sufficient because it ‘is enclosed within itself, and contains nothing that is not due to itself’ (PhdG 9:110.4–5/¶182). At the outset of the first phase of his phenomenological examination of Self-Consciousness Hegel restates this thesis in these terms: Initially self-consciousness is simple being-for-itself, self-identical by the exclusion of everything other from itself; to it, its essence and absolute object is I; and in this immediacy, or in this being of its being-for-itself, it is an individual. Whatever other object is for it, is as inessential, marked with the character of the negative. (PhdG, 9:110:35–111.2/¶186)

Here Hegel characterises the Self-Sufficiency Thesis in terms broad enough to include the ego-centric predicament, which recalls his strategic reason for considering here this radical view of self-consciousness, namely, to demonstrate that our human self-consciousness is possible for us only if we are also 17

See HER 164–88, Westphal (2009b), §6; de Laurentiis (2009), Bykova (2009a). Quante (2009) nicely explicates the Intersubjectivity Thesis announced at the end of ‘The Truth and Self-certainty’ of Self-consciousness (PhdG 9:108.29–31/¶176), though he neglects how Hegel further explicates and justifies this thesis; see below, §§71–91. 18

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conscious of independently existing particulars (and, ultimately, of other rational agents; below, §89); I shall call this the ‘General’ Self-Sufficiency Thesis. The relevant range of versions of this General Self-Sufficiency Thesis is suggested in ‘The Certainty and Truth of Reason’, where Hegel associates Fichte’s ‘I am I’ not only with Descartes but also with Luther and with the rise of natural science.19 To look ahead in this way helps focus the original question: How, in what way(s) and to what extent does Hegel justify (or at least aim to justify) his own conception of thought by the beginning of §B of ‘Self-Consciousness’, and what remains to be done to develop his account of thought into an initial form of Reason? Answering this question is facilitated by restating the Thesis of Self-Consciousness in this way: In being aware of particulars, Self-Consciousness is only aware of itself; or self-conscious awareness of objects is nothing but a mode of one’s own self-consciousness.20 Very briefly, ‘Self-Consciousness’ examines several practical attempts to substantiate this General Self-Sufficiency Thesis; ‘Reason’ then examines several theoretical attempts to substantiate the same general thesis. Hegel aims to show that, though highly instructive, none of these attempts justifies the General Self-Sufficiency Thesis, nor any specific version of it. Hegel further aims to show that we can be aware of ourselves only through our awareness of the world, not in the form of SelfConsciousness, but only once we attain the level of Spirit, indeed, the developed, ‘mediated’ form of Spirit presented in ‘Absolute Knowing’.21 In this regard, two reasons Hegel introduces ‘desire’ into his examination of the General Self-Sufficiency Thesis are especially important. First, experienced particulars appear to exist and have their own characteristics regardless of anyone’s self-conscious awareness of them. In view of their apparent independence, Self-Consciousness desires to substantiate its General SelfSufficiency Thesis. Second, at the outset we altogether lack an account of SelfConsciousness’s capacities or abilities. Because Self-Consciousness has a task, namely: to substantiate the General Self-Sufficiency Thesis despite the appar19

See Ferrini (2009a), 72–5; Harris, HL 1:447–73. These terms closely follow Hegel’s own in the first paragraph of ‘Self-Consciousness’: ‘However, what was not achieved in the previous relations [of consciousness to its objects] is now achieved, namely a certainty which is identical to its truth, for the certainty itself is its object and consciousness is to itself the true. Of course a being-other is also involved herein: consciousness distinguishes something, though for consciousness it is also at the same time not distinguished’ (PhdG 9:103.11–16/¶166). 21 Cf. Stolzenberg’s (2009) account of the ‘Principle of Consciousness’ and the ‘Principle of Spirit’ in Hegel’s analysis of Enlightenment and Faith. Looking ahead to ‘Spirit’ is not looking too far afield; Hegel states that the Intersubjectivity Thesis in ‘Self-Consciousness’ presents his readers with ‘the concept of spirit’ and that ‘Self-Consciousness’ provides the ‘turning point’ in consciousness becoming spirit (PhdG 9:108.35–109.3/¶177). On ‘Absolute Knowing’ see de Laurentiis (2009); on developed Spirit, di Giovanni (2009), Bykova (2009a). 20

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ent independence of the world it experiences, it must be practical. Desire is the most elementary practical structure of human agency. Hegel’s phenomenological examination of forms of consciousness must begin with the simplest version of a form of consciousness; only identifying its manifest shortcomings justifies introducing more sophisticated successor versions which are then scrutinised in turn. The most direct and simple way to address the apparent independence of particulars from one’s own self-consciousness is to destroy the evidence of their independence by consuming them (cf. PhdG 9:107.27–8/¶189). Here one must wonder, how could this simple point about consumption have anything to do with the philosophical issues with which we began, and especially with the putative ego-centric predicament? Hegel’s phenomenological method is designed to challenge his readers with such questions; they are Parmenidean exercises we must master in order to understand Hegel’s Phenomenology. Fans of the ego-centric predicament will dismiss Hegel’s appeal to desire and consumption as irrelevant. In effect, Hegel’s challenge is to ask: Irrelevant to what, or to whom? Like Kant, Hegel realised that an adequate theory of knowledge must be true of us; we seek and need to understand our knowledge, not that of other kinds of beings. In effect, the Cartesian ego-centric predicament demands that our cognitive capabilities be proven a priori to be trustworthy in any possible environment before trusting them in our own environment. To the contrary, Kant and Hegel sought (in their different ways) to identify our basic cognitive capacities and their attendant incapacities in order to determine the scope, limits and character of human knowledge. It is one thing to reject psychologism, i.e., to replace issues of validity with issues merely of process; it is quite another to reject altogether philosophical consideration of cognitive psychology, physiology or our cognitive capacities and functions (cf. Brook 2004, 2016a, b). Though important traces of the role of our embodiment in enabling us to be self-conscious can be found in Kant’s epistemology (Westphal 2017a), Fichte and Hegel (in their different ways) made this a central philosophical task.22 Hegel undertakes part of this task in ‘Self-Consciousness’. As concerns the ego-centric predicament, part of Hegel’s strategy is to develop some key features of a tenable philosophical anthropology which show that the ego-centric predicament is literally inhuman because its model of and presuppositions about knowledge don’t hold of human beings (see below, §§69, 72–77). Desire introduces elementary classification and hence nascent conceptualisation of the world, for desiring distinguishes between those objects which satisfy a desire and others which do not. The experience of desire also 22

On Fichte’s analysis of embodiment, see Nuzzo (2006), Zöller (2006).

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teaches a rudimentary lesson in realism: Objects satisfying desires are not conjured up simply by desiring them. Those objects exist and have characteristics (e.g., nutritiousness, sheltering, combustibility) independently of their being desired, whilst obtaining and using them requires bodily action and effort. Self-consciousness as desire is wholly inadequate, for it achieves its ends only by destroying its means (the desired object); hence it cannot sustain its own self-consciousness without depending upon both a plethora of new desires and a steady supply of independently existing desired objects to destroy (PhdG 9:107.33–108.6/¶175). Desire is thus shown not to be the essence of self-consciousness, as initially conceived in accord with the SelfSufficiency Thesis (PhdG 9:107.38–9/¶175). Desire-fulfilment, like wish-fulfilment – whether the wish that physical objects weren’t independent of Self-Consciousness, or that its desires were automatically fulfilled by nature – requires willing rather than wishing, and yet Self-consciousness seeks (wishes, desires) to uphold its Self-Sufficiency Thesis, that it alone is self-sufficient. The awareness of other self-conscious beings, of other persons, is an obvious objection to the Self-Sufficiency Thesis, because awareness of another person is awareness of someone other than oneself who has her own thoughts, experience, plans, decisions and activities, and so is evidently or at least apparently not simply a mode of one’s own self-consciousness (PhdG 9:110.35–111.3/¶186). This sets the stage for a further attempt to destroy counter-evidence to Self-Consciousness’s Self-Sufficiency Thesis: the Struggle unto Death. Hegel argues that self-consciousness both requires and yet is irreducible to biological existence by arguing from the contrapositive. Fighting unto death shows that neither combatant, as a self-conscious being, can simply be identified with a biological organism; it shows that as self-conscious beings we are not merely natural beings, that pride, prestige, arrogance or mastery are social, not merely biological, phenomena. It also shows conversely that as self-conscious beings none of us is independent of biological organisms: each of us requires our own living body (PhdG112.5, .21–22/¶¶188, 189). Yet whoever slays the opposing self-consciousness once again confronts the affront to its Self-Sufficiency Thesis posed by the recalcitrance of natural objects of desire. This motivates another attempt to destroy counter-evidence of another agent’s self-sufficiency: the subjugating battle for mastery. The Lord holds the Self-Sufficiency Thesis, claiming that all things are modes of his self-awareness. If he destroys or denies the existence of the subjugated Bondsman, he again confronts the problem of the independence from his desires of the objects he desires; if he recognises the Bondsman as another person, he must repudiate his Self-Sufficiency Thesis. The Lord’s solution is to

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use the Bondsman to grapple with recalcitrant objects whilst denying his selfsufficiency; both parties take the Bondsman as a mere extension of the Lord (PhdG 9:113.10–13/¶190). Yet the Lord solves only part of the problem of desire: by using the Bondsman he evades the independence of desired objects from his desires for them. He doesn’t solve the problems that desiring depends for its satisfaction, and so for his own self of self, upon desired objects; nor that satisfying any one desire terminates that desire and so terminates that bit of his self-consciousness. The Lord’s sense of self-sufficiency (his ‘being for himself’) thus depends both upon the recurrence of his desires and upon the continuing availability of objects to satisfy them promptly. The Lord’s sense of himself is thus fleeting and dependent, and so is not genuine selfsufficiency. The Bondsman must work on independent objects, some of which he cannot directly consume; rather he must transform them and serve them to the Lord. Regarding technique, the Bondsman’s formative activity is self-directed and the artefacts he produces are testimony to his enduring skills and efforts. Thus he constructs monuments to his own ingenuity (PhdG 9: 115.3–11/¶195). The Bondsman triumphs over the independence of particulars by learning how to use them as raw materials and to make them into artefacts. His designs and efforts are permanent, relative to the transitory character of objects used as raw materials (PhdG 9:115.14–19/¶196). He becomes genuinely selfdirecting by developing and exercising his control over antecedently independent objects as raw materials. He finds his initial designs actually embodied in his artefacts, yet his designs are not foreign to him for having become embodied. Thus he solves the original aim of self-consciousness: to be conscious of oneself in being conscious of objects. However, this success requires acknowledging the initial independence and recalcitrance of objects as raw materials, and recognising that the Self-Sufficiency Thesis is tenable only within a very restricted domain of objects, namely one’s own artefacts. This destroys the generality and hence the tenability of this version of the SelfSufficiency Thesis (PhdG 9:116.3–5/¶196). At the start of §B, ‘Freedom of Self-Consciousness’, Hegel expressly contrasts the outcome of the Lord’s experience with that of the Bondsman by crediting the Bondsman with attaining – genuinely, if implicitly and immediately – the level of thought (Denken) because the forms of the Bondsman’s artefacts are the same as his intelligent designs for them (PhdG 9:117.20–4/ ¶197). The core idea of ‘thought’, according to Hegel, is that it is structured by concepts, i.e., specific forms of thinking (discriminations, classifications) instantiated in specific, localised particulars (PhdG 9:117.30–118.12/¶197). Achieving the level of thought issues in a new form of Self-Consciousness

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which is ‘free’ because the particulars it conceives are not foreign others but are cognitively accessible to it, so that in conceiving a particular, Self-Consciousness remains within itself whilst having that particular for itself although that particular is numerically distinct from it (PhdG 9:117.3–6, .8–12/ ¶197).23 Now that the observed consciousness of the Bondsman has in fact attained a concept, Hegel can explicate here his conceptions of thought and of genuine concepts (Begriffe). Hegel stresses that this point is essential for understanding his ensuing discussion of Stoicism, Scepticism and the Unhappy Consciousness (PhdG 9:117.12–5/¶197). Yet the unity of this new form of Self-Consciousness with its object is merely immediate (PhdG 9:117.12–18/¶197). Hegel equates this initial form of free Self-Consciousness with Stoicism, which stresses the ‘pure universality’ of thought (Hegel’s emphasis); accordingly, Hegel claims, Stoicism is merely the concept of freedom, rather than living freedom, because this concept lacks ‘the fullness of life’ (PhdG 9:118.13–15/¶200). The Stoic dictum to ‘follow nature’ subverts the autonomy (and hence the freedom) of thought because it attempts to derive the proper content of thought from an allegedly given nature (PhdG 9:118.22–24/¶200). Insofar as Stoic autonomy avoids this problem, it must determine the content of thought entirely a priori. In so doing, however, it can generate only edifying platitudes, though no criterion of truth. Hence it fails literally to come to terms with the details of everyday reality and so fails to substantiate Self-Consciousness’ Self-Sufficiency Thesis (PhdG 9:118.27–31/¶200). Whereas Stoicism was only the concept of freedom, Pyrrhonian Scepticism, Hegel claims, realises the concept of freedom.24 Hegel here uses, indeed stresses, the term ‘Realisierung’ (not ‘Verwirklichung’, actualisation). Tetens defined the term ‘realisieren’ to mean, to show that a concept has an object by indicating, picking out, ostending at least one such object (cf. above, §2). His definition became common philosophical usage, and was adopted by Kant (KTPR §33). Hegel indicates that the Pyrrhonist is a counterpart to the Bondsman, who actually works on particulars. The Pyrrhonist works by attacking any and all claims to know reality, purporting (inter alia) that particulars lack reality, being, truth and knowability because they are neither selfsufficient nor stable. By appealing to the diversity of opinions on any topic and to the Dilemma of the Criterion (above, §§12, 60–64), Pyrrhonists purport to make apparent that all the distinctions drawn by theorists are merely their own conceptualisations (PhdG 9:119.3–25/¶202). 23

On Hegel’s view of freedom as being by oneself see Hardimon (1994), 112–4. Hegel’s present discussion directly concerns Pyrrhonian, not Cartesian scepticism (on which see infra §§60, 69, 86). 24

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Hegel’s attributions clearly allude to the Trope of Relativity, which relies on the Parmenidean ‘ontological’ conception of truth, according to which something is true only if it is unchanging, constant and so eternally self-identical (cf. PhdG 9:120.7, .11/¶204). Because this trope apparently can be used against any and all particulars, Pyrrhonism achieves the comprehensive scope lacking from the Lord’s desire and consumption and from the Bondsman’s artisanship, and appears to substantiate its independence from and its superiority over the world of appearances, both natural and social. If particulars can be shown not to be self-sufficient, then, perhaps, they pose, or at least appear to pose, no threat to Self-Consciousness’ Self-Sufficiency Thesis. In this way, Pyrrhonism produces its certainty of its own freedom and being-forself (PhdG 9:120.7–9/¶204). Sceptical ataraxia (unperturbedness) is to provide ‘unchangeable and truthful’ self-certainty (PhdG 9:120.18–9/¶204; Hegel’s emphasis). (Recall that Hegel’s use of the term ‘certainty’ in connection with forms of consciousness concerns, not the usual epistemological senses of the term (infallibility, indubitability or incorrigibility), but rather the question whether that form of consciousness finds its conception adequately instantiated within its experience of its purported objects.) For present purposes the most important problems facing Pyrrhonism developed by Hegel are these. Hegel judiciously notes that the Pyrrhonist may exhibit various inconsistencies without admitting to any of them. This is true of observed forms of consciousness generally and is one key reason for Hegel’s distinguishing between them and our point of view on them as phenomenological observers (HER, 103–8). Hegel notes that rather than exhibiting an ‘unchangeable and truthful’ form of self-consciousness, by its own Parmenidean conception of truth as unchangeable being, the Pyrrhonist him- or herself is utterly changeable and hence untruthful because s/he unhesitatingly states ‘not-A’ when counter-balancing ‘A’, and just as readily proposes ‘A’ when counter-balancing ‘not-A’, for any claim ‘A’ whatever. Though Pyrrhonists purport dispassionately to continue seeking the (Parmenidean) truth, they conduct their lives – non-committal though they may be – according to mere semblances, whether natural or social. Because Pyrrhonism is supposed to be a dispassionate, healthy way of life, these practical tensions are grave internal problems. By attaining ataraxia (tranquillity) only through the epoché (suspension) of others’ claims to knowledge, Pyrrhonism shows that its proclaimed self-sufficiency is a sham: like the Lord’s desires, Pyrrhonism’s most basic aim and methods (its sceptical tropes) depend upon a steady supply of others’ cognitive claims to neutralise. Though Pyrrhonists artfully avoid uttering any commitment to any claim or truth, their own sceptical practice exhibits repeated, unquestioning and constant reliance upon

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the Parmenidean conception of truth, the Trope of Relativity and the Dilemma of the Criterion. Judged by Pyrrhonism’s Parmenidean notions of truth and knowledge, in practice Pyrrhonists are committed to these principles, even if they expressly disavow them and (in effect) strategically appeal to their opponents’ implicit acceptance of them. Their behaviour, their sceptical way of life, is thus deeply at odds with their artful non-utterance (or at least non-affirmation) of theoretical or factual commitments (PhdG 9:120.16– 121.22/¶205). A very important criticism of Pyrrhonism is latent in Hegel’s text, though Hegel clearly intends it. Only by presuming the Parmenidean conception of truth can the Trope of Relativity reduce everything we experience to mere appearance because whatever we experience, like our experiences themselves, changes and varies. When introducing ‘Self-Consciousness’, Hegel notes that ‘being no longer has the significance of the abstraction of being’ (PhdG 9:105.25–6/¶169; Hegel’s emphasis). The ‘abstraction of being’ rejected here, subsequent to ‘Consciousness’, is the abstract cognitive claim criticised in ‘Sense Certainty’ that any purportedly known object simply ‘is’. This undifferentiated sense of ‘is’ is tantamount to the Parmenidean conception of truth. Hegel’s critique of Sense Certainty shows that this conception of truth qua changeless being can be referred to no particulars, to nothing we experience nor to any of our experiences, and thus has no legitimate cognitive significance. For this reason Pyrrhonism fails to achieve genuine thought because it fails to refer any of its own ideas (representations, Vorstellungen) to particulars; it fails to realise any of its presumptive concepts. In this regard, like Stoicism, Pyrrhonism fares worse than the Bondsman. Thus Pyrrhonism too cannot sustain Self-Consciousness’ Self-Sufficiency Thesis; both its thought and its way of life are entirely dependent upon a world independent of it, from which and from whom it alienates itself due to its unquestioned presumptions about truth, relativity and criteria of justification. This is an important example of the kind of Platonic exercise Hegel’s Phenomenology poses and requires us to master in order to understand his issues, analyses and results. Because the Pyrrhonist is aware of its Parmenidean conception of truth qua changeless being and also of a welter of what it regards as mere appearances, whilst also exhibiting the inconstancy of its own sceptical thought and behaviour, it contains and exhibits (though does not expressly connect) the two sharply contrasting poles of (allegedly) unchanging ultimately real being and evanescent particular appearances. The integration of these two poles, Hegel claims, is required for ‘the concept of spirit’. The Unhappy Consciousness advances beyond Scepticism because it is expressly, admittedly aware of both of these poles within itself, though it does not know how to integrate

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them, whence its unhappiness (PhdG 9:121.23–29/¶206). Yet it improves on both Stoicism and Pyrrhonism because it ‘brings and holds together’ pure thought and particulars, though without reconciling these two poles (PhdG 9:125.12–4/¶216). Significantly, Hegel here distinguishes ‘pure thought’, which is not referred to specific particulars (Hegel speaks generically of ‘Einzelheit’), from his own explication of (genuine) thought which (per Tetens and Kant) can be and is referred to particulars (PhdG 9:125.22–9/¶217). Aware that it satisfies no criteria of self-sufficiency, the Unhappy Consciousness ascribes self-sufficiency to a transcendent, alien ‘unchangeable being’, the divinity (PhdG 9:122.11–30/¶208). Ultimately through the mediator or pontiff (i.e. bridge), the inessential Unhappy Consciousness totally alienates its thoughts, deeds and guilt to the (presumptive) essential, unchangeable being, who thus acquires the particular characteristics of the individual devout self-consciousness, to whom in principle it is thus no longer alien or transcendent (PhdG 9:130.9–131/¶228–30). This is Self-Consciousness’ ‘turning point’ towards spirit; here is the first indication to the observed consciousness and to us, Hegel’s readers, that the content and effectiveness of spirit is due to our own activities.25 I stress Hegel’s dative case here (‘to whom’) because this point is not yet explicit for Unhappy Consciousness. Significantly, Hegel presents this point symbolically: to the Unhappy Consciousness this implicit reconciliation is a representation (Vorstellung) and not yet even a pure concept (lacking reference to particulars) of Reason. Because its object presents to it its own individual deed and being as being and deed per se, it is a representation of Reason, as ‘consciousness’s certainty, within its individuality, of being absolute in itself, of being all reality’ (PhdG 9:131.30–1/¶230).26 This is tantamount to the Thesis of Reason, the next major section of Hegel’s Phenomenology, ‘Reason’. Though Hegel’s introduction to this section, ‘The Certainty and Truth of Reason’, contains a panegyric on reason and its (purported) comprehensive identity with all reality triumphantly proclaimed by Fichte’s phrase, ‘I am I’ (PhdG 9:104.13/¶167), Hegel’s introduction to ‘Reason’ encompasses the entire Modern Age, including Luther, Descartes, Bacon and the whole scientific revolution (HL 1:447–73; Ferrini 2009a). Historically, the transition from ‘Self-Consciousness’ to ‘Reason’ thus marks the transition from Mediaeval Christian Faith to the Modern Age of Enlightenment, early to late, as is borne out by Hegel’s ensuing discussions of theoretical and practical reason.27 This observation allows us to understand why Hegel’s transition to ‘Reason’ turns on a merely implicit, symbolic representation and also why 25

PhdG 108.35–109.3/¶177, cf. di Giovanni (2009), Bykova (2009a). For detailed discussion of the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ see Chiereghin (2009, 64–70) and Burbidge (1992). 27 See Ferrini (2009b), Pinkard (2009) and D.C. Hoy (2009). 26

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the various forms of Reason seek to uphold a series of more intellectual forms of the General Self-Sufficiency Thesis. That more versions of the Self-Sufficiency Thesis must be critically examined, not only in ‘Reason’ but also in ‘Spirit’, indicates that by the end of ‘Self-Consciousness’ Hegel has not yet completed his case for his Kantian thesis that we can be self-conscious only if we are conscious of particulars.28 69 HEGEL’S INTERIM CRITIQUE OF THE EGO-CENTRIC PREDICAMENT. If ultimately Hegel can show that our self-consciousness depends upon our consciousness of particulars, then he justifies rejecting the Cartesian egocentric predicament. Yet if Hegel does not complete his case for this Kantian thesis by the end of ‘Self-Consciousness’, what bearing does ‘Self-Consciousness’ have upon the ego-centric predicament? Three main points are these: Hegel’s point that in principle the Parmenidean conception of truth lacks cognitive reference to particulars entails that sceptical hypotheses based upon it are cognitively transcendent, idle speculations with no cognitive standing which cannot justify rejecting (or ‘defeating’) any actual evidence or justification we have for believing as we do in the existence of spatio-temporal objects and that we know well enough some features of some of these particular objects, events, structures or processes. This point holds mutatis mutandis also for the Cartesian mauvais genie, the ‘evil deceiver hypothesis’. In principle this hypothesis too cannot be referred to particulars and so is a cognitively transcendent idle speculation lacking any implications for our knowledge of particulars. Likewise, the notion that the particulars we perceive may vanish when they are not perceived by any or all of us, in principle lacks cognitive significance because it too cannot be referred to any localised particulars (hence it cannot be realised, in Tetens’ sense). Likewise, it is simply a truism that as a matter of logic all of our perceptual beliefs could be as they are even if they were all false. To think that this truism is relevant to our perceptual knowledge presupposes that empirical justification must conform to the deductivist requirements of infallibilism, according to which evidence sufficient for knowledge entails the truth of what is known. This entailment relation requires eliminating any and all logical gaps in any line of justificatory reasoning (per Tempier 1277). This supposition is symptomatic of profound misunderstanding of the manifold roles of logically contingent facts and principles in cognitive justification in non-formal domains such as empirical knowledge. This idea, like Cartesian scepticism gen28

Westphal (2003, §§16–20) examines Hegel’s case against some still-standard Enlightenment views about individual cognitive self-sufficiency.

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erally, presumes that mere logical possibilities suffice to block cognitive justification, even in non-formal domains. This presumption assimilates logical gaps to cognitive gaps in any justificatory evidence or reasoning. Thus Cartesian scepticism assimilates all non-formal domains of knowledge to the deductivist, infallibilist model of pure axiomatics. However, this model of justification – like the notion of ‘provability’ – is only definable, and thus only defensible, within purely formal domains of knowledge. In contrast to this, Hegel (like Kant and Gettier) is a fallibilist about empirical justification; according to this view, evidence sufficient for knowledge (in non-formal domains) strongly indicates, though does not entail, truth. The Cartesian sceptic’s ‘standards’ for empirical knowledge are not ‘too stringent’, as is often claimed. Rather, they are entirely inappropriate, altogether irrelevant, to the non-formal domain of empirical knowledge. At most, deduction may be necessary, though it cannot be sufficient for justification in nonformal domains, because all such domains are in part constituted and specified by semantic and existence postulate, the character, credibility and use of which cannot be assessed by purely formal or deductive techniques alone. Hegel’s semantics of singular cognitive reference entails that counter-arguments or counter-examples to justificatory evidence or reasoning in the nonformal domain of empirical knowledge require, not mere logical consistency (logical possibility), but positive, identified counter-evidence or counter-instances, where such evidence or instances requires cognitive reference to spatio-temporally localised particulars (which alone can be the source of relevant evidence). Hence the deductivist, infallibilist ideals of justification presumed by Cartesians – and in this, empiricism in the analytic tradition, including Quine’s (Westphal 2015b), remains deeply Cartesian – is altogether ill-suited to the non-formal domains of empirical knowledge. Examining the Meditations using Hegel’s method of determinate negation through strictly internal critique reveals that Descartes’ analysis is infected not by one but by five distinct, vicious circularities, that it cannot refute Pyrrhonian scepticism and that it is subject to the Dilemma of the Criterion (HER, 18–34).29 Hegel also realised that the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion shows that the foundationalist model of justification embedded in the model of scientia can neither refute nor evade Pyrrhonian scepticism in non-formal domains because the foundationalist model of justification cannot avoid petitio principii against those who dispute the particular premises or the particular derivation rules used in any foundationalist line of justificatory reasoning, or 29

The other two paradigmatic attempts to assimilate empirical knowledge to the deductivist requirements of infallibilism are the empiricist attempt to reduce talk of physical objects to talk of sense data and Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Both strategies fail in this regard; see HER, 47–67, 230–2, and KTPR.

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who dissent from the foundationalist model of justification itself. Any specific foundationalist account of justification presupposes, but cannot itself justify, its preferred derivation rules or ‘basing relations’ because that model analyses justification solely in terms of derivation or basing according to those very rules, which are not entailed nor otherwise derivable from that account’s preferred domain of basic foundational claims, experiences or events. Coherentist accounts of justification, including ‘reflective equilibrium’, cannot distinguish credibly, in theory or in practice, between a maximally comprehensive and coherent account of the actual world we (putatively) experience, and a maximally detailed, extensive and coherent fiction, as Bonjour (1997) finally conceded to Haack (1997) – a concession Sextus Empiricus has awaited most patiently. The Cartesian ego-centric predicament presupposes both the foundationalist, deductivist model of infallible justification and its appropriateness to non-formal domains of knowledge. All this is symbolised by Descartes’ mauvais genie. Hegel’s semantics of singular cognitive reference, developed in ‘Consciousness’ and ‘Self-Consciousness’, shows that this seductive symbol of scepticism is in principle a cognitively transcendent, idle speculation. In ‘Consciousness’ and ‘Self-Consciousness’ Hegel refutes the epistemological presuppositions of the ego-centric predicament; hence he can disregard that predicament and need not criticise it directly. Hence he need not include the ego-centric predicament amongst the forms of consciousness examined in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. 70 CONCLUSION. ‘Self-Consciousness’ contributes inter alia to establishing Hegel’s semantics of singular cognitive reference, which provides a powerful critique of Cartesianism in epistemology. Hegel’s explication of thought and his cognitive semantics provide the basis for introducing and developing ‘the category’ (in ‘Reason’), which then forms the point of departure for ‘Spirit’.30 Against the SelfSufficiency Thesis that all our awareness of particulars is nothing but modes of our self-awareness, Hegel argues in ‘Observing Reason’ that after the scientific revolution, much of our awareness of particulars is possible only through scientific investigation of independently existing natural phenomena (Ferrini 2007, 2009b). Thus our scientific consciousness of natural phenomena depends entirely upon our awareness of particulars which are not merely modes of our self-awareness, where our awareness of particulars involves 30

PhdG 134.24–30ff, 238.6ff/¶¶235, 437; cf. HER, 164–77, Westphal (2009b) §6.

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conceptually structured thought in the form of categories.31 ‘Observing Reason’ thus greatly augments and specifies Hegel’s justification of causal realism in ‘Force and Understanding’ (Westphal 2015a), thereby undermining the generality and hence the tenability of the Self-Sufficiency Theses both of SelfConsciousness and of Reason. These conclusions suggest some of the important ways in which Hegel seeks to show that scepticism and subjective idealism are symptoms of profound self-misunderstanding. Understanding human knowledge requires understanding who we are, not who we might be or who we might think we are. Epistemologists, too, must heed the inscription at Delphi: ‘Know thyself!’

31

PhdG 191.6–9, 193.20, 238.3–7, .14–17; cf. Ferrini (2009b).

CHAPTER 12

Mutual Recognition and Rational Justification in Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit 71 INTRODUCTION. This chapter and the next aim to show that Hegel is correct, that individual rational judgment – of the kind required for rational justification, whether in cognition or morals (ethics and justice) – is socially and historically based, although the bases of rational judgment identified by Hegel are consistent with realism about the objects of knowledge and with strict objectivity about moral principles. In this chapter my analysis is both systematic and historical. I begin with an analytical outline of my systematic analysis (§71.1) and then provide an expository outline of my discussion (§71.2). Both outlines and their respective agendas are required to ascribe to Hegel is issues and central theses I identify. The following chapter examines Hegel’s issues and theses in systematic, epistemological detail. 71.1 My systematic analysis consists in two brief critical and seven constructive steps. One critical step is to show that foundationalist theories of rational justification can neither solve nor avoid the Dilemma of the Criterion (§77). The other is to show that neither can standard coherence theories solve or avoid this Dilemma (§79.1). The first constructive step is to show that Hegel’s analysis of the possibility of constructive self-criticism solves the problem of vicious circularity (§79.1). The second is to highlight four aspects of the autonomy of rational judgment: 1. The exercise of judgment is inherently one’s own exercise of one’s own capacity for judgment. (§77) 2. The exercise of judgment is structured normatively, not merely causally. (§77) 3. Only by exercising judgment do we act, rather than merely behave, because we base our actions upon justifying reasons, rather than merely excusing or exculpating ourselves. (§77) 4. Reason as rational judgment suffices for identifying and justifying basic norms. (§80) Step three is to show that the key point of Kant’s constructivist theory of justification in moral philosophy justifies this last aspect of autonomy (4.) by showing that sufficient justifying grounds for a proscribed action cannot be © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_0�3

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provided to all concerned (affected) parties. Conversely, sufficient justifying grounds for the omission of positive moral requirements cannot be provided to all concerned parties. In contrast, legitimate principles are ones for which sufficient justifying reasons can be given to all concerned parties (§78). Step four argues that Kant’s normative constructivism is fundamentally social because it focusses on whether sufficient justifying reasons for an action can be provided to all concerned parties; this requirement is the core point of Kant’s account of ‘respect for [moral] law’ and of the Categorical Imperative always to treat others as ends in themselves and never merely as means (§79). Step five is to argue that Hegel adopted and further developed Kant’s constructivism by generalising it to include theoretical (cognitive) norms as well as practical norms (§79.1), by emphasising the fallibilism inherent in constructivist justification (§§79.1, 79.3) and by connecting this fallibilism with the social bases of rational justification. Step six is to argue that Hegel’s ‘Thesis of Mutual Recognition’ is that we can only judge fully rationally if we recognise our own fallibility as rational judges, the judgmental competence of others and our mutual interdependence for rational assessment of our own and others’ rational judgments. Moreover, this thesis counts as a genuine transcendental condition of fully rational judgment (§80).1 The seventh and final systematic step is to argue that Hegel’s constructivist, fallibilist, social theory of rational justification is inherently an historical, pragmatic theory of rational justification, because the justification it provides is based on the present state of knowledge, because it is inevitably provisional and because the list of relevant alternatives increases historically (§81). The historical aspect of my analysis aims to show that Hegel developed precisely this kind of theory of rational justification in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and in particular, that this kind of theory affords an adequate, proper and illuminating account of Hegel’s ‘Thesis of Mutual Recognition’ (§§72–75, 81). The contemporary significance of Hegel’s social, historical and pragmatic theory of rational justification is highlighted, in conclusion, by contrasting it with the still-dominant, strong (as it were ‘atomistic’) individualism in analytical epistemology (§81; cf. §§89, 90). Hegel’s genuine insights about rational judgment can be identified by considering an important regard in which Hegel is a transcendental philosopher. The coping stone of Kant’s transcendental Critique of Pure Reason is the ‘I think’ which, for each of us, must be able to accompany any of my represen1 I do not deny that Hegel’s ‘Thesis of Mutual Recognition’ also has other important uses and implications, though I believe (here I cannot argue the case) its heretofore neglected role in Hegel’s theory of rational justification is the most important, in part because it provides the bases for its further uses and implications. For a good survey of further uses of Hegel’s account of mutual recognition, see Schmidt-am-Busch and Zorn (2010).

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tations (or my experiences), so far as I can become self-consciously aware of them. If Hegel is a transcendental philosopher, then what and where is his counterpart to Kant’s analysis of the ‘I think’, and what might this have to do with mutual recognition? Hegel does provide a counterpart to Kant’s ‘I think’ in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, though it is not located where it is typically sought, and it is much more philosophically significant than has been recognised. Identifying Hegel’s counterpart to Kant’s ‘I think’ reveals the core of Hegel’s account of rational judgment and its social basis, which includes Hegel’s most important insight regarding mutual recognition. This insight, in turn, is fundamental to Hegel’s theory of normative justification, for both cognitive and practical norms. Understanding this enables us also to understand Hegel’s account of individual rational autonomy and its social bases, and to understand why Hegel’s account is correct. 71.2 To establish these claims, I first examine Hegel’s account of ‘Self-Consciousness’ in relation to Kant’s ‘I think’ (§72). The key questions are clarified by considering the current state of debate about Hegel’s Thesis of Mutual Recognition (§73). I then argue that the proper approach to understanding Hegel’s account of mutual recognition lies in Kant’s observation that the ‘I think’ is the ‘I judge’ (§74). The importance of taking this approach is underscored by considering briefly Hegel’s individualist account of the ‘I think’ in the Phenomenology (§75).2 This poses the issue of what, if anything, links the ‘I think’ to ‘mutual recognition’ (§76). Reconsidering the relations between rational judgment, autonomy and spontaneity reveals constructive aspects of the fallibility of individual rational judgment (§77). These aspects reveal how individual rational judgment is only possible within the context of a community of rational judges (§78).3 This result demonstrates that, and how, Hegel analyses and defends the fundamental ways in which each of our individual consciousness of ourselves as rational judges requires and depends upon our recognising other human beings as rational judges. This finding underscores fundamental, innovative and philosophically decisive features of Hegel’s account of rational justification, because it shows how Hegel adopted Kant’s constructivist account of rational justification (§79), and why he was right to do so, for Hegel generalises Kant’s constructivist account (§80). With these points in hand, we can then grasp Hegel’s genuine insights about mutual critical assessment (§81). Finally, Hegel’s insights about the social dimensions of rational judgment enable us to understand the historical dimensions of 2 Great confusion has resulted from Burge (1992) having used the phrase ‘anti-individualism’ to designate his anti-Cartesian case for mental content externalism. I use ‘individualism’ to contrast to social accounts of human reason, reasoning or knowledge. 3 In §78 I also contrast Kant’s (and Hegel’s) form of constructivism with contemporary forms of constructivism in moral philosophy.

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rational justification (§81). Hegel’s account thus ‘saves the phenomena’ of rational assessment and justification, while avoiding obfuscating over-simplifications (§82). My topic is specifically rational justification, my account of which is, and is intended to be, consistent with various externalist elements pertaining to perceptual judgment (see §§127–131). 72 HEGEL’S ‘SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS’ AND KANT’S ‘I THINK’. At the beginning of ‘Self-Consciousness’, the second major section of the1807 Phenomenology, Hegel states the thesis, that no one of us can be self-conscious without also being consciously aware of other self-conscious human beings, in these terms: There is a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness. Only through this is there self-consciousness at all …. – Thus for us the concept of spirit is already on hand.4

Hegel’s reference to ‘us’, for whom ‘the concept of spirit is already on hand’, denotes his readers, who observe Hegel’s presentation and internal critique of forms of consciousness in the Phenomenology. When introducing any form of consciousness, Hegel clues ‘us’, his readers, into the significance of a form of consciousness or its development, so that we can anticipate what is to come, and thus more easily understand and assess its advent, development, critique and (purportedly justified) results (HER, 98–9). Here at the end of the passage introducing ‘Self-Consciousness’, Hegel clearly links the theme of mutual recognition to the advent of ‘spirit’, which consists, in part, in a recognitive community. That Hegel links these two themes is unsurprising; the surprise is that Hegel announces this link so early in the Phenomenology, because ‘Reason’, the third part of Hegel’s book, intercedes between the second and fourth parts, ‘Self-Consciousness’ and ‘Spirit’, respectively. Where and how does Hegel prove his Thesis of Mutual Recognition? Most commentators seek Hegel’s account of mutual recognition directly within ‘Self-Consciousness’. Since the latter half of ‘Self-Consciousness’ concerns ‘Stoicism’, ‘Skepticism’ and the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’, it seems Hegel must justify the Thesis of Mutual Recognition in the first half of ‘Self-Consciousness’, in his infamous discussions of ‘The Battle unto Death’ and ‘Lord and Bondsman’.5 The ‘Initial Thesis of Mutual Recognition’ considered at this 4 „Es ist ein S e l b s t b e w u ß t s e i n f ü r e i n S e l b s t b e w u ß t s e i n . Erst hiedurch ist es in der Tat […]. – Hiemit ist schon der Begriff d e s G e i s t e s für uns vorhanden“ (PhdG, 9:108.29–30, .35/¶177). 5 The Contents of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit is presented as a table in Westphal (2009a), 28.

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stage is this: Individual self-consciousness is only possible on the basis of one’s consciousness of other self-conscious human beings. The problem then is to find a phenomenological presentation, analysis or demonstration in these two subsections which supports this Initial Thesis of Mutual Recognition. Indirectly, such interpretations reinforce how seriously we should take the organisationally surprising introduction (just noted) of this Initial Thesis of Mutual Recognition so far in advance of ‘Spirit’. The problem is not that Hegel doesn’t espouse or support some such thesis. The problem is that so much more is required to justify it than his account in ‘Self-Consciousness’. The ‘Initial Thesis of Mutual Recognition’ introduced early in the main section on ‘Self-Consciousness’ is closely connected with Kantian notions about the ‘I think’. However, this Initial Thesis of Mutual Recognition is Fichte’s, not Hegel’s. In fact, Hegel does not support this initial Fichtean Thesis of Mutual Recognition. Instead, Hegel take’s Fichte’s view as a clue for developing a much more sophisticated and illuminating Thesis of Mutual Recognition of his own, one introduced much later in the Phenomenology, at the very end of the major section on ‘Spirit’, in the transition to ‘Religion’. The ‘concept’ of spirit announced at the beginning of ‘Self-Consciousness’, Hegel ultimately argues, is extremely abstract and inadequate, yet very important and suggestive. We can trace the significance and reasons for Hegel’s replacement for Fichte’s Thesis of Mutual Recognition if we begin with Kant’s ‘I think’. Kant’s ‘I think’ is such an abstract concept, and when we think it, it is such an abstract thought, that it is extremely difficult to see how any transcendental or even quasi-transcendental argument could show that merely thinking the thought, ‘I think’, requires recognising that one’s own self-consciousness as a thinker requires recognising that other people also can and do think the ‘I think’ for and about themselves. The Initial Thesis of Mutual Recognition is this: Individual self-consciousness is only possible for human beings on the basis of our conscious awareness of other self-conscious persons.6

One main problem with this thesis is its sheer breadth. It appears implausible to suggest that we cannot be self-aware without being aware of other selfaware persons. Part of why it appears implausible is due to our Cartesian inheritance, according to which to be conscious at all involves being conscious that we are conscious, so that consciousness of whatever we may sense, imagine or conceive automatically involves self-consciousness. In this regard it is important to note that, like Kant, Hegel distinguishes between consciousness and self-consciousness just as Leibniz distinguished between perception and 6

Cf. PhdG 9:108.29–30, .35/¶177; quoted above, n. 5.

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apperception. Leibniz’ ‘perception’ is bare sensory awareness, e.g., ‘hunger now’, ‘food there’, where these are to be understood as explicit formulations of the contents of mental states which themselves are not conceptually, linguistically or otherwise explicitly articulated by the (organic) subject of those states. According to Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, the explicit propositional articulation of sensory states, in forms that can be expressed as ‘I am hungry now’ or ‘Over there is some food I want’, is a further, complex intellectual achievement. This is not the place to examine the merits of these two different views; though the distinction between mere sensory perception and explicit, conceptually structured apperception is defensible.7 I hope that indicating this key issue helps remove an appearance of utter implausibility from the Initial Thesis of Mutual Recognition. 73 HEGEL’S ANALYSIS OF MUTUAL RECOGNITION: THE STATE OF DEBATE. 73.1 Even if sound, this interpretive advice does little to specify the Initial Thesis of Mutual Recognition. One might suggest that, because it involves conceptually articulated forms of explicit awareness, apperception requires language in order to provide the conceptual repertoire apperception requires. Whatever may be the merits of this suggestion, arguing for it would require something like Wittgenstein’s critique of private language. Although this strategy may ultimately succeed,8 it is plainly not the kind of analysis Hegel provides in ‘Self-Consciousness’, nor elsewhere in the Phenomenology.9 73.2 Another suggestion is that the relevant kind of ‘recognition’ involves recognising oneself as a person, a much more sophisticated kind of selfawareness than mere self-awareness of what one perceives. If one were to argue further that being aware of oneself as a person is required for being a person, one might then try to justify the Initial Thesis of Mutual Recognition by arguing that individual human beings cannot be aware of themselves as persons without being aware of other self-conscious persons (cf. Strawson 1959, 87–117). This specification of the Initial Thesis of Mutual Recognition is 7

For discussion and defence of this distinction, see Westphal (2010a), (2013a). The best reconstruction of Wittgenstein’s analysis as an argument in Crispin Wright (1986). Though ‘new Wittgensteinians’ demure from ascribing theses or arguments to Wittgenstein, reconstructions like Wright’s are important to address non-Wittgensteinian philosophers who first insist upon the question, ‘What’s the argument?’ 9 This is not to deny that interesting comparisons can be made between Hegel’s critique of ‘Sense Certainty’ and Wittgenstein’s critique of private language. However, Wittgenstein’s analysis focuses on our abilities to follow rules, whereas Hegel’s focuses on our possession and use of certain a priori concepts to identify particular objects and events at all. In this regard, Hegel’s critique of ‘Sense Certainty’ is much closer to Kant’s views than Wittgenstein’s. On Hegel’s critique of ‘Sense Certainty’ see Westphal (2000a), (2002–03), (2009b), (2010a). 8

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much closer to Fichte’s view. If recognising oneself as a person involves recognising more than merely that one thinks; if it requires recognising who one is and what one does as a person, then perhaps Hegel’s concern is not simply with Kant’s thin transcendental ‘I think’, but with richer notions of individual character or (in this sense) of ‘identity’. If so, then perhaps we could understand Hegel’s account of mutual recognition by appealing, e.g., to Aristotle’s account of friendship. According to Aristotle, we can achieve certain important kinds of self-knowledge only by witnessing our own kinds of character traits as they are exhibited by our closest friends, who typically share some of our important, defining character traits.10 If this were Hegel’s point, it would be easy to see how the concrete recognition of one’s specific kind of character could well require mutual recognition, at least amongst intimate friends. A group of intimate friends, however, is far short of a society-wide recognitive community, and this kind of concrete self-recognition of one’s character is not obviously a transcendental issue admitting of transcendental proof, however construed. Though interesting, this way of enriching Hegel’s premiss provides no key to Hegel’s analysis and defence of the initial Thesis of Mutual Recognition. 73.3 The most cogent recent attempt to show that Hegel proves the thesis of mutual recognition within the first half of ‘Self-Consciousness’ is Beiser’s (2005, 174–91). His discussion provides a composite conspectus of Hegel’s analyses of mutual recognition in the dialectic of lord and bondsman, as Hegel develops this theme in the Nürnberger Propädeutik,11 the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (chapt. IV, IVA) and the 1830 Encyclopaedia, §§430–437 (2005, 178). My disagreement with Beiser – and with most interpretations of this issue in and section of Hegel’s Phenomenology – is two-fold. I disagree about exactly how and where Hegel draws his ultimate conclusions about mutual recognition in the 1807 Phenomenology, and about exactly what conclusions Hegel draws. Beiser claims that If the master recognises the slave as a free being, then he also ceases to degrade himself to the level of his animal desires. He proves that he is rational because he recognises that another person is an end in himself. (Beiser 2005, 190)

To support this claim, Beiser cites the final seven paragraphs of Hegel’s chapter.12 Beiser then introduces the Rousseauian-Kantian theme that genuine rationality lies in self-legislating universally valid laws, ultimately claiming that ‘The master proves his freedom not by dominating this slave, … but by treat10

Aristotle EN, Bk. 10; cf. Cooper (1980). GW 10:17–28, 425–29; the latter appears in Hegel (1986), 58–63. 12 PhdG 9:112.34–116.5/¶¶190–6; cited by Beiser (2005), 327 n. 19. 11

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ing him as an equal’.13 Though interesting, Beiser’s treatment of these two points is deficient. First, whilst appealing to notions about self-legislation is germane, so doing does not explain why self-legislation is necessary to achieve self-conscious. Second, the closing paragraphs of Hegel’s chapter IVA support, not Beiser’s interpretation but my own.14 Hegel concludes his remarks about the Lord by noting that the he achieves only ‘a one-sided and unequal recognition’, because, in comparison to genuinely mutual recognition, his ‘lacks the moment, that what the lord does to the other, he also does to himself, and what the bondsman does to himself he also does to the other’ (PhdG, 9:113.36–39/¶191). The remainder of Hegel’s chapter highlights the rather better results for the Bondsman, though neither does Hegel credit the Bondsman with achieving equal recognition. Beiser is correct about the form Hegel’s argument takes at this point in the Encyclopaedia, though he does not ask why this premiss – or is it Hegel’s conclusion? – is absent from chapter IVB of the 1807 Phenomenology. Beiser likewise disregards the significance of the different contexts of Hegel’s analysis in the 1807 Phenomenology and the Encyclopaedia. One important contrast between them is that the Encyclopaedia is a lecture syllabus, to which condensed summaries are appropriate. More important is the fact that Hegel’s Encyclopaedia is written from the standpoint of Hegel’s philosophical system, which presupposes that philosophy is cognitively competent. As Hegel states in both editions of the Science of Logic,15 the proof of this crucial presupposition of his philosophical system is provided solely by the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. Thus the 1807 Phenomenology must demonstrate by justifying, inter alia, that free rational action requires Kantian selflegislation, or that mutual recognition is constitutive of our individual selfconsciousness. Finally, Beiser does not consider why Hegel’s summary discussions of mutual recognition in the Nürnberger Propädeutik and in the Encyclopaedia turn directly to something called ‘universal self-consciousness’ – Hegel’s label there for genuine mutual recognition within moral philosophy – whilst his most detailed analysis of mutual recognition in the 1807 Phenomenology does not lead directly to this (purported) result. Instead, individualist views of thought, reason and action persist through the remainder of ‘Self13

Beiser (2005), 190; he cites Enz. §433R for support. See HER 160–2, 180–3; Westphal (2003a), §13.9. 15 WdL I, 11:20.5–18, 20.37–21.11; 21:32.23–33.3, 33.20–34.1 The debate about the later systematic importance of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology has been distracted by seeking an ‘introduction’ to Hegel’s Science of Logic, of which there are several, though none of the others are ever described by Hegel as providing a ‘justification’, ‘proof’ or a ‘deduction’ of the standpoint of the Science of Logic, a task Hegel expressly assigns solely to the 1807 Phenomenology. This serious oversight reflects general lack of attention by Hegel’s commentators to issues of justifying, not merely expounding, Hegel’s (purported) views. 14

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Consciousness’,16 through the entirety of ‘Reason’, are only implicitly replaced by social conceptions of thought, reason and action at the beginning of ‘Spirit’, where these implicitly social conceptions of human individuals only become explicit (and purportedly justified) at the very end of ‘Spirit’ in ‘Evil and Forgiveness’, after criticising internally another wide range of individualist views.17 Beiser’s fine summary misses much of Hegel’s point due to insufficient attention to detail, both textual and philosophical. This is an inherent problem of synopses, especially of Hegel’s views, though more careful and thorough analysis can afford more cogent synopsis.18 73.4 Some recent commentators realise that Hegel’s discussion of mutual recognition extends through to the end of his analysis of ‘Reason’, and that his analysis of ‘Evil and its Forgiveness’ is crucial to his account of mutual recognition.19 However, these commentators do not link Hegel’s account of mutual recognition to his contention that consciousness of others is a transcendental condition of individual self-consciousness. Ludwig Siep (1998) rightly stresses the importance of Hegel’s account of recognition to his theory of justification of practical norms, though without noting its importance to Hegel’s theory of rational justification as such. All the commentaries present composite accounts of Hegel’s account of mutual recognition, without recognising that Hegel’s Phenomenology must provide self-sufficient proofs of his main theses in order to justify the standpoint of ‘Absolute Knowing’, and thereby to justify the standpoint of Hegel’s Science of Logic, and more generally the cognitive competence of (Hegel’s) philosophy. The present study aims to remedy these shortcomings.

16

For excellent discussion of ‘Stoicism, Scepticism and Unhappy Consciousness’ see Chireghin (2009). 17 See below, §79, and HER, 160–83. Especially here the present analysis depends upon a broader interpretation of the 1807 Phenomenology than can be defended here, though much of it is defended in Harris (HL) and Westphal (2009a); cf. Stekeler (2014). 18 Surprisingly, Beiser (2005, 11) claims Hegel is not an original thinker. Beiser may be correct that many of Hegel’s themes can be found amongst his predecessors; indeed Hegel insists they are. Hegel’s originality lies in his highly innovative redevelopment of these themes into very distinctive, detailed and sophisticated philosophical views. If Beiser fails to appreciate this, it may be due to insufficient attention to the details of Hegel’s texts and analyses, and perhaps also to valuable secondary literature. Properly philosophical analysis of Hegel’s – or of any philosophical – texts requires combining philosophically acute historical, textual and systematic analysis. This should go without saying, but must be said because it has been so widely neglected in Hegel studies, as in Hegel criticism. Regrettably, Beiser still reads Hegel largely in terms he learned from Stace (1924). 19 Wildt (1982); Harris (HL); HER, 160–8, 183; Siep (1998); Williams (2003a, 2003b); Houlgate (2003); Westphal (2003a), §13.9–11; Neuhouser (2009); below, §§83–91.

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74 HEGEL’S PHENOMENOLOGY AND KANT’S ‘I THINK’. Prospects for a successful Hegelian analysis lie in recalling Kant’s view that to think is to judge (KdrV B398). Might it be possible to prove transcendentally that judging that ‘I judge’ requires judging – and thus recognising – that, in order rationally to judge that ‘I judge’, each of us must recognise – i.e., rightly judge – that other people likewise judge correctly and rationally about themselves, ‘I judge’? An affirmative answer can be found if we recall that Kant’s transcendental proofs involve regressive demonstrations (Ameriks 1978) and that Hegel’s phenomenological dialectic adopts and extends this important feature of Kant’s strategy (HER, 150–5, 171–5, 184–5). This strategy I develop in this chapter and the next. To focus this richer point about rational judgment and intersubjectivity, note first where and how in the Phenomenology Hegel justifies conclusions pertaining to Kant’s ‘I think’, as a necessary, transcendental condition for the very possibility of self-conscious human experience (HER, 158–64, esp. 160, 164). One key conclusion for which Hegel argues in ‘Consciousness’ is drawn at the end of ‘Force and Understanding’ (PhdG chapt. III), namely, that we can be conscious of objects only if we are self-conscious.20 At the beginning of ‘Self-Consciousness’ (PhdG chapt. IV), Hegel asserts his thesis that human self-consciousness requires for its possibility our consciousness of objects other than ourselves.21 By the end of the final subsection of ‘Self-consciousness’, ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ (PhdG chapt. IVB), Hegel contends that the Unhappy Consciousness rejects entirely the original claim of Fichtean SelfConsciousness, that it self-sufficiently constitutes the entire world we experience (PhdG, 9:130.25–31/¶229). Rejecting this thesis, within the context of He20 Hegel states: ‘The consciousness of another, of an object in general, is indeed itself necessarily self-consciousness, being reflected in itself, consciousness of its self in its otherbeing. The necessary progression from the previous forms of consciousness [sc. ‘Sense Certainty’, ‘Perception’ and ‘Force and Understanding’], to which their true was a thing, something other than themselves, expresses just this, that not only is consciousness of things only possible for a self-consciousness, but also that this alone is the truth of those forms of consciousness’; „Das Bewußtseyn eines Andern, eines Gegenstandes überhaupt, ist zwar selbst nothwendig S e l b s t b e w u ß t s e y n , reflectiert seyn in sich, Bewußtseyn seiner selbst, in seinem Andersseyn. Der n o t h w e n d i g e F o r t g a n g von den bisherigen Gestalten des Bewußtseyns […] drückt eben dies aus, daß nicht allein das Bewußtseyn vom Dinge nur für ein Selbstbewußtseyn möglich ist, sondern daß diß allein die Wahrheit jener Gestallten ist“ (GW 9:101.38–102.5/¶164). 21 ‘Self-consciousness has at first become for itself, not yet as unity with consciousness as such’; „Das Selbstbewußtseyn ist erst f ü r s i c h geworden, noch nicht a l s E i n h e i t mit dem Bewußtseyn überhaupt“ (GW 9:102.6–7/¶164); ‘But in fact self-consciousness is the reflection out of the being of the sense-certain and perceived world, and is essentially the return out of otherbeing’; „Aber in der That ist das Selbstbewußtseyn die Reflexion aus dem Seyn der sinnlichen und wahrgenommenen Welt, und wesentlich die Rückkehr aus dem A n d e r s e y n “ (GW 9:104.7–10/¶167).

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gel’s reductio ad absurdum argument, justifies inferring, by disjunctive syllogism, that we can be self-conscious only if we are conscious of independently existing objects (PhdG, 9:131.1–31/¶230). Hegel’s argument for this conclusion is an argument for mental content externalism.22 In this way, Hegel’s two lines of analysis jointly restate and purport to justify the conclusion (inter alia) of Kant’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’, that we can be self-aware only if we are in fact aware and have a least some empirical knowledge of our natural surroundings. To this very significant extent, Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology addresses Kant’s issues about transcendental self-consciousness (apperception), expressed by the ‘I think’.23 75 WHAT LINKS THE ‘I THINK’ AND THE THESIS OF MUTUAL RECOGNITION? Hegel’s conclusions about the ‘I think’ in ‘Consciousness’ and ‘Self-Consciousness’ (§74) are individualist; they neither claim nor imply anything about intersubjectivity being a condition for individual self-consciousness.24 Thus they do not answer questions about the advent of collective or social spirit, about the Initial Thesis of Mutual Recognition nor about any social or historical conditions of individual self-consciousness. To what extent – and if so, how – does Hegel seek to demonstrate that the ‘I judge’ is possible for each of us only insofar as it is also possible, and one recognises it is possible, for other members, indeed for all mature members, of one’s community? No such presentation, analysis or argument can be found in ‘Lord and Bondsman’, nor even in the entirety of Hegel’s analysis of ‘Self-consciousness’.25 Examining Hegel’s text shows that he does not argue in ‘Self-Consciousness’ for the Initial Thesis of Mutual Recognition. Though initially focussed on mutual recognition, Hegel’s analysis in ‘Lord and Bondsman’ sets this issue aside, other than to demonstrate that equal mutual recognition is impossible between superior and subordinate. The structure of Hegel’s text ought to alert us to his intention not to prove here that bare individual self-conscious22

‘Mental Content Externalism’ is the thesis that the contents of some basic ‘mental’ states can only be defined or specified by recourse to extra-mental objects, persons or events. 23 It suffices for present purposes to understand Hegel’s intention to defend the conclusion to Kant’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’; the details of his justification of this thesis need not be considered here. For discussion, see HER 156–64, Westphal (2005), (2009b). 24 It is important to stress that I use the term ‘individualism’ to contrast with collective or social phenomena. The relevant features of Hegel’s social ontology are analysed in Westphal (2003a), §§29–37. 25 On ‘Lord and Bondsman’ (‘Self-Consciousness’, §A) see Neuhouser (2009), Redding (2005, 2008, 2011); on ‘Stoicism’, ‘Scepticism’, and ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ (‘Self-Consciousness’, §B), see Chiereghin (2009); on the entirety of ‘Self-Consciousness’ see HL 1:316–446. Nuzzo’s (2005) analysis of Fichte’s account of the role of embodiment in mutual recognition illuminates Hegel’s treatment of embodiment at the outset of ‘Self-Consciousness’.

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ness is possible only on the basis of our consciousness (or ‘recognition’) of other self-conscious people. First, it is very hard to imagine how such a portentous thesis could be demonstrated in only a few short pages. Second, it is even harder to find an argument to justify this thesis within the few short pages Hegel devotes to ‘Lord and Bondsman’. Third, Hegel introduces the initial Thesis of Mutual Recognition as a bald assertion (PhdG, 9:109.8–9/¶178). This should alert us to the fact that Hegel thereby introduces a key thesis – a ‘certainty’ (Gewißheit) – of one of his opponents, in order to subject that thesis and its intended use to internal critique. Here Hegel’s opponent is Fichte, who upholds two theses, the Initial Thesis of Mutual Recognition and the ‘Self-Sufficiency Thesis’, that individual self-consciousness is completely selfsufficient, in the sense that it suffices to account for the entirety of anyone’s conscious experience, symbolised by Fichte’s ‘ I = I ’ . Hegel’s main critical points in ‘The Battle unto Death’ and ‘Lord and Bondsman’ are that these two theses are incompatible, and that the ‘Self-Sufficiency Thesis’ is false.26 Nevertheless, Hegel does espouse a Thesis of Mutual Recognition. It is crucial to notice that Hegel continues to discuss this issue throughout the Phenomenology.27 After disappearing from ‘Lord and Bondsman’, the issue of mutual recognition (though not the term) first reappears in ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ (PhdG chapt. IVBc). The recognition considered there is a highly asymmetrical, putative recognition of the ‘changeable’ unhappy consciousness of the devoutly religious (Augustinian) individual by the (divine) ‘unchangeable’, which is projected by that devout individual (PhdG, 9:122.7–10, 130–31/¶¶207, 227–230). In the Phenomenology, Hegel first mentions a genu26 Cf. Redding (2005). Hegel’s substantive argument in the first part of ‘Self-consciousness’ (i.e., ‘the Battle unto death’ and ‘Lord and Bondsman’) may be summarised briefly: Hegel’s analysis of ‘Self-Consciousness’ provides an internal critique of Fichte’s philosophy, which purported that ‘self-consciousness’ (‘I = I’) is a self-sufficient principle for explaining the entirety of our empirical experience and action. There are two main strands of idealist argument in Fichte’s philosophy. One strand is theoretical; it purports to demonstrate transcendentally that we constitute the world we experience (Zöller 1998). I ‘The Battle unto Death’ and in the initial stages of ‘Lord and Bondsman’, Hegel highlights biological organisms, including one’s own body, and other apparently self-conscious human beings, because these provide clear counter-examples to the claims of self-sufficiency required by Fichte’s theoretical (‘transcendental’) idealism. The second strand of idealism in Fichte’s philosophy is practical; it recognises that the first, theoretical strand cannot adequately account for the reality or objectivity of what we experience, and contends that we must actively appropriate the objects and events we experience in order to make the world our own (Beiser 2002, Part II). In the first half of ‘Self-consciousness’ Hegel argues, with Fichte’s practical idealism against Fichte’s theoretical idealism, and then further argues against Fichte’s practical idealism by showing that it holds only with regard to a severely restricted range of objects: artifacts made by oneself. To make this case, Hegel considers ranges of specific kinds of objects, pointing out that, aside from one’s own artifacts, all of them are counter-examples to Fichte’s practical idealism (HER, 160–2). 27 Harris (HL), Siep (1998) and Williams (2003) recognise this important fact.

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ine case of equal mutual recognition at the beginning of ‘Immediate Spirit’ (chapt. VI): that between sister and brother, Antigone and Polynices (PhdG, 9:248.3–9/¶456). However, Hegel expressly indicates that theirs is an undeveloped, literally immature form of mutual recognition. The first fully developed form of equal mutual recognition in the Phenomenology occurs at the end of ‘Spirit’, in the last sub-section of Hegel’s discussion of ‘Conscience’, in ‘Evil and Forgiveness’ (chapt. VICc). At this juncture, two moral judges finally recognise that they are equally fallible and equally competent to judge individual behaviour, regardless of who acts and who observers, and that they require one another’s assessment to scrutinise and thereby to assess and so to justify their own judgment on any particular matter.28 What are Hegel’s philosophical grounds for this conclusion? 76 RATIONAL JUDGMENT, AUTONOMY AND SPONTANEITY. The self-conscious ‘I think’ that matters most to philosophy is the ‘I judge’ that is central to rational thought and action in any of its forms. Only a strong sense of ‘I judge’ which involves critical assessment makes possible thought and reasoning, as contrasted to mere vocables, rhetoric, propaganda or rote following of protocols. Conversely, anyone who can or does engage in genuine inquiry and debate instantiates (more or less adequately) this strong sense of the term. Kant’s analysis aimed to uncover the transcendental conditions which make self-conscious experience humanly possible. Though Hegel shares that concern (above, §74), his focus in the Phenomenology is primarily on the kind of self-conscious judgment required to understand, to appreciate and to assess the point of, e.g., Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction of the Categories’ or his ‘Refutation of Idealism’ or any other piece of substantial philosophical reasoning. In this important regard, a critique of philosophical selfconsciousness is central to Hegel’s Phenomenology (Westphal 2003a, 29–37). Hegel’s Phenomenology concerns centrally the proper understanding of rationally justified and justificatory judgment. To judge rationally is not merely to decide. To judge rationally is to make whatever judgment is best warranted in view of all available relevant considerations, including evidence, counter-evidence, relevant principles of inference, relevant (as contrasted to irrelevant or less relevant) analogies with other examples, cases or domains 28

PhdG, 9:359–62/¶¶666–671; HER, 183. Harris (HL), 2:482–83, 495–96, 502–08, 534–37, cf. 770–72; Williams (1992), 208, (2003); and Brinkmann (2003) also recognise that this passage is crucial, though none recognises its significance for rational judgment per se. Beiser (2009) epitomises Hegel’s analysis of ‘Morality’, including ‘Conscience’, though he neglects much of the philosophical significance of the final reconciliation among the contesting agent and observer.

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and alternative accounts or assessments of the issue, whether historical, contemporaneous or possible (though no one has yet advocated it). To judge rationally is to assume responsibility for the warrant or justificatory status of one’s conclusions. To assume responsibility for making judgments and for making any and every particular judgment – all of which are intrinsically one’s own judgments – is to exercise autonomy in at least two senses. First, judgment is autonomous because one forms one’s own judgment, rather than merely adopting anyone else’s judgment, advice or recommendation (much less, command). Second, judgment is autonomous because it is guided by the normative considerations of appropriate assessment and use both of evidence and of principles of reasoning. If judgment, as a physiological or psychological process is somehow causally structured, nevertheless it counts as judgment only insofar as it responds to such normative considerations, rather than merely to its causal antecedents as such. Judgment is a response to, not merely an effect of, its proper evidentiary and inferential antecedents. If justificatory processes turn out to be causal, they are justificatory not because they are causal, but because they satisfy sufficient normative constraints – defining or at least including proper functioning, proper inference and proper assessment – to provide inter alia rational justification. For this reason, Kant held that reason, rational judgment (a pleonasm), is spontaneous. This point merits closer consideration. Kant famously emphasised the spontaneity of human thought; Hegel followed suit. Kant contends that freedom is a rational idea which is constitutive – indeed definitive – of our conceiving of ourselves as agents (Allison 1997). Only rational spontaneity enables us to appeal to principles of inference and to make rational judgments, both of which are normative because each rational subject considers for him- or herself whether available procedures, evidence and principles of inference warrant a judgment or conclusion. In the theoretical domain of knowledge, having adequate evidence, proof or (in sum) justification, requires taking that evidence, proof or justification to be adequate; in the practical domain of deliberation and action, having adequate grounds for action requires taking those grounds to be adequate. Thus Kant’s ‘Incorporation Thesis’, that no inclination is a motive unless and until it is incorporated into an agent’s maxim by being judged to be at least permissible,29 is an instance of the more general principle (and third aspect) of autonomous judgment identified here. We act only insofar as we take ourselves to have reasons, even in cases of acting on desires, where we must (ex hypothesi) take those desires as – by judging them to be – appropriate and adequate grounds of action. Otherwise we abdicate rational con29

Kant, Rel., 6:24; Allison (1990), 5–6, 39–40.

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siderations and absent ourselves from what Sellars (EPM 107) calls ‘the space of reasons’ and merely behave. In that case, to borrow McDowell’s (1994, 13) phrase, we provide ourselves only excuses and exculpations, but neither reasons nor justifications, for acting or believing as we do.30 Kant’s conception of rational spontaneity opposes empiricist accounts of beliefs and desires as merely causal products of environmental stimuli, and it opposes empiricist accounts of action, according to which we act on whatever desires are (literally) ‘strongest’. We think and act rationally only insofar as we judge the merits of whatever case is before us.31 77 INDIVIDUAL RATIONAL JUDGMENT AND THE COMMUNITY OF RATIONAL JUDGES. What, if anything, links individual rational judgment, so understood, to a community of rational judges? To begin to answer this question recall that Kant still worked with a traditional dichotomy, familiar to Descartes, Locke and Hume, between ‘historical’ (i.e. empirical) and ‘rational’ knowledge.32 Historical knowledge (historia) derives from sensory and memorial data, whilst rational knowledge (scientia) is inferentially based on rational first principles. In the wake of Tempier (1277), this model became narrowly deductivist and infallibilist. Kant retained this Modern version of the ancient Greek model of ‘science’ as the deduction of conclusions from first principles. This model requires any ‘science’ to be a ‘system’. This model of rational knowledge runs through Kant’s Critical system; it is central to his transcendental idealism and to his attempt to provide a priori metaphysical foundations for natural science (KTPR, 173–204). 30 I do not claim that taking evidence to be adequate suffices for that evidence to be adequate! Some epistemologists bridle at the notion that having adequate evidence or grounds for belief requires taking that evidence or those grounds to be adequate. Yet there are many examples of people having memories or perceptions that in fact bear evidentially on a certain belief they hold, though they fail to recognise this evidential relation and so fail to base their belief on that evidence. Basing (or, mutatis mutandis, rejecting) beliefs on evidence requires taking that evidence to be both relevant and adequate. 31 Hegel restates Kant’s Incorporation Thesis in his own terms in his Philosophical Outlines of Justice (GW 14, Rph §§5–7), where he also extols Kant’s account of autonomy (Rph §§133, 135R). 32 Descartes employs this distinction in passing in the Third of his Rules for Directing the Mind (AT 10:367). This distinction is Locke’s (Es 1..1.2) point in using the ‘historical, plain method’. It undergirds Hume’s point that if we were to find no regularities in nature, then ‘the memory and the senses’ would be ‘the only canals, by which the knowledge of any real existence could possibly have access to the mind’ (En, §8). Kant uses it in the same sense as Descartes in a parallel context (KdrV, A835–7/B863–5). This distinction remains highly influential today, as is evident from the extent to which analytical philosophers continue to distinguish ‘conceptual’ from ‘empirical’ issues, and to distinguish ‘philosophy’ sharply from ‘history of philosophy’, relegating the latter to mere scholarship.

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The key justificatory model involved both in historical and in rational knowledge, as traditionally understood, is foundationalist: Both kinds of knowledge involve justifying conclusions by deriving them unilaterally from basic foundations. In the case of historical knowledge, these foundations are empirical data (however conceived). In the case of rational knowledge, these foundations are self-evident or otherwise rationally certified first principles. The ‘foundationalist’ point of either model is that justification flows from ‘basic’ foundations to other, ‘derived’ claims, not vice versa. This is the case regardless of whether justificatory ‘basing relations’ are strictly deductive, or involve other kinds of rules of inference or (in the case of empirical data) weaker forms of ‘basing relations’. However, both of these foundationalist models of justification were exposed by Sextus Empiricus to be hopelessly dogmatic and prone to petitio principii, because neither kind of justificatory foundations can offer any justification to those who fundamentally doubt or dispute those foundations, whatever derivation or ‘basing’ relations are used or the very foundationalist model of justification itself. In the face of such fundamental disagreement, how can proper criteria of justification be established? In principle, no foundationalist theory can answer this question, precisely because it understands justification solely in terms of derivation of conclusions from first premises of one kind or another. In principle, foundationalism preaches to the (nearly) converted, and commits a petitio principii against whoever dissents; it cannot justify its criteria of truth or of justification.33 This is one key implication of Sextus Empiricus’ Dilemma of the Criterion (above, §§12, 61). Regardless of whether the preferred set of foundations are empirical or rational, so long as ‘foundations’ for knowledge are sought, controversies about those foundations, their associated ‘basing relations’ and the foundationalist model itself are inevitable, whilst in principle the foundationalist model of justification offers nothing to settle such disputes because it analyses justification solely in terms of derivation from some privileged set of foundations. Pure externalist accounts of cognitive justification, such as reliabilism or information-theoretic epistemology, are designed to scuttle such internalist worries about justification. However, identifying and justifying our claims about principles, whether epistemic or moral, raises these issues again (HER, 68–90); pure externalism neglects our need and our capacity to form, assess, justify and revise our judgments rationally (per above, §§63, 72, 74), including our judgments about externalist principles purportedly governing 33

One important qualifier: the Dilemma of the Criterion is a genuine problem in non-formal domains, such as empirical knowledge, whether common sense or scientific, morals or any substantive areas of philosophy. Formal domains are those in which deduction is the sole and sufficient form of justification; they are not my topic.

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cognitive justification. The Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion is the central methodological problem addressed by Hegel’s Phenomenology; he re-states it in the middle of his Introduction to the Phenomenology.34 One of Hegel’s great epistemological insights is to realise that, first, this Dilemma is a genuine philosophical problem; second, it disposes of foundationalist models of justification, and so disposes of the two traditional models of knowledge (scientia and historia); although third, this Dilemma does not ultimately justify scepticism about ordinary, scientific nor even philosophical knowledge.35 Hegel’s conclusion, instead, is that the Dilemma of the Criterion underscores the importance of Kant’s account of the autonomy of rational judgment (above §73), and more importantly, Kant’s constructivist account of the identification and justification of rational principles (§75). Hegel’s solution to the Dilemma of the Criterion is summarised above in §76, and detailed in §§60–64. 78 KANT’S CONSTRUCTIVIST ACCOUNT OF RATIONAL JUSTIFICATION. The constructivist character of Kant’s account of justification introduces a fourth dimension of autonomy central to rational judgment (above, §71.1). Kant’s constructivism about cognitive principles is suggested at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason in the ‘Doctrine of Method’, where he recognises that the proper inventory of our cognitive capacities must be a collective undertaking, in which we scrutinise our own and others’ results (O’Neill 1989, 3–50; 1992), and again in the ‘Canon of Pure Reason’ where he notes that one important, if fallible way to distinguish genuinely sufficient justificatory grounds from those which merely appear (first-person) to be sufficient is to consider whether those grounds are such that they can be communicated to all others, such that they too can understand, consider, assess, think and act upon those same grounds because they too can find them to be sufficiently justificatory of one’s claim or judgment (KdrV A829/B857, cf. GS 8:144–7). Kant’s constructivism about practical principles is built into his universalisation tests of the Categorical Imperative, in ways highlighted by Onora O’Neill (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004a, 2004b), though they were also identified, adopted and adapted by Hegel (Westphal 2017b, 2018a). The label ‘constructivism’ now runs riot in moral theory, where it is too often understood ontologically, in contrast to moral realism. Kant’s constructivism is methodological and justificatory; it is unique and, I submit, uniquely powerful (Westphal 2016a). Unfortunately, it 34

PhdG, 9:58.12–22/¶81; see above, §§60–64, and HER, 10–15. The only recent philosopher who is equally sensitive to these key points is F.L. Will; in effect, the Dilemma of the Criterion is Will’s (1979, 159) point of departure for his positive account of philosophical governance of norms. 35

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remains largely unfamiliar, despite O’Neill’s outstanding work on it. I first summarise some key points of Kant’s constructivist approach to identifying and justifying practical norms (in this §), before indicating how Hegel extends Kant’s model to account for rational justification generally (§79). Instead of consent, Kant’s theory of normative justification relies on possible consistency of human maxims or forms of outer action. Kant’s basic criterion of right action, along with its various instances, is neither indicative nor hypothetical; it is modal. The modality of Kant’s basic criterion is nicely formulated by O’Neill: When we think that others cannot adopt, a fortiori cannot consent to, some principle we cannot offer them reasons for doing so. (O’Neill 2000, 200)

‘Adopt’ here means, to be able to follow consistently that same principle in thought or action. This is an issue of capacity and ability, not a psychological claim about what someone can or cannot bring him- or herself to believe. The key requirement built into Kant’s universalisation tests is that one be able to supply to all relevant others sufficient justifying reasons for acting or thinking as one proposes to do on the very same occasion on which one proposes so to act or to think; this is Kant’s conditio sine qua non for what can or cannot be ‘adopted’ consistently. The possibility of adopting a principle thus differs fundamentally from ‘accepting’ one, in the typical philosophical senses of ‘believe’, ‘endorse’ or ‘agree to’, which are central to contractarian or contractualist analyses (Westphal 2016a, §§29–34). Kant’s universalisation tests rule out any maxim which cannot possibly be adopted by others; it does not concern whether they may (not) in fact chose to adopt the same maxim, nor the same kind of maxim. Numerical (rather than generic) identity of the shareable maxim is central to Kant’s tests; he says expressly that your own maxim is to be (counterfactually) universalised.36 What we can or cannot consistently adopt as a maxim is constrained by the proposed form of thinking or behaviour or its guiding principle (maxim), by basic facts about our finite form of rational agency and by basic features of our worldly context of action. This 36 Recall Kant’s statements from the Groundwork of the Formula of Universal Law: ‘Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’ (Gr 4:221), the formula of a Law of Nature: ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature’ (Gr 4:421), the formula of Autonomy: ‘… act only so that the will can regard itself at the same time as giving universal law through its maxim’ (Gr 4:434), the Humanity Imperative (quoted just below) and the formula of the Realm of Ends: ‘… every rational being must act as if he were by his maxims at all times a lawgiving member of the universal kingdom of ends. The formal principle of these maxims is, act as if your maxims were to serve at the same time as a universal law (for all rational beings)’ (Gr 4:438). Each of these statements of the principle of Kant’s test indicates that it is your own maxim, not your generic kind of maxim, that is to be universalised (tr. Gregor).

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latter information is brought into Kant’s universalisation tests by using the Principle of Hypothetical Imperatives, ‘Who wills the end, wills also (necessarily, if he accords with reason) the sole means which are in his power’ (Gr. 4:417, tr. Paton).37 Though minimal, Kant’s tests directly rule out maxims of coercion, deception, fraud and exploitation. In principle, such maxims preclude offering to relevant others – especially victims – reasons sufficient to justify their following those maxims (or the courses of action they guide) in thought or action (O’Neill 1989, 81–125). This is signalled by the lack of the very possibility of consent, which serves as a criterion of illegitimacy (it is not constitutive of illegitimacy). Consent itself, whether implicit, explicit or hypothetical plays no role in Kant’s tests, nor in Kant’s justifying the results of his tests. Kant’s test uses the possibility of consent to signal the crucial justificatory possibility of providing sufficient justifying reasons to all concerned parties. Obviating the very possibility of consent on anyone’s part obviates the very possibility of offering sufficient justifying reasons to all concerned parties as possible bases of their own thought or action. Because any maxim’s (or any course of action’s) passing his universalisation tests requires that sufficient justifying reasons for that maxim or action can be given to all concerned parties, Kant’s constructivism embodies at its core equal respect for all persons as free rational agents, i.e., as agents who can determine what to think or to do by rationally assessing the merits of the case. Ruling out maxims which fail to pass this universalisation test establishes the minimum necessary conditions for resolving the problems of conflict that generated the central concern of Modern natural law with establishing normative standards to govern public life, despite deep disagreements among various groups about the substance and conduct of a good or pious life.38 Kant’s justificatory strategy is constructivist because it makes no appeal to any antecedent source or kind of normative authority. Thus Kant’s constructivist justification of practical principles at its core embodies the autonomy of reason, as being the necessary and sufficient basis for identifying, justifying and thereby genuinely establishing legitimate norms. This is the fourth key dimension of the autonomy of rational judgment (per above, §71.1): Kant’s justificatory strategy appeals only to a fundamental principle of rational justification, that justifying a judgment, claim, principle, policy, belief, institution or action requires that its proponent can provide sufficient justifying reasons to all other concerned parties, such that they can judge them to be 37

How Kant’s procedure works is detailed in Westphal (2016a), §§24–28, 35–38. Schneewind (1998); regarding Kant see Westphal (2016a), §§18–23; regarding Hegel see Westphal (2017e), (2018a). 38

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sufficiently justificatory and they can consistently adopt and follow the very same proposal in thought or action for the very same reasons. Therefore, at its core Kant’s constructivist justification of practical principles is fundamentally social, it is fundamentally intersubjective, because it addresses all concerned parties. The nerve of Kant’s strategy is to show that this modal capacity to provide justifying reasons to all relevant others is a very stringent requirement regarding any and all public phenomena or action(s). On the basis of this modal principle Kant develops a powerful kind of constructivism in normative theory, not in the sense popularised by Rawls (1971), but in the sense explicated by O’Neill.39 Kant’s constructivism articulates the content of a natural law theory, though it moots the issues of ontology (moral realism) and motivation which plagued natural law theories. Kant’s constructivism justifies the objectivity and legitimacy of practical, action-guiding principles, without appeal to moral facts, whether natural or non-natural. Kant’s constructivist principle addresses neither a particular society with its norms (communitarianism), nor an ‘overlapping consensus’ of a pluralistic society (Rawls), nor the multitude of voices aspiring to communicate in accord with the requirements of an ‘ideal speech situation’ (Habermas), nor a plurality of potential contractors (e.g., Gauthier or Scanlon40). These latter considerations are important, but are secondary to the basic framework principles of justice identified and justified by Kant’s constructivism, which articulates the most basic rational principles of human thought and action as such. The principles required for legitimate contract cannot themselves be established by contract, because (as Hume recognised, T 3.2.5.1–4) any such contract presupposes those principles. Conversely, requiring consent to establish basic norms too easily allows for negligence or backsliding through refusal to consent, including refusal to acknowledge relevant considerations and obligations. Kant’s constructivism establishes key norms to which we are committed, regardless of our preferences, desires or wishes, by our rational requirements to act in justified ways, together with the limits of our very finite form of human agency. According to Kant, there is no public use of reason without this constructivist principle, which uniquely avoids presupposing any particular authority, whether ideological, religious, sociohistorical, textual or personal. Saying that Kant’s constructivism does not appeal to moral facts may invite a misunderstanding. Unlike most contemporary ‘constructivist’ programmes, Kant’s constructivism is not committed to generating or ‘constructing’ the entire moral domain by appeal solely to non-moral facts and 39 40

O’Neill (1989, 1996, 2000, 2002b, 2004a, 2004b). See Westphal (2016a), §§18–34.

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principles. Kant’s constructivism solely concerns justification and assessment of judgments, not the ontology of the objects or phenomena so judged. Facts about human finitude, such as our liability to injury, coercion or deceit are empirical facts. They are partially constitutive of our finite form of rational agency. They are morally relevant facts because as agents there is so much we can, and either should or should not do to produce, avoid, exploit, avert or minister to them. The point of departure of Kant’s constructivism is not the alleged rights of others, but rather our own obligations towards others and towards ourselves because we are each a free, rational and finite agent living in mutual proximity on a finite surface. Ab initio Kant’s version of constructivism moves within the normative domain because restricting ourselves to those principles for which we can provide all parties with sufficient justifying reasons is as much a principle of morals as it is a principle of rational justification per se. It is a (broadly) moral principle because it requires us to act only on those principles which can be rationally justified, and because it requires us to respect ourselves and all other persons as rational agents who can understand, develop, assess, revise, think and act upon rationally justified principles because we recognise and understand their justificatory grounds. Kant primarily formulates ‘respect’ as respect for the moral law.41 Respect for the moral law is constituted by recognising the Categorical Imperative as the fundamental moral principle and to follow what it requires because it is the fundamental principle of morals. Kant’s Categorical Imperative is the fundamental principle of morals because it provides the fundamental criterial procedure for distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate types of action by distinguishing among prohibited, permissible and obligatory types of action. To use Kant’s Categorical Imperative and to follow its dictates requires using the constructivist method summarised here to identify and to justify legitimate maxims. Kant is emphatic that only insofar as we use the Categorical Imperative and follow its dictates can and do we treat each and every person as an end in him- or herself, and not merely as a means only. Doing this requires that we think and act only upon justifiable, and indeed rationally justified principles. A necessary criterion, the key conditio sine qua non, of rationally justifiable or justified principles is that only for such principles can we offer all concerned parties sufficient justifying reasons to think, judge or act as we do or propose.

41

Gr 4:400, 401n, 403, 424, 426, 436, 440; KdpV GS 5:73, 74–6, 78–86, 128, 132, 151, 157.

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79 HEGEL’S GENERALISATION OF KANT’S CONSTRUCTIVIST MODEL OF JUSTIFICATION. Just as Hegel realised that Kant’s ‘Incorporation Thesis’ instantiates a basic feature of rational judgment as such (above, §76), he also realised that Kant’s constructivism about practical principles holds for the justification of all rational principles, including cognitive principles – and thus also, inter alia, principles of empirical evidence and principles governing externalist factors in cognitive justification.42 Only Kant’s and Hegel’s constructivist approach to rational justification can resolve Sextus’ Dilemma of the Criterion.43 Sextus’s Dilemma holds against asymmetric, as it were ‘linear’ theories of justification, that work from first premises down to particular conclusions (scientia and historia). Against ‘coherentist’, ‘circular’ or ‘dialectical’ theories of justification, Sextus’ Dilemma raises the trope of vicious circularity. However, this horn of the Dilemma is defeated, and is shown to be merely a trope, by Hegel’s account of the possibility of constructive self- and mutual criticism. Mutual criticism is discussed later in this section (§79.3); first I briefly summarise Hegel’s account of the possibility of self-criticism (§79.1).44 The key to Hegel’s reply to the trope of circularity is to show that, because we are capable of constructive self-criticism, when assessing or re-assessing any piece of justificatory reasoning, by reviewing its basic evidence, principles of inference and its use of each of these, we can revise, replace or re-affirm as need be any component and any link among components within the justificatory reasoning in question.45 Because self-criticism and constructive mutual assessment are both fallible and – most fortunately – corrigible, Hegel’s account of rational justification is fundamentally fallibilist. Wisely, Hegel 42

I argue elsewhere that Hegel’s practical philosophy adopts and further develops Kant’s constructivist method for identifying and justifying practical principles (Westphal 2018a). 43 Recall that the present topic is rational justification. If some form of externalism is true, then simple perceptual knowledge escapes Sextus’ Dilemma, too, although no externalist theories or principles of perceptual knowledge escape. Externalist theories of perceptual knowledge do not escape social dimensions of human knowledge, due to the social dimensions of our acquisition and use of language, which we require for any claims to perceptual knowledge (Westphal 2003a, §§20, 25–28), nor do they escape reflective dimensions of human knowledge, which arise whenever perceptual conditions are either uncertain or sub-optimal. In such circumstances, any simple perceptual beliefs we may form are assessed or accepted only in view of our assessment of our current perceptual conditions. Pure externalism is an unlikely candidate for human perceptual knowledge; see Alston (1989a), 227–45. 44 I have analysed its details above, §§60–64; cf. HER, Westphal (1998a), (2003a). 45 Westphal (2003a), §10. In epistemology, this critical reassessment is facilitated by Hegel’s rejection of descriptions theories of reference, his transcendental proofs of externalism about mental content and his endorsement of some externalist aspects of cognitive justification, e.g., regarding sensation and perception (Westphal 2003a), and his (Kantian) semantics of singular cognitive reference; above, §§65–70, Westphal (2014).

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realised that fallibilism about justification is consistent with realism about the objects of empirical knowledge and with objectivity about practical principles.46 79.1 Hegel’s is no Coherence Criterion. It is important to understand why Hegel’s criterion for the truth and the rational justification of a philosophical theory of knowledge is not a version of any standard coherence theory of justification. Coherence theories of justification have long been suspected of failure to link their criterion of truth or justification, ‘coherence’, with the actual truth of the (purported) objects of any maximally coherent theory, without simply equating truth with coherence. One reason for this is that, like foundationalist theories, coherence theories are internalist theories of justification, according to which any justifying ground, any relevant principles of justification and justifying links amongst them, must be such that the relevant person (S) is or can easily become aware. Consider this point (briefly) in connection with some central characteristics of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century coherence theories. Nineteenth-century coherence theories of justification were conceived and written in what was later called the material mode of speech, and included experiences along with statements and principles amongst which coherence was to be sought. One persistent problem with such views is that, in the attempt to distinguish coherence from foundationalist theories of justification, coherence theorists tended to treat ‘experiences’ in ways which made their relations to objective states of affairs – i.e., to the relevant empirical truth-makers – puzzling if not incomprehensible. In the early Twentieth Century coherence theories were reformulated in the formal mode of speech, so that ‘experiences’ dropped out of account in favour of protocol statements, and coherence often became no more than logical consistency. This exacerbated the internalist difficulties of coherence theories, von Juhos (1934) noted, because any coherent system of statements can include the statements ‘This system of statements is the maximally coherent one and is thus true’, or ‘This system of protocol statements is issued by scientists of our cultural circle and is thus the only relevant one’. When relevant sets of protocol statements were restricted to, e.g., ‘scientists of our cultural circle’, the Dilemma of the Criterion was directly if unwittingly reinstated. Nor was it recognised when something tantamount to ‘cultural circles’ was re-instantiated by van Fraassen’s (2002) stress upon philosophical ‘stances’. I do not dismiss the relevance of considerations about ‘cultural circles’ or ‘stances’, but it must be said that Hegel is the philosophical past mas46 See HER, Westphal (1993a), (2003a), (2003b), (2007b). Below (§88.2), I show how Hegel’s analysis of self-criticism extends naturally to practical principles. Hegel’s realism about objects of empirical knowledge is corroborated independently by Ferrini (2009b).

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ter of their analysis and assessment. Analytical philosophy has impoverished itself by neglecting Hegel’s profound and revolutionary Critical achievements in epistemology.47 Hegel’s theory of cognitive justification is a mixed internalist-externalist view.48 Two externalist elements in Hegel’s theory of cognitive justification are reliabilism about sensory awareness, in conjunction with a direct (rather than representational or ‘indirect’) theory of perception. Significantly, Hegel realised that these two theses need merely be true, they do not need to be known to be true, in order for them to contribute justificatorily to our empirical knowledge. (Like Kant, Hegel rejected the ‘K-K thesis’, the strongly internalist thesis that in order to know that x, one must know that one knows that x.) Within his justificatory argument for his mixed, internalist-externalist theory of cognitive justification, Hegel develops two genuinely transcendental proofs of (not ‘from’) mental content externalism, the thesis that some of our mental contents can only be specified by reference to extra-mental objects in our environment. One he developed in his early essays, by arguing that we cannot be self-conscious unless we inhabit a natural world which provides us a sufficient minimum degree of identifiable similarities and differences amongst the contents of our sensations and (analogously) amongst the spatio-temporal objects of our awareness (above, §§30–36). In the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel argues against Fichte’s ‘Self-Sufficiency Thesis’, the thesis that individual human self-consciousness suffices to explain (indeed, ‘transcendentally’) the entire contents of human experience (above, §75). Hegel argues against this thesis regressively, by internal critique, throughout the ‘Self-Consciousness’ section, to the conclusion that human self-consciousness is not at all self-sufficient in this way, so that (by disjunctive syllogism) human self-consciousness is possible only on the basis of our consciousness of an ‘external’ natural world. Both of these are transcendental proofs of mental content externalism (above, §§65–70).49 47 On critical discussion of coherence theories in early logical positivism, see HER, 55–6. If much of my critical discussion is directed towards analytical philosophers, it is because of their decisive contributions to epistemology in the Twentieth Century, without which it is not possible to develop epistemology constructively, though also because much of analytical epistemology has been deeply and naïvely Humean; see Westphal (2007), (2018a). In many central regards, Carnap remains a paradigm philosopher. 48 One of the first mixed internalist-externalist views in analytic epistemology is Alston (1988), rpt. in idem. (1989a), 227–45. INTERNALISM regarding justification is the thesis that all factors in justification are such that the subject is or can easily become aware of them; e.g., justifying reasons; EXTERNALISM regarding justification is the thesis that some factors in justification are such that the subject is not aware of them, certainly not readily aware of them; e.g., the reliable functioning of one’s neuro-physiology of perception. 49 Cf. Westphal (2005), on Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s versions of this argument, which also serve to elucidate Hegel’s; cf. Westphal (2018c).

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No extant coherence theory of justification provides proof of mental content externalism; indeed, it is hard to understand how coherence of whatever kind (Davidson’s semantics not withstanding50) could prove mental content externalism. In this decisive regard, although Hegel’s theory of cognitive justification involves coherentist elements, it is not a coherence theory of justification. Furthermore, extant coherence theories of justification neglect the Dilemma of the Criterion, they attempt no analysis of the very possibility of selfcriticism and they lack sufficient procedures or criteria for distinguishing between vicious circularity and constructive criticism and revision to identify positive increases in the ‘truth content’ of the most coherent account available for the topic under consideration, as contrasted to mere change in our systems of beliefs. Indeed, available coherence theories analyse coherence as the nature of justification and as the criterion of truth, without much accounting for how the favoured form of coherence is to be identified or established. Neither do they analyse the social dimensions of cognitive justification. The ‘reflective equilibrium’ suggested by Goodman (1965, 64), popularised by Rawls (1971), provide no method, because they can do little or nothing to guide different philosophers to the same equilibrium between principles and intuitions (even if they share substantially the same sets of each), because intuitions are insufficiently well-ordered to ground stable equilibria (Perlmutter 1998) and because there are deeply and apparently irreconcilable ‘intuitions’ (if that be what they are) amongst (schools of) philosophers.51 Reflective equilibrium can hardly avoid (sub-)cultural or historicist relativism; indeed, it may instead be a source (if not a version) of it. Goodman’s formulation expressly concerns what we do, namely, that we trim data to fit our theories, and trim our theories to fit our data. Nothing in his observations show that we ought to do this, nor how we ought best to do this. Thus his remarks suggest no philosophical method.52 If we insist on classifying Hegel’s theory of rational justification in familiar terms, its closest kin would be Haack’s ‘Foundherentism’, which includes a direct (not representational) theory of perception rooted in the proper func50

Davidson provides no coherence theory of knowledge because, inter alia, his semantic theories omit considerations of cognitive justification, which is the key bone of contention with sceptics. His causal considerations are far too vague even for semantics; see Westphal (2016b) cf. below, §§140–148. 51 On Rawls, see O’Neill (2003) and Reidy (1999, 2000). 52 Rawls’s method, properly so-called, lies in his use of the ‘original position’ to try to guide our reflective equilibrium in a way that ultimately generates consensus about the political principles he advocates and the supporting reasoning he provides for them. For an account of the use of intuitions in improving our moral views, superior to ‘reflective equilibrium’, see Griffin (1996). If ‘intuitions’ were instead designated ‘hunches’, there would be a large gain in accuracy and credibility.

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tioning of our neuro-psychology of perception, a mixed internalist-externalist theory and ‘a better understanding of the difference between legitimate mutual support and vicious circularity’.53 Yet Hegel greatly augments Haack’s Foundherentism with his transcendental proofs of mental content externalism, his solution to the Dilemma of the Criterion via his account of the possibility of constructive self-criticism and his superior analysis of the social and historical aspects of rational justification.54 79.2 Fallibilism and Constructivist Justification. The same fallibilism built into Hegel’s explication of the possibility of constructive self-criticism is built into Kant’s constructivist strategy for rational justification. Because constructivist rational justification is fallibilist, it dispenses with the illicit tendency to unilateral judgment embedded in foundationalist models of justification, especially those models involving infallibilist pretensions to certainty. Infallibilist models of justification consistently fail to provide adequate resources to distinguish grasping the truth and thereby being certain of it, from being only apparently (if vividly) ‘certain’ of something and only thus thinking it (unwarrantedly) to be true and self-evident. Precisely because constructivist rational justification is fallibilist, it underscores that to judge rationally is to judge matters thus: To the best of my present abilities, understanding and information, this conclusion is justified for the following reasons and in the following regards – what do you think? Because rational judgment is fallible, and because it involves our own (‘perspectival’, as it were) assessment of the relevant evidence, principles and the interrelations among these, rational judgment is also fundamentally social. We are each responsible for the critical assessment of our own and of others’ rational judgments. Genuine rational judgment requires constructive selfcritical and mutually critical assessment of each and everyone’s judgment. Any consensus thereby reached is and remains justified – and remains justificatory of conclusions based on it – because it identifies the very best available principles, evidence and conclusions, and because it always remains open to on-going and future critical re-assessment. 79.3 Self-Criticism and Mutual Critical Assessment. Mutual criticism facilitates self-criticism and makes it a social phenomenon by facilitating the identification of discrepancies between our conceptions of our knowledge and the objects of our knowledge (1, A; above §63), between our experience of the objects we know and our experience of our own cognitive constitution and 53

Haack (2002), 420; cf. Haack (1993). See Longino (1994) and Haack (2003), 57–91, on the social dimensions of human knowledge. Regarding coherence theories, see Bender (1989), Meyers (1988). 54

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activities (2, B), and between our conceptions of knowledge and its objects (1, 2) and our experiences of our own cognitive activities which generate our experience of our objects (A, B). The crucial social aspects of constructive selfcriticism can be seen, briefly, in two considerations. First, the norms and principles involved in any judgment have implications far beyond the present context, and indeed far beyond the purview of any individual person. Consequently, the scrutiny of those norms and principles falls to parties other than oneself. Indeed, those norms and principles have the content they do and are justified to whatever extent they are only through their critical scrutiny by all concerned parties, presently, historically and in the future. Second, due to our fallibility any particular judgment anyone makes is justified only to the extent that the judge does his or her utmost to exercise mature judgment on that occasion and to the extent that one’s judgment survives critical scrutiny by all concerned parties. Because mature judgment is socially based, so is rational justification.55 80 MUTUAL CRITICAL ASSESSMENT IN HEGEL’S ANALYSIS OF ‘EVIL AND FORGIVENESS’. This is precisely the point reached by the two moral judges Hegel considers in ‘Evil and Forgiveness’ (PhdG, chapt. VICc). This sub-section concludes Hegel’s analysis of ‘Conscience’, in which Hegel criticises the practical version of Fichte’s ‘Self-Sufficiency Thesis’, that individual conscience suffices, unto itself, to determine through its conviction what is right as such for all.56 This thesis is entirely individualist. In the concluding subsection of Hegel’s analysis, an agent and an observer dispute who has proper, genuine authority to judge the agent’s behaviour. After struggling over this issue in various ways which reveal that each of their original judgments narrowly considered only selected aspects of the action and situation, these two moral judges finally (in the penultimate paragraph) each rescind their presumption of the sufficiency and the supremacy of their own antecedent convictions and standpoint, they recognise that they are both equally fallible and equally competent to judge particular acts and that they each require one another’s assessment in order to scrutinise and thereby to assess and to justify their own judgment about 55 ‘Judgment’ has largely fallen by the wayside in analytic epistemology, except for an innocuous sense of identifying commonsense objects in one’s environs. Kant insisted that rules require judgment for their application (KdrV A132–4/B171–3). In effect, Wittgenstein’s scepticism about rule-following makes the same point, that principles are not algorithms, and indeed that their use requires social training and context (von Savigny 1991; Will 1997, chs. 7–9). Further support for the social basis of constructive self-criticism are discussed in Westphal (2003a), esp. §§20, 24, 28, 35. Elgin (1999) discusses related issues. 56 Fichte (1798), 202, 204, 205, 208/(2005), 148, 149, 150, 152. On the context within which Hegel discusses ‘Evil and Forgiveness’, see Beiser (2009).

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any particular act.57 This is the breaking of the hard-hearted individualist’s presumed self-sufficiency; it is likewise the breaking point of the subjective idealist thesis, that any one individual solely constitutes the entirety of his or her ‘world’ or experience. With this insight, the two judges become reconciled to each other, and to the fundamentally social dimensions of genuine rational judgment. Expressly, this is the first instance of genuine and equal mutual recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.58 Moreover, Hegel indicates that this achievement is the advent of ‘absolute spirit’: The word of reconciliation [between the two judges] is the extant spirit, which beholds the pure knowledge of itself as universal essence in its opposite, in the pure knowledge of itself as the absolute individuality existing in itself – a reciprocal recognition which is absolute spirit.59

The ‘universal essence’ Hegel mentions here is the knowledge, principles, practices and context of action (both social and natural) shared in common among the members of a social group. All of this is required, and understanding of all this is required, in order rationally to judge that ‘I judge’, and not merely to utter the words ‘I judge’, thereby merely feigning rationality. Thus the rich philosophical significance of Hegel’s own Thesis of Mutual Recognition may be formulated thus: HEGEL’S THESIS OF MUTUAL RECOGNITION: For anyone genuinely to judge rationally that she or he is a rational judge requires (i) recognising one’s own rational fallibility, (ii) judging that others are likewise genuine rational judges, (iii) that we are equally capable of and responsible for assessing rationally our own and each other’s judgments and (iv) that we require each other’s assessment of our own judgments in order to scrutinise and thereby maximally to refine and to justify rationally our own judgments. This rich and philosophically crucial form of self-consciousness requires the analogous consciousness of others, that we are all mutually interdependent for our capacity of rational judgment, our abilities to judge rationally and our exercise of rational judgment. This requirement is transcendental, for unless we recognise our critical interdependence as fallible rational judges, we cannot judge fully rationally, because unless we acknowledge and affirm our judgmental interdependence, we will seriously misunderstand, misuse and 57

PhdG, 9:359–62/¶¶666–671; HER, 183. PhdG, 9:359.9–23, 360.31–361.4, 361.22–25, 362.21–29/¶¶666, 669, 670, 671 (end). 59 „Das Wort der Versöhnung ist der d a s e y e n d e Geist, der das reine Wissen seiner selbst als a l l g e m e i n e n Wesens in seinem Gegentheile, in dem reinen Wissen seiner als der absolut in sich seyenden E i n z e l n h e i t anschaut, – ein gegenseitiges Anerkennen, welches der a b s o l u t e Geist ist“ (PhdG, 9:361.22–25/¶670); cf. HER, 182–3. 58

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over-estimate our own individual rational, though fallible and limited powers of judgment. Thus recognising our own fallibility and our mutual interdependence as rational judges is a key constitutive factor in our being fully rational, fully autonomous rational judges, so far as we are each able. Only by recognising our judgmental interdependence can we each link our human fallibility and limited knowledge constructively to our equally human corrigibility, our ability to learn, especially from constructive criticism. Therefore, fully – or at least maximally – rational justification requires us to seek out and actively engage with the critical assessments of others, just as Kant had argued, if briefly (cf. above, §§2.5, 78). Hegel addresses this issue in connection with ‘forgiveness’ to stress that our recognition of our common fallibility and our mutual interdependence for constructive assessment and corrigibility requires acknowledging and accepting the crucial roles of charity, tolerance, patience and literal forgiveness in our mutual assessment of our rational judgments and those of others, to acknowledge that oversights, whether our own or others’, are endemic to the human condition and as such are not grounds for blame or condemnation of anyone’s errors.60 Mutual forgiveness is required for our mutual reconciliation within the human community of knowers, which is required for each of us to be as rationally cognisant as we can. Hegel’s Thesis of Mutual Recognition involves mutually achieved recognition, not of our individual virtues of character (à la Aristotle on friendship), but of our shared fallible and corrigible rational competence.61 The first virtue of Kant’s and Hegel’s Critical, constructive, social and historical account of rational justification in all non-formal domains is the humility required to gauge one’s confidence to the calibre of one’s actual evidence and the actual cogency of one’s analysis and judgment, to develop and exercise genuine expertise, to heed the insight and expertise of others and scrupulously to forego the many vices of self-importance. Directly following this crucial result, Hegel emphasises four points in his concluding paragraph of ‘Evil and Forgiveness’ which are especially important here. First, he insists that ‘absolute spirit’ is introduced into the body of the Phenomenology of Spirit here (as quoted just above from Hegel’s penultimate paragraph) once this collective, social basis of individual thought and action is achieved (PhdG 9:361.26–27/¶671). Second, he claims this is the basis of consci60

Details are examined below, §§83–91; cf. HER, 160–4, 181–3; Westphal (2003a), §13.9. The social dimension of rational judgment highlighted here is reinforced by Hegel’s complementary accounts of mature judgment; the role of education in our acquiring norms; the mutual interdependence of ‘reason’ and ‘tradition’; the social dimensions of language acquisition and use, which carry over into the constitutive role of language in our ‘information channels’ (Dretske); and his exposure of false dichotomies undergirding debates about ‘methodological individualism’; see Westphal (2003a), §§11, 20, 24–37. 61

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ousness (PhdG 9:362.14–15/¶671), i.e., of our awareness of phenomena other than ourselves within our shared, public world. Third, this social basis of consciousness is not yet explicit for the observed consciousness (PhdG 9: 362.15–16/¶671). Finally, this collective social self is ‘God manifest in the midst of those who know themselves as pure knowledge’.62 These last two points introduce the theme for Hegel’s discussion of religion, how religion facilitates the human community’s becoming self-conscious by becoming conscious of itself as and within the community of knowers, including both theoretical and practical knowledge within its natural, social and historical context. The religious overtones of Hegel’s analysis of ‘forgiveness’ are deliberate, though they do not portend any ultimate shift away from the human community to any transcendent religious diety. Though Hegel was Christian, if theism involves a transcendent divine creator, Hegel was no theist. If there is a first principle of Hegel’s metaphysics, as it were, it is: Posit no transcendent entities.63 That principle is a corollary to Kant’s and Hegel’s semantics of singular cognitive reference (above, §§2.1, 55.1), which requires that any and all conceptions which we can use truly, or which we can know to be true or to be cognitively justified, we must be able to refer demonstratively to their relevant instance(s). Whatever thoughts we cannot so realise (per Tetens and Kant) lacks genuine cognitive significance. This holds against any supposed experience-transcendent (conception of) divinity; yet it may accommodate divine immanence, whether within the world, within ourselves, or perhaps we within the divine. Hegel’s book is a phenomenology of spirit, of spirit’s advent and development. One key task Hegel faces in ‘Religion’ (PhdG chapt. VII) is to demonstrate that a thorough phenomenology of religion ultimately sustains, justifies and makes explicit for the observed form of religious consciousness the thesis already stated (and just quoted) in the final paragraphs of ‘Evil and Forgiveness’ that in principle God = Spirit = the mutually recognitive human community, where this thesis is actualised by our recognitive community becoming adequately self-knowing through Hegel’s philosophical system and its manifold historical, social, moral, normative and empirical grounds and ideals. This need not entail reducing religion to anthropology, nor to social history. Precisely our capacity to recognise what morality requires, to hold ourselves 62

GW 9:362.28–29/¶671; „Das versöhnende JA, worin beyde Ich von ihrem entgegengesetzten D a s e y n ablassen, ist das D a s e y n des zur Zweyheit ausgedehnten I c h s , das darin sich gleich bleibt, und in seiner vollkommnen Entäusserung und Gegentheile die Gewißheit seiner selbst hat; – es ist der erscheinende Gott mitten unter ihnen, die sich als das reine Wissen wissen“ (PhdG 9:362.25–29). ‘Es’ in the final clause refers back to ‘das versöhnende JA’, and ‘ist’ expresses the identity of this ‘versöhnende JA’ with ‘Gott’. 63 Though he dissents from the interpretation of Hegel’s account of religion presented here, the heresy to which Hegel subscribed is identified by Houlgate (2005), 242–75.

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and one another accountable to what morality requires of us, and yet to be tolerant and forgiving of understandable human shortcomings, whilst maintaining righteousness in all matters of justice, is – as Socrates heard from his daimonion, as Kant enshrined in his accounts of our moral autonomy and the supreme value of the moral law, and as sages everywhere have always taught – the spark of divinity within us, individually, collectively, historically, socially: right here and now, and as always. In this regard, an important structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is that the ‘consciousness’, so to speak, of spirit – its cognisance of phenomena other than itself – is examined in the first six chapters I–VI, ‘Consciousness’ through ‘Spirit’. ‘Religion’ (chapt. VII) then examines the development of spirit’s ‘self-consciousness’. Spirit’s consciousness and self-consciousness are then integrated, so that spirit becomes both in and for itself, in ‘Absolute Knowing’ (chapt. VIII). Hegel’s examination of religion is consistent with and ultimately supports the present analysis.64 81 MUTUAL CRITICAL ASSESSMENT AND THE HISTORICAL DIMENSIONS OF RATIONAL JUSTIFICATION. Above (§72) I indicated that one of Hegel’s prime concerns in the Phenomenology is with understanding the kind of ‘I judge’ required to appreciate and to assess, e.g., Kant’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’. Obviously, assessing this or any other piece of important reasoning requires substantive training in the relevant issues. Yet such training does not suffice to assess the reasoning in question. Assessment requires autonomous judgment about the merits of the case made in and by that piece of reasoning. For reasons identified herein, Hegel recognised, adopted and extended Kant’s insights into both the autonomy and the intersubjective bases of genuine rational judgment. Because reason is autonomous in the four ways identified above (§§76, 78), and in order to address Sextus’s Dilemma, the justification of any substantive view requires and must be based on the thorough, constructive internal critique of all relevant opposed views so far as we can determine them, whether historical, contemporary or possible. This is built into Hegel’s concept and method of ‘determinate negation’.65 Because the list of relevant alternative views can always be extended, in part by devising new variants on previous accounts, and in part by doing so when confronting new kinds of circumstances, rational justification is fallible and inherently provisional. Consequently, rational justification 64 HER, 181–8; cf. HL 1:190–1, 2:521–707, esp. 526–47, 649–707; Stolzenberg (2009), di Giovanni (2009), (2018); deLaurentiis (2009), esp. 250–3, 256; and Bykova (2009a), 282–5. 65 PhdG, 9:57.1–12/¶79; see above, §§60–64; cf. HER, 125–6, 135–6, 163.

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is fundamentally historical, because it is provisional and because the list of relevant alternatives and information expands historically. 82 CONCLUSION. Hegel’s broad, central insights into the character and requirements of rational judgment are very far from philosophical commonplaces, as are Hegel’s sophisticated views about how productive self-criticism and mutual critical assessment are possible and why they are central to rational justification. Sextus’ Dilemma of the Criterion has received scant philosophical attention, and recent attempts to solve it consistently over-simplify it (above, §61). That we often engage in constructive mutual criticism is nothing new. Neither is it news that instead we often thwart it. Yet what we achieve by such activity and how we achieve it are far from obvious, nor is much if any account of it given in most theories of justification. If the present analysis is correct, we can and ought to engage in constructive self- and mutual criticism because only in this way can we achieve genuine rational justification, and only in this way can we thus aspire to or achieve it.66 It is significant to show that, and how, we can achieve rational justification through self-criticism and mutual critical assessment. However, I have argued for a stronger thesis, by arguing that the Dilemma of the Criterion is a problem that must be addressed by any tenable theory of rational justification for non-formal domains and by arguing that, uniquely, Hegel’s theory of rational justification solves this Dilemma. Because rational justification involves using various grounds of justification, we must be able to distinguish genuine and relevant from false or irrelevant justificatory grounds. So doing requires solving the Dilemma of the Criterion. If Hegel’s theory of rational justification solves this problem, and indeed uniquely solves it, then Hegel is right that we can achieve genuine rational justification only by engaging in the kinds of self-criticism and mutual critical assessment central to his theory of rational justification. It may be helpful to note that my analysis does not reduce the method nor the substance of Hegel’s Phenomenology to a theory of judgment. Instead, my analysis provides an internal critique of individualism with regard to rational justification and rational judgment. Once the social factors in individual rational judgment and justification identified herein are accepted, there can be 66 Contrast (e.g.) Feigl (1950), also Lehrer (1997, 2011), who is sensitive to issues of selfassessment and rational autonomy, but whose analysis flounders for lack of focus on the key issues posed by the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion, by the structure and conditions of mature judgment (see below, §88.3) and by the social and historical aspects of rational justification, both of which are required to solve that Dilemma.

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no further objections against introducing the further social and historical dimensions involved in human knowledge, both empirical and philosophical, for without Bildung there can be no fully rational, nor any maximally justified judgment.67 If philosophers took Hegel’s theory of rational justification seriously and developed it further, it might perhaps be shown that Hegel identified a genera of theory covering various specific theories of rational justification. This would nevertheless show that Hegel’s achievement is extremely important, because in the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel sought to establish the proper outlines and context of a tenable philosophical theory (inter alia) of human knowledge, including a tenable theory of rational justification, whilst expressly leaving specifics to various parts of his philosophical system, including, centrally, both his examination of our individual cognitive capacities and of our natural- and social-scientific achievements (see below, Part III). Hegel’s philosophical system expressly requires the Phenomenology as its sole ‘justification’ and ‘deduction’, in part because his system is justifiable only if Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology succeeds, inter alia, in refuting or dissolving philosophical scepticism by solving the Dilemma of the Criterion and by showing that philosophical knowledge is possible because it can be fully rationally justified. In this important regard, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit remains the crucial, scientific ‘first part’ of his philosophical system, even if he later decided that the Phenomenology does not constitute a proper (first) part within his system of philosophical knowledge.68 The intricacy of these issues requires caution, keeping our philosophical theories of rational judgment and justification as simple as possible. Yet the crucial importance of these issues requires us to be mindful of Einstein’s (2000, 314) important corollary to Ockham’s razor: ‘Everything must be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler’. Standard analyses of rational judgment and justification have failed to be mindful of both cautions. This is reflected in theory by philosophers’ continuing resistance to recognising the social and historical dimensions of rational justification and in practice by the still far too common conflation of rational justification with defending one’s view come what may.69 67

On ‘Bildung’ (education, enculturation) in Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology, cf. Bykova (2009a). PhdG 9:475, WdL I, 21:9.14–18. Unfortunately, these crucial philosophical issues are neglected by many Hegel scholars, including e.g. Lucas (2004) and my dear friends Fred Beiser and Burkhard Tuschling. None of Hegel’s other works even attempt to respond to the Dilemma of the Criterion; hence none provides a full-dress analysis and defence of the possibility and competence of rational justification via rational judgment, whether in philosophical or in empirical knowledge. 69 Originally, Burge’s (1979) critique of ‘individualism’ focussed not only on mental content externalism, but also on social aspects of mental content. Hostile critique by other 68

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Consider in this regard Paul Teller’s statement of a modest version of ‘epistemic contextualism’, according to which what requires justification depends in part upon what questions are raised. About this view Teller states: The pursuit of knowledge is a deeply social enterprise; and many of us accept, in the spirit of reliabilism, that we are better off, if, on the whole, we do not brush aside the contrary opinions of those we acknowledge as worthy interlocutors. (Teller 2001, 125)

Teller suggests this modest contextualist view for the sake of discussion, noting that … to go this far is already to accord some weight to both the opinions and the values of many of our peers even though nothing rationally compels us to do so. (Teller 2001, 125)70

The notion that ‘nothing rationally compels us’ to accord any weight to the opinions and values of our peers reflects the individualism which still dominates contemporary epistemology, even in the face of growing, if grudging recognition that our human pursuit of knowledge is in fact a social enterprise. Moreover, Teller’s guarded acknowledgement of ‘those we acknowledge as worthy interlocutors’ and, perhaps more broadly, to ‘many of our peers’ is symptomatic of another characteristic of most of philosophy in the twentieth century of whatever stripe: The unfortunate tendency to divide into what logical positivists called ‘cultural circles’,71 a phenomenon evident again in both the title and the substance of Bas van Fraassen’s (2002) empiricist manifesto, The Empirical Stance (see below, §119). Retreating into groups of likeminded thinkers has too often involved retreating from serious engagement with considered dissent by able and informed interlocutors. In view of such misfortunes, philosophers ought to reconsider carefully the incisive alternative Critical account of rational justification developed by Kant and Hegel.72 This chapter has been primarily explicative and expository; the next reexamines the core issues and argues that Hegel’s explication of the self-critical structure of consciousness and the fundamental social and historical aspects of maximally cogent rational justification are sound.

analytic philosophers drove him to restrict the scope of his critique to asocial issues of mental content externalism (Burge 1992). 70 Teller presents this view for discussion; I likewise use his cautious statement because it captures wide-spread attitudes within contemporary analytic epistemology. 71 Neurath (1931–32), 286, (1934), 352–4; Hempel (1935), 57, cf. 54, (1936), 39; cf. HER, 56–57. 72 Convergent conclusions are reached brilliantly by Wallgren (2006), by very different means and through very different sources.

CHAPTER 13

Mutual Recognition and Rational Justification in Substantive Domains 83 INTRODUCTION. Hegel argues – soundly, I shall now argue – that individual rational judgment, of the kind required for rational justification in non-formal, substantive domains (i.e. in empirical knowledge or in morals, both ethics and justice) is in fundamental part socially and historically based, although these social and historical roots of rational justification are consistent with realism about the objects of empirical knowledge and with strict objectivity about basic moral principles. The central thesis is that, to judge fully rationally that one judges – in ways which provide rational justification of one’s judgment about any substantive matter – requires recognising one’s inherent fallibility and consequently also recognising our mutual interdependence for assessing our own and one another’s’ judgments and their justification. This explication provides a pragmatic, fallibilist account of rational justification in substantive domains which puts paid to the distinction, still influential today, between ‘rational’ and ‘historical’ knowledge. The central thesis of this chapter is Hegel’s, who both in theory and in practice was subtle and sophisticated about philosophically central issues and methods regarding critical assessment and rational justification. The textual and interpretive issues involved in this attribution are addressed in the previous chapter, to highlight here the fundamental role of mutual recognition in rational justification in substantive domains. 84 THE PYRRHONIAN DILEMMA OF THE CRITERION. 84.1 The Dilemma. The most fundamental challenge to rational justification, especially within substantive domains, is (once again) the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion, which poses the problem of justifying criteria of truth (or mutatis mutandis of justification) within any disputed domain (quoted above, §8). Pyrrhonian skepticism has pervasively influenced philosophy (Popkin et al. 1980, 1993, 2003; Ramão 2007), though only recently have analytic epistemologists much discussed it. Fogelin (1994) is an exception, yet he

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neglects the Dilemma of the Criterion.1 Chisholm (1982, 65–75) substitutes for the Pyrrhonian ‘Dilemma’ his own ‘Problem’ of the Criterion. Though often mistaken for the original (e.g., Sinnott-Armstrong 2004b, 2006), Chisholm’s ‘Problem’ oversimplifies the original Dilemma (cf. above, §61; Cling 1994). 84.2 The Pyrrhonian Dilemma contra Coherentism. The Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion refutes two standard accounts of justification: coherentism and foundationalism. Against coherentism, the Dilemma raises the charge of vicious circularity. Coherence alone cannot distinguish in any principled way between genuine improvement in our knowledge (or belief set), in contrast to mere change in belief, nor between a true set of beliefs and an elaborately detailed, coherent fiction, which may coherently embed the statements, ‘this set of beliefs is true’, or ‘this version of the coherence theory is true’. Coherentism’s foremost contemporary advocate, Laurence BonJour (1997, 14–5), conceded that coherentism provides no adequate criterion of truth or justification, unwittingly recapitulating the key point made by von Juhos and Ayer against Hempel in the mid-1930s (HER, 56–7). 84.3 The Pyrrhonian Dilemma contra Foundationalism. Foundationalist models of justification typically distinguish between historia and scientia. Experiential knowledge (historia) derives from sensory and memorial data; rational knowledge (scientia) is deduced from first principles.2 This distinction remains common, e.g., in the distinction between ‘conceptual’ and ‘empirical’ issues. Both models involve justifying conclusions by deriving them unilaterally from basic foundations: justification flows from basic foundations to other, derived claims, not vice versa. This holds whether justificatory relations are strictly deductive or involve other kinds of rules of inference (e.g., induction, abduction) or weaker forms of basing relations (e.g., ‘probabilification’, ‘self-warrant’). The Dilemma of the Criterion exposes foundationalist models of justification as dogmatic and as committing a petitio principii because such models can provide no justification to those who fundamentally dispute either the foundations or the basing relations invoked by any foundationalist analysis or theory. Neither can any foundationalist theory of justification justify the foundationalist model itself, because any such theory explicates justification solely in terms of derivation from its preferred set of basic premises, accord1

The Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion is omitted by Bett (2010), Vogt (2011) and Borchert (2006), including Comesaña (2006); it includes Chisholm’s ‘Problem of the Criterion’ (3:278), but mentions general problems about criteria of truth only within Indian philosophy (Franco 2006, 118–20). 2 ‘History’ came to have its centrally chronological sense in the Nineteenth Century with the development of geohistory, spurred by the study of fossils (Rudwick 2005). This semantic shift was abetted by the development of ‘natural history’ (lacking chronological connotations) into ‘natural science’, especially by Newton (Harper 2011).

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ing to that theory’s preferred derivation rules or basing relations. In principle, a foundationalist theory (or use of that theory) only addresses the (nearly) converted, and cannot avoid committing a petitio principii against those who dissent; once disputed, foundationalism can neither justify its criteria of truth or of justification, nor any particular, disputed claim. 84.4 The Pyrrhonian Dilemma: First- and Higher-order Challenges. In these regards, the Dilemma of the Criterion challenges coherence and foundationalist theories of justification, not simply the justification of any particular first-order claim(s). In this important regard the Dilemma of the Criterion differs from and is more challenging than what Williams (1996, 60–8) calls ‘Agrippa’s Trilemma’, which challenges first-order claims by noting that any mere claim is neither more nor less justified than any other, and that justifying a claim by appeal to another claim threatens to launch an infinite regress, to argue viciously in a circle or to appeal to another mere assertion. (Williams omits possible appeal to a falsehood.) The Dilemma of the Criterion stresses that solving the problem of cognitive justification at the first order must be coördinated with solving the problem of epistemic justification at the second order of justifying any theory of justification. Trying to solve either problem before the other threatens to prejudice the issues (cf. Chisholm 1982, 65–75). Contemporary epistemologists have taken notice of ‘Agrippa’s Trilemma’, but tend to ossify it into a taxonomy of standard alternatives within theory of justification.3 They thus neglect the second-order, the reflexive and the fully general character of the Dilemma of the Criterion. The Dilemma of the Criterion raises not only the second- or third-person question, How might a philosopher justify his or her second-order analysis of first-order justification, together with his or her original first-order claim, without dogmatism, petitio principii, infinite regress, vicious circularity or mistaken appeal to falsehood?4 The Dilemma of the Criterion also raises the reflexive first-person question, How might I qua philosopher justify my second-order analysis of first-order justification, together with my original first-order claim, without dogmatism, petitio principii, infinite regress, vicious circularity or mistaken appeal to falsehood? This reflexive character derives in part from Pyrrhonian suspension of judgment: the Pyrrhonist does not argue, but remarks how the dialectical situation appears to him or her at the moment, leaving it to us who 3

Cf. Alston (1989a, 19–21, 26–7, 53–5, 153–71), Sosa (1997) and Comesaña (2006), who claims to discuss Pyrrhonian rather than Academic scepticism, but presents ‘the Pyrrhonian problematic’ dogmatically and so reverts (in effect) to Academic scepticism, as does Alston (2005, 217). Williams formulates ‘Agrippa’s Trilemma’ whilst highlighting ‘skepticism without theory’; too many younger scholars have mistaken that trilemma for the core of Pyrrhonian scepticism. 4 For critical discussion of the suggestion that an infinitude of justified claims can provide justification, see Stephen Wright (2013).

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claim to know something either to meet or to dissolve the challenges apparently raised, inter alia, by the Dilemma of the Criterion. Unlike both Chisholm’s ‘Problem of the Criterion’ and Williams’ ‘Agrippan Trilemma’, the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion raises these issues in their fully general, fully flexible and reflexive form (HER, 10–6). (Hereafter I refer simply to the ‘Dilemma of the Criterion’.) 85 DEDUCTION, SCIENTIA AND INFALLIBILISM. 85.1 Justificatory Infallibilism. What form(s) of proof or justification can we attain in philosophy or in other kinds of inquiry? ‘Infallibilism’ is the thesis that justification sufficient for knowledge entails the truth of what is known. The presumption that rational inquiry can achieve infallible knowledge derives historically from the Ancient Greek model of scientia, in which rational first principles afford the derivations of more specific corollaries. How, whether or to what extent this model (or family of models) might be fitted to empirical domains has been, in the wake of Tempier (1277), a philosophical preoccupation from Descartes and Hume to contemporary efforts (e.g., by logical positivists) to use axiomatic systems within natural sciences, especially physics (cp. Wright 1999), or by empiricists to replace all talk of physical objects with nothing but talk of sets of sense data. The three most sophisticated attempts to analyse our empirical knowledge in accord with an infallibilist model of scientia are Descartes’ Meditations, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and Carnap’s Logische Aufbau der Welt.5 Strictly internal critique of their views reveals insurmountable problems with each. Descartes’ Meditations are vitiated by five distinct vicious circularities (HER, 18–34).6 Kant developed his Transcendental Idealism in order to secure apodeictic knowledge of the necessary, a priori conditions which make possible human experience and knowledge (KdrV, Axv). However, Transcendental Idealism ultimately fails to justify our basic causal judgments, and one of Kant’s most basic lines of analysis refutes his own core arguments supporting Transcendental Idealism (per above, §§25–36). The empiricist attempt to replace talk of physical objects with talk of sets of sense data fails because it cannot define, but instead must presuppose time, the temporal sequence of (sensory) events, our competent use of the concepts of ‘time’ and of ‘times’ (periods of time) and our awareness of temporal sequences (HER, 230–2). Hence neither can ego-centric empiricism support infallibilism about cogni5

Spinoza advocates a robust form of scientia, but neglects basic issues in epistemology (and semantics), in part by conflating logical, metaphysical and causal necessity. 6 Both the severity and the multitude of the problems crippling Descartes’ analysis are neglected, e.g., by Sosa (1997).

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tive justification.7 85.2 Self-evidence. Appeals to self-evidence have been perennial favourites amongst foundationalists. Though some substantive claims are infallible (e.g., Descartes’s knowledge that he exists, whenever he considers whether he does), typically infallibility is achieved by stripping candidate claims of any further implications. Perhaps one cannot at any moment mistake what one seems to experience at that moment. However, such self-evidence is a function of the logic of ‘seems’, not of any apparent content of experience. Such self-evidence is evidence for nothing else. Only because such claims are justificatorily vacuous can mere seemings be infallible. When more substantive claims are made, appeals to self-evidence are challenged to distinguish reliably and credibly in principle and in practice between these two cognitively very different scenarios: 1. Grasping a truth, and only on that basis having, and recognising one has, infallible knowledge of it. 2. Being utterly, even incorrigibly convinced one has grasped a truth, and solely on that basis claiming (mistakenly) to have infallible knowledge of that purported truth. This distinction holds regardless of the truth or falsehood of the claim in question; it is a cognitive distinction marking a crucial justificatory difference. No advocate of self-evidence has devised plausible criteria for distinguishing reliably between them, in connection with claims sufficiently substantive to contribute to justifying further claims. This is, e.g., the key failing of C.I. Lewis’s (AKV) proposal to use ‘terminating judgments’ of our apparent sensory experiences to partially justify ‘non-terminating judgments’ of (purported) objective states of affairs. Having argued for robust pragmatic realism in (MWO), under pressure from resurgent empiricism he relapsed into the infallibilist-foundationalist fold founded by Tempier by asserting ‘If anything is to be probable, then something must be certain’, where these certainties are provided by sense data (AKV 186). The apparent certainty of ‘sense data’, however, are gained only by stripping them of all further implications, so that they cannot contribute to justifying anything else (below, §§136, 137). 85.3 Justificatory Fallibilism. Infallibilism is ill-suited to substantive domains. The alternative is fallibilism, according to which justification sufficient for knowledge strongly indicates the truth of what is known, but does not entail it. ‘Fallibilist knowledge’ requires that the truth condition of knowledge be fulfilled; it denies that its satisfaction is entailed by justification sufficient 7 I do not claim empiricism must be ego-centric, only infallibilist empiricism must. Quine’s (1969, 72) claim, that ‘the Humean [egocentric] predicament is the human predicament’ betrays a fundamental incoherence in Quine’s semantics (Westphal 2015b).

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for knowledge. Infallibilists have condemned fallibilism as capitulating to scepticism. Clarifying why this is not so requires distinguishing between formal and non-formal domains. Strictly speaking, formal domains contain no existence postulates; only thus can sentences be valid or justified (or not) solely due to their form. Strictly speaking, the one purely formal domain is a careful reconstruction of Aristotle’s Square of Opposition (Wolff 2009). All further logical or mathematical domains involve various sorts of existence postulates, including semantic postulates. We may define ‘formal domains’ more broadly to include all formally defined logistic systems (Lewis 1930 [1970], 10). The relevance of any such logistic system to any non-formal, substantive domain rests, however, not upon formal considerations alone, but also upon substantive considerations of how useful a specific logistic system may be within a non-formal, substantive domain (Lewis MWO, 298; cf. Carnap 1950b). Within any specified logistic system, deduction suffices for justification only within that system; the use of that system within any nonformal domain of its application requires further justificatory resources, not limited to formal deduction. This holds too for the use of that system in justifying any particular claim within its domain of application. Within any substantive domain, fallibilism is no sceptical capitulation, not because infallibilist standards of justification are too stringent, but because in principle they are inappropriate, indeed they are irrelevant to substantive domains. Conversely, within any substantive domain, a merely logical possibility has no cognitive status and so cannot serve to ‘defeat’ or to undermine (refute) an otherwise well-grounded line of justificatory reasoning within that domain (see below, §§100–110). 86 SOLVING THE DILEMMA OF THE CRITERION. Solving the Dilemma of the Criterion within non-formal, substantive domains requires a philosophical sea-change, only partly inaugurated by Kant’s Critical philosophy, and only partly undertaken by post-Gettier analytic epistemologists (e.g., Alston 2005).8 I briefly recall six features of its solution here (§86), to focus three central aspects of its solution (§§87–90). 86.1 Justification in Formal and in Non-formal Domains. Per above (§§55, 57.2, 69, 85.3), solving the Dilemma of the Criterion requires distinguishing properly between purely formal and non-formal domains, and within non8 Compare Alston’s (2005, 207–9) admittedly weak response to the epistemic circularity pervading ‘track record’ arguments for the general reliability of perceptual beliefs, to Kant’s, Hegel’s or Wittgenstein’s robust justifications of their general reliability, provided by transcendental proofs of mental content externalism and (independently) by Kant’s and Hegel’s semantics of singular cognitive reference.

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formal, substantive domains rejecting justificatory infallibilism (i.e., within both empirical knowledge and practical philosophy). This requires rejecting the ‘K-K Thesis’, that to know something requires knowing that one know it.9 86.2 Justificatory Internalism and Externalism. Solving the Dilemma of the Criterion requires rejecting justificatory internalism, the thesis that the only factors relevant to cognitive justification are such that one is aware of them, or can easily become aware of them upon simple reflection. Conversely, it requires accepting justificatory externalism, the thesis that some aspects of justification fulfill their justificatory role(s) without the Subject being (readily) aware of them. (Kant’s account of the a priori transcendental conditions for human perceptual knowledge and their sub-personal functioning is externalist; the designation is recent, though such views are not; cf. Westphal 2007) Justificatory externalism involves some form(s) of ‘reliabilism’, the thesis that, to some extent and in some way(s), beliefs or claims may be justified (at least in part) by reliable processes which generate them – most plausibly, simple perceptual beliefs (cf. below, §§4.4–4.6). 86.3 Integrating Justificatory Internalism and Externalism. An adequate account of rational justification in substantive domains, and a tenable solution to the Dilemma of the Criterion, require recognising and integrating both internalist and externalist aspects of cognitive justification (per Alston 1989, 227–45). 86.4 Distinct Levels of Epistemic Analysis. Solving the Dilemma of the Criterion requires distinguishing different levels of justificatory issues and analysis (per Alston 1989a, 153–71), in particular, between being justified in (e.g.) a perceptual belief, justifying that belief by appeal to sufficient reasons and justifying the epistemology which shows why those kinds of reasons suffice. These distinctions are highlighted by the Dilemma of the Criterion by its express mention of criteria of truth in relation to (first-order) cognitive claims, and its express insistence that such criteria themselves require justification. 86.5 Epistemic Circularity. Solving the Dilemma of the Criterion requires recognising that not all forms of justificatory circularity are vicious (Alston 1989a, 319–39; 1993). For example, if many simple perceptual beliefs are typically generated by suitably reliable and informative psycho-physiological processes, these may count as perceptual knowledge. On the basis of such perceptual knowledge, we may then be able to formulate and to justify the cog9

Infallibilist rejoinders (e.g., Lehrer and Kim 1990; Merricks 1995; McDowell 1982, 2010, 2014; Moon 2012) tend to commit a petitio principii by assuming premises fallibilists need not accept, or by assuming that, on a fallibilist account of justification, the truth condition of knowledge is not met. A sound fallibilism requires that the truth condition of knowledge be met; it denies that the satisfaction of the truth condition need be proven to be satisfied. On McDowell, see below, §107.

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nitive principle that, in favourable circumstances, many simple perceptual beliefs are typically generated by suitably reliable psychological processes, and so count as perceptual knowledge. So doing involves justificatory circularity, but this circularity is not in principle vicious. Having reliably formed perceptual beliefs which thereby count as knowledge may settle one important issue, but for most substantive domains we can only justify our cognitive or moral claims by appeal to reasons, evidence and their assessment in any case of controversy, unclarity or particular importance (e.g., large-scale construction, legal testimony or scientific data collection). Hence the remainder examines justification by reasoning within non-formal, substantive domains. 86.6 Epistemic Circularity: Virtuous versus Vicious. Such two-step ‘track-record’ arguments must be carefully assessed in order to identify genuine cases of non-vicious, positive justification of principles of justification, and to distinguish these from justificatorily vicious cases of pseudo-justification (Alston 2005, 201–10). The relevant kind of assessment requires two linked analyses: of the possibility of constructive self-criticism, and of the possibility of constructive mutual assessment. Before considering these topics (§§88, 89), recall first the prospects of strictly internal critique (§87).10 87 DETERMINATE NEGATION. Following Kant (O’Neill 1992; above, Part I), Hegel realised that a sound fallibilist account of rational justification requires identifying and assessing our basic cognitive and practical capacities, together with their attendant incapacities. This rational self-assessment is required to assess and to establish sound principles of justification and their appropriate use for and by beings with our form of cognitive and practical agency. To conduct this self-assessment whilst avoiding petitio principii, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) examines a wide range of principles of justification, both cognitive and practical, as used by their paradigmatic exponent within their intended domains. Each candidate set of principle, exponent, use and intended domain is presented as a ‘form of consciousness’. Each candidate set is relevant because it plausibly highlights one or another of our putative cognitive or practical capacities or abilities. Hegel holds that, to avoid petitio principii, cogent refutation must be internal, and that each candidate principle of justification can be assessed strictly internally to each proponent form of consciousness: thorough internal critique enables us to understand both the insights and the oversights of the assessed principle and its paradigmatic use. Deepening our understanding of 10

For details regarding the points summarised in §83, see above, §§60–64.

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that principle and its purported domain and use in this way enables us to assess the adequacy and the justificatory status of that principle, to identify its strengths and weaknesses and to justify the introduction of a superior successor principle, which incorporates those strengths whilst remedying the identified weaknesses. This successor principle is then subjected to internal critique. Through this process, we also improve our understanding of our actual cognitive capacities and incapacities. This is part of what enables us to winnow the insights from inadequate forms of consciousness and to understand the rationale for introducing more adequate, more sophisticated and more comprehensive successor forms of consciousness. Hegel’s use of this kind of strictly internal critique reflects his contrast between ‘abstract’ negations of philosophical views, which stop at finding fault (e.g., Socratic elenchos, Pyrrhonian equipollence, Popper’s falsificationism), and ‘determinate’ negations, which result from thorough, strictly internal critique (PhdG, 9:57.1–17/¶79, cf. WdL II, 12:14–15). External criticism can be blocked by dogmatic re-assertion of the original view; ‘abstract’ criticism undermines the justification of a view, but provides no constructive steps towards a superior alternative. Determinate negation via thorough internal critique provides genuine refutation and strong regressive proof, whilst avoiding petitio principii. Regressive proofs start from an acknowledged phenomenon (e.g., the claim ‘now is night’, or ‘here is a tree’), and purport to show that the phenomenon in question could not occur unless certain specified preconditions for it are satisfied (e.g., possession and competent use of the conceptions ‘time’, ‘times’ and ‘individuation’). These preconditions are thus necessary grounds for that phenomenon (WdL I, 21:57, cf. PhdG, 9:239. 15–23/¶439). What sorts of ‘preconditions’ these may be, and why (and in what ways) they may be necessary, depend upon the domain and topic at issue. In the 1807 Phenomenology, Hegel argues, e.g., against individualist accounts of thought and action that the phenomena of individual thought and action are possible because as individual human agents, we are each fundamentally social practitioners. One of Hegel’s main arguments for this conclusion is examined below, §§89, 90. (Hegel’s non-reductive view is that individuals and their societies are mutually interdependent for their existence and characteristics; Westphal 2003a, §§32–7). 88 THE POSSIBILITY OF CONSTRUCTIVE SELF-CRITICISM. 88.1 Conceptual Schemes: Access or Cage? Resolving the sceptical trope of vicious circularity, and distinguishing instances of vicious justificatory circularity from permissible instances of epistemic circularity require that we are

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capable of constructive self-criticism, both to assess our own, and to assess others’ justificatory reasoning. Recall two key points of Hegel’s analysis of how constructive self-criticism is possible: First, our experience of the world involves our experience of ourselves in and as we experience the world. Second, our experience is constituted in part by the conceptions we use and by how we use them to grasp their objects, and also in part by the objects we thereby grasp, however (in)adequately. This implies both that we are incapable of aconceptual ‘knowledge by acquaintance’, and that we are not trapped within our ‘conceptual schemes’! Instead, sustained use of our conceptions of the world and of ourselves (as cognisant agents) to know the world and to know ourselves can inform us about whether or how we must revise, augment or replace our conceptions (or our use of them) to better comprehend our objects. Because the character and content of our experience depend both upon our conceptions and upon their – that is, upon our – objects, our conceptions of the world and of ourselves can be made adequate to our experience of ourselves and of the world only if our conceptions adequately correspond to their – that is, to our – objects: to the world itself and to our actual cognitive capacities and activities. These theses (and some related ones) must be true in order for constructive self-criticism to be possible; they need not be known to be true for constructive self-criticism to be possible (per §86.5).11 From these rudiments Hegel develops a powerful criterion for the truth and the justification of philosophical theories of knowledge and of human action and its principles, which solves the Dilemma of the Criterion (above, §§60–64). Here I present Hegel’s analysis for our practical knowledge regarding our actions and our principles of action. 88.2 Hegel’s Explication of Consciousness in Relation to Objects. Hegel’s analysis of the possibility of constructive self-criticism explicates our consciousness as a relation to an extra-mental object. Even subjective idealists must account for the apparent commonsense distinction between our awareness of our surroundings and those surroundings themselves, and also between what we aim to do and the efforts and tactics required to achieve our aims.12 Starting with this commonsense distinction commits no petitio principii. Hegel distinguishes the object itself, of which we are aware, from our conception of the object itself. Likewise, he distinguishes ourselves as actual cognitive agents in our actual cognitive and practical engagements from our selfconception as engaged cognitive and practical agents. Making these basic distinctions allows us to explicate our experience of an object, and likewise our 11

Hegel’s account thus rejects narrow accounts of mental content, as defined above, §63.2; like Burge (1979), Hegel highlights the importance of partial understanding. 12 Hegel develops this point into a telling criticism of Fichte’s early idealism, and of subjective idealism generally (above, §§68, 69, 75–80).

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experience of ourselves as cognitive practical agents, as resulting from our use of our conceptions in attempting to know or to act upon or to achieve our ‘objects’: Our experience of the object results from our use of our conception of the object in attempting to know or to act upon the object itself. Likewise, our self-experience as cognisant, practical agents results from our use of our cognitive and practical self-conceptions in attempting to know ourselves in our cognitive and practical engagements. In the practical domain, the relevant conceptions are of (A) the situation in which we act, and what we intend and expect to achieve, on the one hand, and on the other: (1) of ourselves as agents who can act – and who may, should or should not act – as we intend.13 The relevant objects are (D) the situation itself and what it does and does not allow to occur (hence what possible effective acts it affords and which it thwarts), on the one hand, and (4) our actual capacities, abilities, skills and resources as agents, on the other. Two further factors, which may be informative if and to the extent that our conceptions are inadequate, are features of our context or of our own agency which are closely related to those we experience, but are not included (centrally) within our conceptions and may not be explicitly experienced (c, 3); these Hegel marks using dative grammatical constructions. What sorts of features these may be, and how they may be related to our experience of ourselves and of our objects, depends upon the specifics of the form of consciousness in question. For the practical context, these distinctions are as follows; primes indicate the practical counterparts to the aspects of cognition detailed previously (§63):

L

13

Relevant here is instrumental rationality, and our knowledge and understanding of our capacities for acting effectively; moral assessment is another concern (Westphal 2016a, 2018a)

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Conscious Acting as a Relation and as Self-relation 1N) Our conception of our context of action, our aim and expected consequences: Our context, aim and act ACCORDING TO us.

AN) Our self-conception as agents who

2N) Our experience of our context and results whilst acting: Our context FOR us.

BN)

3N) Features of our context closely related to, yet not included in, our conception of our context: Our context and results TO us.

CN) Features of our agency closely re-

4N) Our context of action as such, and what it enables or disallows us to effect: Our context and results AS SUCH.

DN) Our capacities, abilities, skills as

can and do act intentionally: Our agency ACCORDING TO us. Our experience of ourselves as acting: Our action FOR us. lated to, yet not included in, our conception of our agency: Our agency TO us. agents and our actual behaviour as such: Our agency AS SUCH.

On this account, our experience of the situation and the execution of our intention (2N) results from using our conception of the situation (1N) in which we act and what we intend and expect to achieve by coping as well as we are able with the situation itself (4N) and what it does and does not enable us to effect. Likewise, our self-experience as agents (BN) results from using our selfconception as agents who can act as we intend (AN) to guide and exercise our actual capacities, abilities, skills and resources as agents as such (DN). Put positively, our experience of our context of action and our results of our action (2N) corresponds with our context of action itself, and what it either allows or disallows us to effect (4N), if and only if our conception of our context of action, our intention(s) and our expected consequences (1N) also corresponds with our context of action itself, and what it either allows or disallows us to effect (4N). Likewise, our experience of ourselves as active agents (BN) corresponds with our actual capacities, abilities and skills as agents and our actual behaviour as such (DN) if and only if our self-conception as agents who can and do act intentionally (AN) also corresponds with our actual capacities, abilities, skills as agents and our actual behaviour as such (DN). Put negatively and critically, insofar as our conception of our context of action, our intention(s) and our expected consequences (1N) fails to correspond with our context of action itself, and what it either allows or disallows us to effect (4N), we can detect and correct this lack of correspondence by sus-

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tained, concerted attempts to comprehend our context of action itself, and what it (dis)allows us to effect (4N) through using our conception of our context of action, our intention(s) and our expected consequences (1N) in our experience of our context of action and the execution of our action (2N). By using and scrutinising our conception of our context of action in this way, further of its features (3N), closely related to those which we initially, explicitly experience (2N), can be made manifest and inform our self-assessment and revision of our conception of our context and plan of action (1N). Analogously, insofar as our self-conception as agents (AN) fails to correspond with our actual capacities, abilities and skills as agents and our actual behaviours as such (DN), we can detect and correct this lack of correspondence through sustained, concerted attempts to comprehend our actual capacities, abilities and skills as agents and our actual behaviours as such (DN) by using our self-conception as intentional agents (AN) in our experience of ourselves as active agents (BN). By using and scrutinising our self-conception as agents (AN) in this way, further features of our agency cN), closely related to those which we initially, explicitly experience (BN), can be made manifest and inform our self-assessment and revision of our self-conception qua agents (AN). Accordingly, how we experience our actions as we execute them (2N, BN) can inform us whether and how our conceptions of our actions and agency (1N, AN) can and must be revised to improve their correspondence with our context of action and our actual agency as such (4N, DN), by revealing further, related features of our context of action and our agency (3N, CN). Furthermore, our conception of our context of action, our intention(s) and our expected consequences (1N) and our practical self-conception (AN) must mutually correspond, so that we conceive of our context of action, our intention(s) and our expected consequences (1N) in ways which can be conceived and executed in accord with our practical self-conception (AN), and our practical self-conception (AN) must be of an agent who can conduct such actions as we conceive them (1N). These conceptions must positively support each other. Likewise our experience of ourselves as active agents (2N) and our practical self-experience (BN) must support each other. Finally, our conception of our context of action, our intention(s) and our expected consequences (1N) must be such that it renders our practical selfexperience (BN) intelligible, and our practical self-conception (AN) must render our experience of our context of action and the execution of our action (2N) intelligible. In sum, the four aspects of our practical consciousness and experience (1N, 2N, AN, BN) must mutually correspond and mutually support each other so that they ground and justify each other. However, this can be achieved only insofar as our conceptions (1N, AN) correspond to their – i.e., to

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our – objects as such (4N, DN). At the broad level of the critical examination of key conceptions of human agency, where different conceptions (or models) of our context of action, our intention(s) and our expected consequences (1N) require different self-conceptions (or models) of our agency (AN), this complex of correspondences is a sufficient criterion of the truth, and also the justification, of an account of our agency. In commonsense agency and action, these criteria provide substantial criteria for the assessment of our practical claims at the first order, in part because the relevant conceptions and their objects can be specified as much as we need to suit the particular case at hand. The self-critical capacities and activities identified by this model allow us to examine, detect and assess gaps between intentions and actual consequences, and between our self-conceptions as agents and our actual behaviour, capacities and abilities. The prospects for such critical self-assessment are augmented through social interactions involving the sociological law of unintended consequences (e.g., Smith’s ‘invisible hand’), according to which groups of interacting individuals who behave in the same ways may achieve results, whether good or ill, unintended and unforeseen by any of them.14 These distinctions, their relations and their implications are direct counterparts to those identified above regarding empirical knowledge (§63). The key points of Hegel’s account of the possibility of constructive selfcriticism should be sufficiently clear for present purposes. This explication of critical self-assessment is constructive because it enables us to identify both the insights and the shortcoming of a view (including one’s own), so that we can seek to incorporate its insights whilst remedying its shortcomings when developing a superior view. The main point for now is to show that constructive self-criticism is humanly possible, that we are not condemned in principle to vicious circularity or petitio principii in the very attempt to assess our own views critically. The possibility of constructive self-criticism resolves the Pyrrhonian trope of vicious circularity because it shows that, when assessing or re-assessing any piece of justificatory reasoning by reviewing its basic evidence, principles of inference and its use of each of these, we can revise, replace or re-affirm as need be any component and any link among components within the justificatory reasoning in question (see below, §89.5). Because self-criticism and constructive mutual assessment are both fallible and corrigible, this explication of rational justification is fundamentally fallibilist. However, fallibilism about justification is consistent with realism about the objects of empirical knowledge, and with strict objectivity about basic moral 14 The criterion stated here concerns action theory and understanding particular actions. Identifying and justifying basic moral norms require further considerations which cannot be examined here, though they require the present account of justification (Westphal 2016a).

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principles (Westphal 2016a). This account provides for telling critical assessments of theory types, of the views espoused by various ‘cultural circles’ and of philosophical ‘stances’. Hegel’s method of internal critique generates significant, constructive results.15 Here the merits of this account can be highlighted by considering mature judgment. 88.3 Mature Judgment. Mature judgment may be explicated as this set of skills and abilities: to discern and define the basic parameters of a problem, to distinguish relevant from irrelevant and more relevant from less relevant considerations bearing on a problem, to recognise and to formulate important questions and sub-questions which require answers in order to resolve a problem, to determine proper lines of inquiry to answer those questions, to identify historical or social factors which lead people – including ourselves! – to formulate questions or answers in particular ways, to think critically about the formulation or reformulation of the issues, to consider carefully the evidence or arguments for and against proposed solutions, to accommodate as well as possible the competing considerations bearing upon the issue, through these reflections and inquiries to resolve a problem, and ultimately to organise and to present these considerations clearly and comprehensively to all interested parties. These qualities of judgment are cardinal intellectual virtues. They are central to intellectual inquiry, both theoretical and practical; they are crucial to philosophy; and they are central to any intelligent inquiry in any of life’s many activities, whether professional, commercial, political or personal.16 This explication of mature judgment should not be surprising, yet it shows that the Pyrrhonian trope of circularity is often merely a trope. Conversely, when someone in fact argues in a vicious circle, this too can only be established through mature judgment. Likewise, we can only distinguish vicious from benign epistemic circularity through mature judgment. We are not condemned in principle to viciously circular reasoning because we are capable of constructive self-critical assessment, in ways deeply obscured by alleged ‘knowledge by acquaintance’, by internalism about mental content and by descriptions theories of reference, though in ways illuminated by Hegel’s explication of the self-critical structure of human consciousness. Recognising that mature judgment involves this complex of factors helps to show that ra15

For an example of how this approach can assess a Weltanschauung, see Westphal (2003a), §§34–37. It suffices for constructive internal critiques of the views of Descartes (HER, 18–34), Hume (Westphal 1998a, 2013a), Kant (KTPR), Jacobi’s ‘immediate knowledge’ (below, §§92–99), Russell’s ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ (Westphal 2010a), Carnap’s semantics (HER, 47–67), Alston (HER, 68–90), Quine (Westphal 2015b) and van Fraassen’s Constructive Empiricism (below, §119; Westphal 2014a, forthcoming b); cp. Hall (1960). 16 Pace Nussbaum (1986/2002), this account of judgment does not favour particularism (Westphal 2012).

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tional judgment, and hence rational justification, is fallible and thus requires the critical scrutiny of others (§89). First some details require clarification. 88.4 Hegel’s is not a Coherence Criterion. The criterion for truth and rational justification of any philosophical view developed here is not a version of any standard coherence theory of justification. The present account is a mixed internalist-externalist view (per above, §86.3). Within the domain of empirical knowledge, two externalist aspects in this theory of justification are reliabilism about sensory awareness, in conjunction with a direct (rather than a representational or ‘indirect’) theory of perception. These two theses need merely be true, they do not need to be known to be true, in order for them to contribute to the justificatory status of empirical knowledge. This is to reject the ‘K-K Thesis’, the strongly internalist (and typically infallibilist) thesis that in order to know that x, one must know that one knows that x.17 A third externalist element in this theory of justification is externalism about mental content, the thesis that specifying some basic mental contents requires reference to extra-mental objects in one’s environment. Anti-sceptical arguments which appeal to mental content externalism as a premiss commit a petitio principii against global perceptual scepticism. This problem can be avoided by genuinely transcendental proof of (rather than ‘from’) mental content externalism. The key point of this proof is that we human beings cannot be self-conscious unless we inhabit a natural world which provides us a sufficient minimum degree of identifiable similarities and differences amongst the contents of our sensations and (analogously) amongst the spatiotemporal objects of our awareness. Without a natural world exhibiting this very general level of identifiable regularities, we could neither develop nor use empirical concepts, nor could we identify any particulars in our environment, nor could we distinguish ourselves from the objects we happen to sense (per above, §§30–36).18 No available coherence theory of justification provides proof of mental content externalism; indeed it is hard to understand how coherence (Davidson’s semantics not withstanding19) could justify mental content externalism. Additionally, the social dimensions of rational justi17 In morals this account of rational justification also provides a mixed internalist-externalist view (Westphal 2016a, §§2–9). Weaker forms of the ‘K-K Principle’ are hollow if not vacuous; ‘knowledge’ or ‘knowing’ must be given the same kind of analysis in both instances of ‘K’ to state a thesis worth holding. 18 A pragmatist version of this proof is provided by Lewis (MWO); cf. Westphal (2010b), §2. Ordinary language analysis of this same point is provided by Will (1997), 1–19. Unlike the ‘transcendental arguments’ Stroud (1968) and Rorty (1971) criticised, these proofs are not verificationist (Westphal 2018c). 19 Davidson (1983) advertised a ‘coherence theory of truth and knowledge’, though he (2001, 154–57) later conceded that none was provided. Even there he neglected cognitive justification, a crucial aspect of knowledge. This is a key reason why philosophy of language can supplement, though not supplant, epistemology.

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fication are optional rather than central to standard coherence theories. In these important regards the present account of rational justification is not a coherence theory of justification.20 The nearest kin to Hegel’s account would be Haack’s ‘Foundherentism’, which includes a direct (not representational) theory of perception based in the proper functioning of our neuro-psychology of perception, a mixed internalist-externalist theory of justification and ‘a better understanding of the difference between legitimate mutual support and vicious circularity’ (Haack 2002, 420; cf. idem. 1993). Yet the present account greatly augments Haack’s foundherentism with a solution to the Dilemma of the Criterion via the explication of the possibility of constructive self-criticism, a robust explication of mature judgment, greater emphasis upon the social and historical aspects of rational justification (§§89, 90) and transcendental proof of mental content externalism.21 88.5 Fallibilism and Constructivist Justification (again). The fallibilism inherent in the present explication of the possibility of constructive self-criticism is built into Kant’s constructivist strategy for rational justification (O’Neill 1992). Because constructivist rational justification is fallibilist, it dispenses with the illicit tendency to unilateral judgment embedded in foundationalist models of justification. Moral philosophy obviously concerns human interactions. So too does empirical knowledge. Claims to empirical knowledge are rightly formulated in this way: ‘It is true that x’, not merely, ‘I believe that x’ or ‘it seems to me that x’. Only through cognitive justification, which in all but the very simplest perceptual cases involves rational justification,22 can we justify claims of the form, ‘It is true that x’, as contrasted with the mere belief that x (even if reliably and correctly formed). Typically, in making empirical claims to truth we make claims concerning one or another feature of the public world, to which others also have access. In contrast, e.g., to after-images, fantasies or private musings, a defining feature of mind-independent objects and events is that they admit of a variety of perspectives, both literally in terms of points of view and figuratively in terms of conceptions, selective attention or interpretations. This multitude of perspectives, both literal and metaphorical, 20 Pragmatist theories of knowledge have typically been hostile to a priori and especially to transcendental proof. However, if transcendental proofs are carefully devised, they are consistent with the fallibilism, realism and the (broad, non-reductive) naturalism central to classical American pragmatism (Westphal 2003b). 21 See Longino (1990, 1994, 2001), Solomon (1994) and Haack (2003, 57–91) on the social dimensions of human knowledge. Regarding coherence theories, see Quinton (1973), 208–231, Meyers (1988), Bender (1989). In 1807 Hegel developed a ‘naturalised’ epistemology in this sense: epistemology must take the natural sciences into very close consideration; see below, §§127–131. 22 Recall §83.3, on mixed internalist-externalist accounts of cognitive justification.

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does not entail relativism. Instead, it is a cornerstone of pragmatic realism, provided we learn and understand how to avail ourselves constructively of this multitude of perspectives upon the shared, public world (cf. Lewis MWO 167–180). 89 THE SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF RATIONAL JUDGMENT AND RATIONAL JUSTIFICATION. Because constructivist rational justification is fallibilist, it underscores that in non-formal, substantive domains, to judge rationally is to judge matters thus: To the best of my present abilities, understanding and information, this conclusion is justified for the following reasons and in the following regards – what do you think? Because rational judgment is fallible, and because it involves one’s own, as it were, ‘perspectival’ assessment of the relevant evidence, principles and the interrelations among these, rational judgment is also fundamentally social. Constructive mutual criticism facilitates constructive self-criticism and renders it a social phenomenon by facilitating (or enabling) the identification of discrepancies between our conceptions of our knowledge and the objects of our knowledge and our experience of the objects we know and our experience of our own cognitive constitution and activities, and analogously for action, regarding either intended and actual consequences or purported and actual justifying reasons (above §88.2). The crucial, constitutive social aspects of constructive self-criticism are revealed by the following considerations. 89.1 Objective Claims and Public Implications. First, the norms, principles and objects or events involved in any judgment have implications far beyond one’s present context, and indeed far beyond the purview of any individual person, even in commonsense judgments such as ‘This is a physical object’, or ‘That is a goldfinch’. The indefinite scope of these implications is, in part, a feature of the ‘open texture’ of our empirical concepts: our empirical judgments cannot rule out that objects may behave very differently than we expect, based on how we conceive (classify) them.23 Consequently, the scrutiny of the norms and principles one uses even in simple empirical judgments, as also the scrutiny of one’s own judgments, falls not only to oneself but also to other parties. Indeed, these norms, principles, classifications (concepts) and judgments have the content they do and are justified to whatever extent they are through their critical scrutiny by all concerned parties, presently, historically and in the future. Even the most ordinary and commonsense concepts, norms and classifications have this kind of social history. Commonsense was 23

See above, note 11, and Westphal (2005), §2. Recall Mill’s (1865, 183) definition of matter as ‘a permanent possibility of sensation’ (cf. ibid., 181–9, 202–12).

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at one time entirely animistic; for a millennium in the Occident it was Aristotelian. Only with great difficulty did Occidental commonsense become Newtonian, and in some Occidental regions today commonsense is still struggling with (or against) Darwinism. None of us today habitually make alchemical classifications. ‘We’ have learnt better, though not – not even ‘in principle’, as is too glibly said – by effecting our own chemical revolution, so as to supercede alchemical notions by our own individual(ist) diligence. Consider Gerd Buchdahl’s (1969, 368–71) example, used to assess Hume’s view that possibility is a function of conceivability, of whether we can conceive of lunar flowers.24 We can picture flower-like cartoon images protruding from a picture of lunar soil and increasing in size, or even passing through the externally visible aspects of morphological development from a shoot to a mature plant. However, these are only images, even if they were drawn, say, by Buffon, Haeckel or Audubon. Plants as we actually know and conceive them (starting no later than early elementary school science classes) are biological organisms which require nutrients in their soil, water, sufficient carbon dioxide in the surrounding atmosphere and sufficient atmosphere to maintain a suitably temperate environment, where the relevant ‘suitability’ is a function of the plant’s physiology. None of these conditions is satisfied by the moon; hence flowers cannot grow on the moon. This is true, not as a matter of conceptual stipulation, but of conceptual understanding of plant physiology developed historically by a large collective of pioneering scientists, some of whose results have become commonsense and part of elementary science education. Analogous points can be made across the spectrum of our commonsense conceptions and beliefs.25 To factor out the social and historical bases of our plethora of commonsense conceptions and beliefs by appealing to notions of ‘narrow content’, according to which the core content of our beliefs or concepts is strictly and entirely introspectable, would leave us bereft of commonsense conceptions and beliefs, including those required to understand the very point of defining or appealing to (alleged) ‘narrow content’. Furthermore, the putative distinction between ‘narrow’ and ‘broad’ mental content can only be drawn post facto, after discovering a discrepancy between someone’s conception and the object so conceived. This is as it should be, according to Hegel’s explication of our conscious experience as resulting from our use of our conceptions for comprehending our putative objects (per §§63, 88.2). 89.2 Classifications and Social Education. Second, the very terms in which 24

I have modified and abbreviated his example to suit present purposes. For systematic examination of these points within the context of natural science, see Bartels (1994), Conant (1957), DiSalle (2002). 25

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we formulate our views and investigate whatever issues we do are acquired, that is, learned, in various ways from various groups. This is especially plain in any kinds of expertise and the so-called ‘division of cognitive labour’, which includes both experts and commoners, and both intellectual and manual labour. Where and when we do innovate by devising new conceptions, methods, procedures, techniques, materials, etc., we human beings can do so only by exploiting inherited, socially acquired conceptual, methodological and often technical as well as material resources. We initially adopt these resources by being taught them as the best-available and best justified resources for the domain at issue (cf. Burge 1989, 2003). Through using these resources, we may augment their justification, extend their use or further refine their character and also, on the basis of our grounds for such refinements, justify these refinements. Yet also in cases where we identify the limits, defects or inadequacies of these resources, or confront novel circumstances which require refashioning our resources, we human beings do so only in and through using those resources in ways which substantially inform and enable our developing improved successors. In these ways, individual innovation, and the justification individuals develop for their innovations, are socially based. The idea that human creation must be ex nihilo, which is required for creation to be a strictly individualist phenomenon (even on that lesser scale called ‘innovation’), has had far more credence in our intellectual and cultural history than it merits, yet it lives on in contemporary philosophical appeals to ‘Crusoe cases’, in which internalists neglect Robinson Crusoe’s having been raised by others to adulthood prior to his ill-fated voyage.26 89.3 Social Scrutiny. As mentioned (§89.1), the judgments each of us make and the principles we use to make them have implications which far transcend anyone’s present situation and indeed one’s entire purview. These include implications for domains, issues and examples one might never attend to, or ever be able to attend to. This raises a third important social dimension of the rational justification of individual judgment: We require the critical assessment of others who are engaged in other activities and concerns, both directly and indirectly related to our own, because they can identify implications of our judgments and the justifying grounds of our judgments which we cannot. None of us can adequately simulate for ourselves the confrontation of our rational judgments with the loyal opposition by also playing for oneself the role of loyal opponent. Though important, being one’s own devil’s advocate is inherently limited and, of course, fallible. Each of us can do our best to try to determine what those who disagree with us may say about our 26

This is one reason why ‘acceptance’ or ‘ontological commitment’ as such are poor indicators of justificatory status (Westphal 2014, 2015b).

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own judgments, and we may do well at this, though only if we are sufficiently broad-minded and well-informed to be intimately familiar with contrasting or (especially) opposing analyses of and positions on the matter at hand. Yet even this cannot substitute for the actual critical assessment of one’s judgments by knowledgeable, skilled interlocutors who actually hold differing or opposed views, or (alternatively) views only tangentially related to our own. Ineluctably we have our own reasons for selectively gaining expertise in some domains rather than others, for focussing on some issues rather than others and for favouring some kinds of accounts rather than others. However extensive our knowledge and assessment may be, we cannot, so to speak, see around our own corners. Our own fallibility, limited knowledge and finite skills and abilities, together with the complexities inherent in forming mature judgments, require us to seek out and take seriously the critical assessment of any and all competent others. Failing to do so renders our judgments less than maximally informed, less than maximally reliable and so less than fully rationally justified, so far as we are humanly or individually capable of achieving rational justification. This feature of rational justification through rational judgment has been obscured by over-specialisation within the field of philosophy, because a high degree of specialisation is too easily conjoined with disinterest in or ignorance of other specialties, whether closely or less directly related to one’s own. The account of rational justification advocated here opposes the presumed sufficiency of the ‘divide and conquer’ approach to philosophical problems characteristic of early analytical philosophy, which sought to replace systematic with piecemeal analysis of problems. This ‘divide and conquer’ approach was exposed as a mirage when Carnap (1950b) adopted a weakly holistic semantics, one consequence of which is that the terms and principles used in any one speciality – however narrowly construed – are related, directly or indirectly, for their meaning, content, significance, use and ultimately also their justification to the terms, principles and analyses used in other domains. This methodological implication of Carnap’s semantics was highlighted by Wick (1951), though it has been widely neglected. Therefore, due to our fallibility and limited knowledge, both factual and inferential, any particular judgment anyone makes is justified only to the extent that the judge does his or her utmost to exercise mature judgment on that occasion, which due to our fallibility and finitude requires us to submit our judgments to critical scrutiny by all concerned parties and to respond constructively to their considered assessments of our judgment. Because mature judgment is socially based, so is rational justification in non-formal,

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substantive domains.27 We are each responsible for the critical assessment of our own and of one another’s’ rational judgments. Genuine and maximally rational judgment requires constructive self-critical and mutually critical assessment of each and everyone’s judgment. Any consensus thereby reached is and remains justified – and continues to justify conclusions based upon it – because it identifies the very best available principles, evidence, analyses and conclusions, and because it always remains open to continuing and to future critical re-assessment.28 89.4 Individualism in Principle? A typical rejoinder takes the form, ‘yet couldn’t we in principle assess our own judgments fully for ourselves, without relying on others?’ This appeal to what we allegedly could do ‘in principle’ is an open invitation to Cartesian dreams of rational self-sufficiency, because the only constraints upon such possibilities ‘in principle’ are the law of noncontradiction, the logically contingent premiss, ‘I think, I am’, whatever one can introspectively identify as one’s ‘own’ (putative) thoughts or experiences and the uncharted expanses of one’s powers of imagination. If mere logical possibilities are relevant to justification, the only possible form of justification is infallibilist, the only possible kinds of mental content are ‘narrowly’ (if deceptively) non-social (recall Buchdahl’s example; above, §89.1), whilst the logical gap between one’s apparent experiences and their putative objects (namely, that the former do not entail the latter) condemns one to the infallibilist internalism of the Cartesian-Humean ego-centric predicament.29 If such views may avoid precisely that ego-centric predicament by rejecting representationalist accounts of perception, they construct an equally pernicious one by mistaking rational justification for defending one’s view come what may against critics and dissenters. This kind of individualism and internalism about cognition and about rational justification is undercut by the transcendental proofs of realism and of mental content externalism discussed earlier (§§30–36, 65–70). Internalism about mental content or about justification may be consistent with realism about ordinary objects and events, but strict internalism of either variety 27 ‘Judgment’ has largely fallen by the wayside in analytic epistemology, except for an innocuous sense of identifying commonsense objects in one’s environs. Kant insisted that rules require judgment for their application (KdrV A132–4/B171–3). Wittgenstein’s account of rule-following makes the same point, that principles are not algorithms, and indeed that their use requires social training and context (von Savigny 1991; Will 1997, 121–192). Further support for the social basis of constructive self-criticism are discussed in Westphal (2003a), esp. §§20, 24, 28, 35; (2012); cf. also Elgin (1996), List (2005). 28 Here my account converges in many regards with those of Longino (1990, 1994, 2001), Solomon (1994) and Haack (1998), 104–19. However, my aim to prove my key thesis transcendentally requires abstracting from the empirical features of collective scientific research to which they rightly draw attention. 29 All of this is entailed by the project of defeating Descartes’ evil deceiver.

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precludes justifying such realism. This complex issue may be considered here by noting an example of social influences on apparently basic features of human visual perception. The Müller-Lyer illusion is familiar, as is the fact that, even after comprehending its character, those who experience it cannot make themselves simply and literally see two equal length lines, conjoined at their respective ends to either convergent or divergent ‘arrowheads’ (Fig. 1). The Müller-Lyer illusion results from inappropriate correction of visual information by our visual system’s constancy mechanisms (Gregory 1970, 1974). Perceptual ‘constancy’ systems allow us to perceive objects in our environment as maintaining their size through changes in distance and angle of view, despite vast changes in the arc which any object subtends within one’s visual field as one’s proximity to it changes. In this regard, it is very fortunate for our abilities to identify and reidentify physical objects that our visual systems do not follow the laws of geometrical optics. The significant point here is that cross-cultural Fig. 1: Müller-Lyer Illusion research shows that there is a decided social influence upon human perception at this basic level because groups which do not build rectilinear structures suffer either very little or not at all from the Müller-Lyer Illusion (Deregowski 1973, 1980). This level of perceptual experience counts as ‘basic’ because it concerns visual appearances, regardless of our judgments or beliefs about what we sense. This perceptual example is germane to my explication of rational judgment because it undermines strong individualism and strict internalism about mental content, by belying glib distinctions between ‘narrow’ and ‘broad’ perceptual content, by showing that social factors enter into what would otherwise be considered ‘narrow’ perceptual content and by showing that ‘narrow’ cannot be distinguished from ‘broad’ perceptual content on the basis of purported ‘narrow’ content. The only way to salvage ‘narrow’ mental content is to repeat Descartes’ (2. Med., AT 7:29) fiat of defining ‘sensing strictly speaking’ in terms solely of what one seems to sense. So doing may be ‘irrefutable’ to the satisfaction of internalists, but such fiat reinstates insoluble global perceptual scepticism because it reinstates infallibilism about rational justification, though in a substantive domain (putative empirical knowledge) to which it in principle cannot pertain. Much more is required to justify one’s view in any substantive domain than to escape overt self-contradiction. To devise a theory of rational justification on the slender basis of individ-

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ualism and internalism about mental content, in order, in effect, to comply with the dictates of Descartes’ evil deceiver, is to devise a theory for some merely logically possible cognisant subject, not for human beings. Such accounts nevertheless remain subject to the Dilemma of the Criterion; satisfying oneself by one’s own best lights is no substitute for justifying one’s claims rationally, and it makes substantive error far more incorrigible than it need be.30 Our concern must be the rational justification, so far as we can obtain it, of our best judgments, using the best of our actual (rather than our imagined) rational capacities, abilities, skills and information. Our rational capacities are finite: we lack omniscience and omni-competence; we can only base our judgments upon information, principles, evidence, examples and reasonings we actually have and use. Our legitimate and ineluctable predilections to focus on some activities, issues or inquires rather than others, the division of cognitive labour this naturally generates, and the manifold implications of our own judgments for domains and issues beyond our cognisance, entail that others have information which bears upon, and can provide for rational assessment and justification or revision of our own judgments, no matter how ordinary or expert our judgments may be. The present account aims to understand the kind of rational justification we can and do have, not the kinds we might have if we were ‘in principle’ some other kind of utterly self-sufficient, though merely logically possible rational being. 89.5 Rationally Justifiable Judgment and Mutual Recognition. All of these considerations and measures are required, and understanding all of them is required, in order rationally to judge that ‘I judge’, and not merely to utter the words ‘I judge’, thereby merely feigning rationality. The central significance of Hegel’s account of mutual recognition (Anerkennung) for rational justification is this: For anyone accurately and justifiedly to judge that she or he is a rationally competent judge requires integrating all of the following: 1. Recognising one’s own rational fallibility; 2. Judging that others are likewise rationally competent judges; 3. Recognising that we are equally capable of, and responsible for, assessing rationally our own and each other’s judgments; 4. Recognising that we each require each other’s assessment of our own judgments, in order to scrutinise and thereby maximally to refine and to justify rationally our own judgments. 30

It can be shown within Descartes’ Meditations that narrow content and justificatory internalism are the basic, self-deceptive fallacies of Cartesianism; see below, §144.1).

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This rich and philosophically crucial form of rational self-consciousness requires our correlative consciousness of others, that we are all mutually interdependent for our capacity of rational judgment, our abilities to judge rationally and our exercise of rational judgment. This requirement is transcendental, for unless we recognise our critical interdependence as fallible rational judges, we cannot judge fully rationally, because unless we acknowledge and affirm our judgmental interdependence, we will seriously misunderstand, misuse and over-estimate our own individual rational, though fallible and limited powers of judgment. Thus recognising our own fallibility and our mutual interdependence as rational judges is a key constitutive factor of our being fully rational, fully autonomous rational judges, so far as is humanly or individually possible. Only by recognising our judgmental interdependence can we each link our human fallibility and limited knowledge constructively with our equally human corrigibility, with our ability to learn: especially from constructive criticism. This form of mutual recognition involves mutually achieved recognition of our shared, fallible and also corrigible rational competence. This recognition involves recognising the crucial roles of charity, tolerance, patience and literal forgiveness in our mutual assessment of our rational judgments and those of others, to acknowledge that oversights, whether our own or others’, are endemic to the human condition, and not as such grounds for blame or condemnation of anyone’s errors.31 Therefore, fully rational justification requires us to seek out and to actively engage with those who critically assess our judgments. The present account implies, in many ways, that rational justification comes in degrees, extents or regards. My main aim is to identify the social dimensions of rational justification in non-formal, substantive domains by explicating the character of fully rational judgment. The extent to which any individual or any group exercises rational judgment on any particular occasion is a further question, though considering it, too, requires exercising rational judgment to our utmost – and hence collective – abilities. 90 MUTUAL CRITICAL ASSESSMENT AND THE HISTORICAL DIMENSIONS OF RATIONAL JUSTIFICATION. 90.1 Determinate Negation of Relevant Alternatives. Assessing any piece of important reasoning requires substantive training in the relevant issues. Yet such training does not suffice to assess the reasoning in question. Assessment requires autonomous judgment about the merits of the case made in and by that piece of reasoning. To address the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion 31

See herein, §§77, 95–96; cf. HER, 160–4, 181–3; Westphal (2003a), §13.9.

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(above, §84), the justification of any substantive view in a non-formal domain requires the thorough, constructive internal critique of all relevant opposed views so far as we can determine them, whether historical, contemporary or possible. This is built into Hegel’s concept of ‘determinate negation’ (above, §87). The twin requirements of ‘all’ and ‘relevant’ pull, as it were, in opposite directions; which alternatives count as relevant is always subject to critical scrutiny and re-assessment. This is as it should be. Because the list of relevant alternative views can always be extended, in part by devising new variants on previous accounts, and in part doing so when confronting new kinds of circumstances, rational justification is fallible and inherently provisional. Consequently, rational justification is fundamentally historical, because it is based upon the current state of knowledge, because it is fallible and thus provisional and because the list of relevant alternatives and information typically expands historically. Reviewing the development of the empirical sciences (and likewise developments within any empirical science) in view of the present account reveals many concrete examples of discoveries and innovations being made in just the ways highlighted by the present explication of rational judgment and its social and also natural bases. Consider briefly an illustrative example of this phenomenon. 90.2 Social Epistemology: An Example from Physics. In 1938 Hahn and Strassmann bombarded uranium salts with neutrons. Yet after exacting re-examination of their procedures, theories and explanations, they could not resolve equivocal results. They reported that chemically, the products of their experiment were barium, which contradicted everything they then knew about nuclear physics. Shortly after learning of their results, Lise Meitner devised an alternative interpretation of their results which achieved consistency by making an important theoretical advance which showed that they had succeeded at producing – for the first time – nuclear fission.32 To achieve her pioneering result, Meitner had to draw upon everything she had learned from others about both chemistry and nuclear physics, yet it was her own innovative rethinking of these conceptual and experimental resources that enabled her to produce her innovative (and sound) explanation of Hahn and Strassmann’s otherwise deeply puzzling results. This example nicely illustrates how individuals can contribute to social institutions (in this case, scientific institutions, including disciplinary methods and theories), though only by drawing upon conceptual and material resources which are socially and historically developed and transmitted. 90.3 Social Epistemology and Engineering. The case is similar across engineering. To devise a solution to an assigned problem, engineers routinely use 32

This example is from Will (1997, 102); cf. DiSalle (2002).

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established kinds of devices, designs and materials, tailoring them to the specific parameters of the current problem, in order to plan and assemble the required works or device. Significant engineering problems arise when available designs, devices and materials cannot readily be adapted to the present, hence problematic situation. Such situations call for genuine innovation. The parameters of the specific problem can be determined, in many important regards, by determining why available designs and devices are insufficient. This kind of specification affords a focussed search for the required innovation. There are no algorithms for innovation; innovation is required precisely when standard procedures are insufficient. Yet the history of engineering repeatedly shows how innovative engineers can be. Of course, prior innovation – beginning in pre-historic times with the simple machines – is what produces today’s stock of available designs and techniques, for any ‘day’ we select. The same phenomenon is found across the trades and industry in all kinds of production, economic or otherwise. 90.4 Social Epistemology and Individual Innovation. As mentioned (§§89.2, 90.2–90.3), individual innovation relies upon unappreciated resources and possibilities of modification found within established, ‘traditional’ practices, in response to unfulfilled aims and aspirations found in those practices or in unexpected circumstances or events; typically, in a combination of these. In these ways ‘tradition’ and ‘reason’ are deeply intertwined, because the traditions we now have (for any relevant ‘now’) generally are the product of intelligent, rational activities guided by our manifold efforts to cope with ourselves, our neighbours or societies and the natural and social world we inhabit. Current practices and procedures may not have been devised by particularly sound, effective or durable reasoning, yet it is reasoning; such are precisely the cases which most benefit from critical scrutiny of their current and on-going effectiveness.33 These broad, central insights into the character and requirements of rational judgment and justification are not philosophical commonplaces, nor are the present explications of the possibility of constructive self-criticism and of mutual critical assessment and their central, ineliminable roles in rational justification. Sextus’ Dilemma of the Criterion has received scant philosophical attention since the early Nineteenth Century; recent attempts to solve it tend to over-simplification (above, §61). That we often engage in constructive mutual criticism is nothing new. Neither is it news that we often thwart it instead. What we achieve by constructive mutual criticism and how we achieve it are not obvious; it is neglected by most theories of rational 33 Hume’s theory of justice (T 3.2) provides an important analysis of this phenomenon in connection with our basic social institutions and the principles governing them (Westphal 2016a, §§10, 11).

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justification.34 If the present account is correct, we can and ought to engage in constructive self- and mutual criticism because only in this way can we achieve genuine, maximally rational justification, to the extent humanly possible, and thus only in this way can we aspire or justifiably claim to achieve it. Hegel was the first to understand and to argue that these social and historical aspects of rational justification in substantive domains are consistent with, and ultimately require realism about the objects of empirical knowledge and strict objectivity about basic moral norms. It is widely supposed that ‘pragmatic realism’ is oxymoronic. This supposition, Hegel rightly argued, rests on a series of false dichotomies (Westphal 2003a). In non-formal domains, cultural and intellectual history, including all forms of empirical inquiry, play central, ineliminable roles within rational justification. Philosophy itself, as a rational examination of substantive issues within substantive domains, is essentially historical and social. Hegel elevated the history of philosophy to a specifically philosophical discipline because he recognised, and argued in detail in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, that comprehensive, critical, philosophical history of philosophy is essential to rational justification in non-formal, substantive domains of philosophical inquiry.35 91 CONCLUSION. It is significant to show that, and how, we can achieve rational justification through self-criticism and mutual critical assessment. I have argued for a stronger thesis, that the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion must be addressed by any tenable account of rational justification in non-formal, substantive domains, and that the present fallibilist account of rational justification via constructive self- and mutual criticism solves it. Because rational justification involves using various grounds of justification, we must be able to distinguish genuine and relevant from false or irrelevant justificatory grounds, and justificatory links among these grounds. So doing requires solving the Dilemma of the Criterion. The present account augers a fundamental change in philosophical orientation. If it is correct, philosophy cannot consist in pure conceptual analysis, nor solely in piecemeal problem solving. Systematic analysis and deductive proof are necessary though insufficient for philosophy (in non-formal, substantive domains), in part because conceptual analysis must be replaced by 34

Notable exceptions include Longino (1990, 1994, 2001) and Haack (2003), 179–202. As noted above (§5), Harris (HL) argues in detail that Hegel’s history in the 1807 Phenomenology is far better than has been recognised, and that the Phenomenology contains Hegel’s genuine philosophy of history. 35

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conceptual explication of concepts in use.36 Conceptual explication requires taking usage and changes in usage carefully into philosophical account. This requires a broad form of naturalism, according to which philosophical theories in non-formal domains must take the natural and social sciences and their histories into philosophical account, along with intellectual and cultural history more broadly. So doing is no capitulation to historicist relativism. The broad naturalism advocated here requires rejoining philosophy with copious amounts of careful scholarship. The intricacy of these issues requires caution, keeping our philosophical theories of rational judgment and justification as simple as possible. Yet the crucial importance of these issues requires minding Einstein’s (2000, 314) corollary to Ockham’s razor: ‘Everything must be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler’. Too often, philosophers of all stripes have retreated into groups of like-minded thinkers – identified by early Logical Positivists as ‘cultural circles’ – and have thus retreated from serious engagement with considered dissent by able and informed interlocutors. We can and ought to do better (cf. Wallgren 2006).

36 Carnap (1950b, 1–18) explicated conceptual explication, without noticing its important steps towards naturalism, and both semantic and justificatory externalism; see below, §§100–110. On naturalism in recent analytic epistemology, see Kitcher (1992).

PART III Hegel’s Systematic Critical Pragmatic Realism

CHAPTER 14

Hegel’s Critique of Intuitionism: Encyclopaedia §§61–78 92 INTRODUCTION. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi epitomised the romantic rejection of discursive thought; his highly influential polemics led the German revolt against Enlightenment rationalism. Traditionally, Anglophone students of Hegel encounter Jacobi’s views only in Hegel’s criticisms of Jacobi in the conceptual preliminaries (Vorbegriff) of the smaller Encyclopaedia Logic. Jacobi’s writings have been translated by George di Giovanni, and his views have attracted increasing attention in English.1 The post-modernist of his day, as it were, Jacobi achieved a status comparable to Richard Rorty’s, the later Feyerabend’s or Derrida’s. Hegel described the impact of Jacobi’s attack on Enlightenment rationalism as ‘a thunderbolt out the blue’ (VGP 3, MM 20: 316–7/H&S 3:412). Because Hegel stresses the conceptual, social and historical mediations of knowledge so strongly, it is crucial for him to refute the doctrine of ‘immediate knowledge’ advocated by Jacobi – and before him by Hamann (1759; 1949–57, 2:57–82) and, sans religious application, by Crusius and his followers, including Krug and Schulze – two of the unnamed targets of chapter I of the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (Westphal 2002–03). Yet in his critique of ‘immediate knowledge’ in the Encyclopaedia, Hegel treats Jacobi as the main representative of this view. Although Hegel’s discussion in the Encyclopaedia is not his longest discussion of Jacobi’s views (it is roughly one-third the pages devoted to him in Hegel’s early polemical essay, Faith and Knowledge), it is Hegel’s most careful analysis of Jacobi’s views and his most sustained and detailed critique of intuitionist epistemology amongst his mature works. (Hegel treats Jacobi’s views in a review article and in his lectures on the history of philosophy. The criticisms he makes there reiterate those made in the Encyclopaedia, though in less detail and with omissions.) This discussion also deserves particular emphasis because of its prominent location as the last of three accounts of metaphysical knowledge critically rejected in the concep1

For a brief discussion in English of Jacobi’s general style and impact on German thought, see Beck’s introduction to Jacobi (1787; rpt: 1983), vii–xix. (Here I use the somewhat briefer second edition, edited by Jacobi himself for his collected works.) For extended discussions see Snow (1987), Beiser (1987), 44–91, and di Giovanni (1994). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_0�5

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tual preliminaries to Hegel’s Encyclopaedia. For these reasons and in view of its richness, here I examine this often read yet rarely analysed text. (Readers primarily interested in epistemology may wish to turn directly to §§98, 99. Most of the exegetical, historical and philosophical points of this chapter are addressed to fans of intellectual intuition, and its ascription to Hegel.) The central significance of Jacobi for Hegel cannot be explained by Jacobi’s philosophical rigour. His lack of rigour shows, for example, in his use of Kant’s conception of time when attacking Spinoza, after having himself attacked and repudiated Kant’s conception of time in his general attack on Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic. Jacobi attacks and repudiates Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic in his Appendix to David Hume über den Glauben (Werke 2:291–310; cited as ‘DH’). He turns Kant’s conception of time against Spinoza in the 7th Appendix to his letters on Spinoza (Werke 4; 2:136, cf. DH 213). Jacobi once remarked, ‘I have never been able to gain the advantage over pure metaphysics. Hence it’s necessary that we discover its deficiencies, and that we’re in a position to do so’ (SB 1:161). Unfortunately, Jacobi didn’t recognise how closely connected are the twin aims of ‘gaining the advantage’ over metaphysics and discovering its deficiencies: both require comprehending it. Jacobi’s significance for Hegel also cannot be explained by his merits as an historian of philosophy. For example, Jacobi claims that in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume had sought, quite unnoticed, to ‘bring everything back to faith (Glauben) in positive tenets (Sätze) of Religion’ (DH 150). Jacobi and his mentor Hamann saw Hume as laying down the conflict between reason and faith in the concluding section of Book I of the Treatise (1.4.7); since Hume didn’t affirm reason, he must have opted for faith. Their self-serving view of Hume rests upon their antecedent conviction that there is an exhaustive and exclusive dichotomy between Enlightenment rationalism and pietistic faith. Hume was more subtle; in that section he contrasts reason to ‘fancy’, to which he gives limited approval; to ‘nature’, to which he gives substantial though qualified approval; and to ‘superstition’, which he condemns. To avoid ambiguity, his remarks about monks and dervishes on the following page indicate his belief that religion belongs under superstition.2 Jacobi’s significance for Hegel becomes clearer in connection with Hegel’s criterion of philosophical importance, namely, that a philosopher contributes to constructive transformation of philosophy. Hegel’s criterion is somewhat slippery, insofar as transformations of philosophy count in Hegel’s eyes as transformations toward his own system, and insofar as Hegel feels free to reinterpret a philosopher’s view from his own position. (For example, Hegel 2 For discussion of the German counter-enlightenment and its use of Scottish philosophers, see Kuehn (1987), 141–66; on Hamann’s use of Hume, Berlin (1980), 162–87; on Hamann and his relation to Jacobi, Beiser (1987), 16–43.

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credits Kant with the important insight that empirical knowledge is knowledge of appearances, whilst also charging that Kant’s understanding of ‘appearances’ was wholly inadequate; Enz. §45Z.) To understand Hegel’s estimation of Jacobi’s significance thus will require accepting, for the sake of discussion, some of Hegel’s philosophical position and understanding some of his terminology for expressing it. Fortunately, two of the three parts of his criticism of Jacobi are independent of his own view of philosophical truth. What was Jacobi’s contribution to philosophy, according to Hegel? In a review of the third volume of Jacobi’s Werke Hegel attributes to him – together with Kant – merely a critical insight: … it is the joint work of Jacobi and Kant … to have put an end to previous metaphysics, and so to have established the necessity of a wholly altered view of logic. (MM 4:455)

This chapter disambiguates and reconstructs Hegel’s analysis and assessment of Jacobi’s views in detail, not only to understand his criticisms of intuitionist epistemology, but also to show that a key to Hegel’s new view of logic is found in some of those criticisms. 93 JACOBI’S CRITIQUE OF DISCURSIVE KNOWLEDGE. The first section of the third ‘Attitude of Thought Towards Objectivity’ (Enz. §61) contrasts Kant’s and Jacobi’s arguments for the claim that ultimate truth is not rationally comprehensible. According to Hegel, Kant’s arguments for this sceptical view purport to show that discursive thought is fundamentally subjective (due to the subject-dependence of its objects of possible application, as shown in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the first Critique) and deploys ‘abstract’ (i.e., mutually independent) universals which lead to metaphysical antinomies. Jacobi’s reasoning follows a different strategy, arguing that since ‘thought is the activity merely of the particular’ (Enz. §62), the truth cannot be rationally comprehended. In the conceptual preliminaries to the lesser Logic Hegel uses the phrase ‘thought as the activity of …’ in characterising accounts of the thinking subject, in contrast to accounts of the objects of thought (Enz. §§19Z, 20, 28Z, 52, 60Z). Accordingly, with this phrase Hegel here describes Jacobi’s view of the thinking subject: ‘Thought as the activity of the particular has only the categories for its product and content’ (Enz. §62). That is, the subject thinks with concepts which it has produced, and it can grasp only what those concepts capture. But why call thought the activity of ‘the particular’? According to Jacobi, thought is not the activity of a logos, but only a ‘means of preservation of human beings’, a being who stands

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between animals, which have no reason (DH 8–9, 56), and God, who needs no reason (DH 10, 55). Thus thought is the activity of humans as a particular species of living being (cf. SB 2:131–2). Hegel agrees with Jacobi that the truth is ‘immanent’ in spirit and that the truth is ‘for’ or manifest to spirit (Enz. §§63, 64R). Hegel holds that Jacobi’s advance over Kant is to move beyond Kantian belief in God towards knowledge of God (Enz. §51R). The disagreement between Hegel and Jacobi concerns the epistemological analysis of this knowledge. In Enz. §62 Hegel summarises Jacobi’s argument for the cognitive inadequacy of conceptual thought, presented most succinctly in the seventh Appendix to the Letters on Spinoza. According to Jacobi, the concepts produced by human thought are limited to categorising forms of causal conditions, causal dependence and causal mediation. To comprehend an object is thus restricted to understanding its place within a series of its causal conditions and consequences. Thus insofar as one attempts to comprehend ‘infinite’ unconditioned truth, one must convert it into something conditioned by causal mediation. Therefore, instead of rationally comprehending ultimate truth, one perverts it into an untruth. In Enz. §62R Hegel uses the term ‘anthropocentrism’ to characterise Jacobi’s objection to discursive thought, a term Jacobi himself does not use. The issue of the anthropocentrism of human thought was widely discussed in this period, though only in connection with teleological judgments. Hegel notes the general import of Jacobi’s objection in roughly the following terms: Insofar as nature as a totality or God Himself are taken as objects of knowledge, because human thought can only proceed in terms of series of causal conditions, these totalities must be conceived by utterly inadequate human forms of thought (SB 2149, 154, 155). Thus it is Jacobi’s contribution to charge that human thought generally, and not merely teleological judgment, is anthropocentric, and to make this charge without appealing to Kant’s idealist doctrines of space and time. Jacobi does develop his argument out of his understanding of Spinoza’s philosophy, but the Kantian roots of his critique in the first and fourth Antinomies and in Kant’s refutation of the Cosmological Argument are not to be ignored. I attempt no assessment of the thesis shared by Kant, Jacobi and Hegel that the application of our common conceptions must lead to explanatory regresses which are in principle endless. I only note their agreement in order to highlight Jacobi’s and Hegel’s concern with the possible objects of such thinking. On this view of thought, to comprehend something is to explain it by appeal to laws of nature and the causal action of other things. In this way anything we comprehend is treated as one particular among others. Hegel accordingly says: ‘… explanation and comprehension thus consist in showing that

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one thing is mediated through another; thus all content [of thought] is only particular …’ (Enz. §62R). Consequently thought is only capable of comprehending particulars. What stands in contrast to this conception of thought as suited only to particulars is not a sense of thought which comprehends ‘the universal’, for according to this view of thought there are universal properties of things and universal laws of nature. What Hegel contrasts with Kant’s and Jacobi’s conception of thought, is thought adequate to ‘the unconditioned’. Hegel expressly makes this contrast insofar as after characterising the particular content of this way of thinking as dependent and finite, Hegel insists that ‘the infinite, the truth, God lies outside of the mechanism of such connection, to which knowledge is supposedly limited’ (Enz. §62R). According to Hegel, this is where Jacobi’s greatest critical insight lies. Because Jacobi holds both that we can know the existence of God – metaphysically expressed, the unconditioned –, and that the categories of thought cannot grasp the unconditioned, he must consequently maintain that the categories of thought are limited in their content and so are ‘finite’. Kant distinguished between negative and positive senses of ‘noumenon’ and had insisted that we can only use the negative sense of this concept. In pressing his point about the limitations of conceptual thought, Jacobi deepens somewhat the contrast between these two senses of noumenon, and together with his insistence that we can know the existence of God this begins to make the positive conception of noumenon determinate. Hegel, of course, sees in the positive sense of noumenon an inadequate notion of the Hegelian ‘unconditioned’. In view of this, Hegel credits Jacobi with advancing ever so slightly in the right metaphysical direction. On this basis Hegel attributes two advances to Jacobi: First, that against Kant and traditional metaphysics he emphasises the limitations of categorial thought (Enz. §§62, 77; cf. DH 80–81); second, that Jacobi had shown that mediated knowledge, taken in isolation, is insufficient for comprehending ultimate truth (Enz. §§65, 77). What may be surprising is that Hegel fails to mention a fundamental thesis of Jacobi’s, not only that ‘every route of demonstration results in fatalism’ (SB 1:178, 2:127), but more importantly Jacobi’s notorious contention that every thorough and consistent use of conceptual thought must ultimately repudiate the existence of nature, of values, of our bodies and also of our freedom. This thesis, pronounced by Jacobi’s report that the Enlightenment’s hero Lessing had embraced Spinozism, was Jacobi’s ‘thunderclap out of the blue’ which so upset German confidence in Enlightenment rationalism (VGP 3:316–7/H&S 3:412); on the next page (of either edition), Hegel notes Jacobi’s previously quoted claim that complete demonstrability leads to complete

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fatalism. For this renunciation of our humanity Jacobi coined the term ‘nihilism’.3 Jacobi’s doctrine of ‘immediate knowledge’ is his alternative to such nihilism. Although Hegel shunts aside the issue of nihilism in the Encyclopaedia, he knew quite well and could count on his audience knowing this infamous point of Jacobi’s polemic (cf. G&W 4:378–81, 410). It would not be too much to say that the whole of Hegel’s philosophy aims to defend conceptual thought and rational knowledge against this charge. For this reason, too, Hegel grants Jacobi a crucial historical position in philosophy. In opposition to Jacobi, Hegel maintains that a consistent and thorough use of reason leads, through a proper critique of reason, to recognising that we only have causal knowledge when we achieve sufficient causal explanations of events, structures or processes and their kinds, though in principle this knowledge never suffices to demonstrate universal causal determinism, certainly not regarding human behaviour. Moreover, rational judgment and responsible decision and action are normatively structured in ways which cannot be reduced to, nor replaced by, strictly causal considerations (below, §§140–148). 94 JACOBI’S ALTERNATIVE TO DISCURSIVE KNOWLEDGE. How does Jacobi present an alternative to nihilism? Hegel remarks sharply that Jacobi recognised the limits of finite categories of thought, found no alternative cognitive method, and so repudiated all method and simply insisted that he had knowledge of God (Enz. §77; cf. SB 1:70). Jacobi expressed himself even more sharply. He characterises his view as a ‘salto mortale’, a fatal leap annihilating discursive thought, which results from stepping onto a fideist ‘elastic spot’ (SB 1:59). Hegel formulates the philosophical point of Jacobi’s train of thought in these terms: It is maintained [by Jacobi] that the truth is manifest to spirit, as well as that man consists solely of reason, and that reason is knowledge of God. Because mediate knowledge is supposedly limited to a finite content, reason is thus immediate knowledge, faith (Glaube). (Enz. §63)

The distinguishing characteristic of Jacobi’s position, according to Hegel, consists in the thesis that ‘immediate knowledge, taken in isolation, excluding mediation, has the truth for its content’ (Enz. §65). In this way, Jacobi held, we can know the existence of God (Enz. §§64, 69) and we can know about our capacity for immediate knowledge (Enz. §§65–67, 77).4 According to Ja3

On Jacobi’s sense of ‘nihilism’, see DH 19, his ‘Brief an Fichte’ (21 March 1799; Werke 3:22–3, 44), and the discussions by Pöggeler (1974), Süß (1974) and Müller-Lauter (1975). 4 Cf. DH 4, 8–10, 28, 37, 46–48, 59–60, 70, 72, 74, 83, 105, 108, 109, 119, 160, 233, 242, 248–9, 282, 304; SB 1:29, 31–2; SB 2:130, 149 note, 152–3, 156, 162.

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cobi, it is no scandal at all, not even for philosophy, not to be able to prove the existence either of a material world or of God (DH 41–2).5 Insofar as we can attain knowledge by means of proofs, these proofs must themselves ultimately rest on direct revelation (SB 1:22–3; DH 4, 11, 105, 180); proofs provide no more than ‘second-hand certainty’ (SB 2:210). If comprehension is insight into how one thing results from another, then neither God nor sensible qualities are comprehensible: not God, because He is unconditioned; not sensible qualities, because their causes are beyond our comprehension (SB 2:149 n.). Only immediate intuition remains as a mode of knowledge. For example, Jacobi claims that ‘his conscience reveals [to man] that … above nature there is an omnipotence, whose likeness is man’ (DH 44–5). To defend and to justify conceptual comprehension, Hegel must fundamentally refute Jacobi’s objections to discursive thought and so discredit his salto mortale. The philosophical and epistemological interest in Hegel’s critique of Jacobi is how subtly Hegel devises a strong and strictly internal critique of such a minimal, and minimally expressed, view as Jacobi’s intuitionism. By so doing, Hegel’s critique holds against a very broad swath of intuitionisms, and uses of ‘intuitions’ in philosophy. (Intuitionist logic is not at issue here.) 95 HEGEL’S QUESTIONS ABOUT ‘IMMEDIATE KNOWLEDGE’. Jacobi intends to repudiate ‘mediate’ knowledge, and thus to reach a particular kind of cognition, namely ‘immediate knowledge’ (cf. DH 106). Hegel’s critique of Jacobi turns on two fundamental, if implicit, questions: First, whether one achieves a particular kind of knowledge through the mere repudiation (or negation, logically speaking) of mediate knowledge; second, whether this kind of knowledge is rightly described as ‘immediate’. Hegel aims to show that both questions must be answered in the negative. It is apparent that Jacobi’s brand of ‘immediate’ knowledge must exclude any kind of syllogism. However, Jacobi’s texts show that he is also concerned with another kind of mediation: the mediation of knowledge by representations. Jacobi held that nihilism also results from any indirect or representational theory of perception (DH 108). (Jacobi neglects the question, whether these two alleged sources of nihilism: representational theories of perception and demonstrative thought, are related.) Hegel may appear not to discuss this aspect of Jacobi’s view, but it must be considered in order to assess the significance and legitimacy of Hegel’s critique of Jacobi.

5

Kant declared it scandalous that no philosophical proof of the external world had yet been found (KdrV, Bxl n.).

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There are at least three kinds of accounts of ‘immediate’ knowledge, two of which are representational accounts of knowledge which exclude syllogism. I sketch these views only in broad terms, for the texts examined here admit no more exacting analysis. Nevertheless, these views highlight some important distinctions and issues in Jacobi’s views and in Hegel’s critique of Jacobi. The relevant theses are three: 1. Knowledge of an object involves no syllogism, the immediate object of conscious awareness is a mental representation, this representation is produced by an extant object, and this object is in this sense the mediate and ultimate object of consciousness. On this view, knowledge is ‘immediate’ in the sense of involving no inference, although it is ‘mediated’ in the sense that it involves representations as intermediaries in our awareness of objects. Locke’s (Essay, 1.2.1, 1.2.8–9) representational account of perceptual knowledge is of this kind. 2. Awareness of objects is ‘direct’ in the sense that objects themselves (and not intervening representations) are objects of awareness, although knowledge of objects requires some kind of representation in order to identify the object by classifying it under that representation. On this view, the awareness of an object is ‘immediate’ in two senses; it requires neither inference nor intervening mental representations. Nonetheless, on this view awareness of an object is not simple, because some kind of use of representations is required to identify an object and so to know that object. Thomas Reid’s theory of perceptual knowledge is an example of this kind of view. Reid (Essays, 2.14, 2.21) repudiated Locke’s representational account of knowledge and held that we perceive objects themselves, without any intervening ‘ideas’, yet also insisted that there is a conceptual and propositional aspect to perceptual knowledge. Below I shall show that, although Jacobi occasionally speaks like Reid of a propositional aspect in perceptual knowledge, on the whole he does and must repudiate such an account.6 3. Knowledge of objects involves no inference and involves no representations, neither as intermediaries in awareness nor for identification. Pure, direct intuition suffices for knowledge. Russell’s (1911, 1913) doctrine of ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ is an example of this view. Such a view is also a typical presupposition of Modern and 20th Century empiricist accounts of concept acquisition (cf. Turnbull 1959). Russell, of course, would never countenance God as an object of direct acquaintance, as Jacobi contends He is, but this reflects a difference in ontology, not 6

On Jacobi’s relation to Reid, see Kuehn (1987), 158–66.

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epistemology. One cardinal defect of intuitionism or aconceptual acquaintance – as Hegel makes unmistakably clear – is that it cannot sort tenable from untenable ontologies or objects of (alleged) knowledge. Jacobi expressly denied the first Lockean thesis that perception is indirect because it is mediated by mental representations. He insisted that such a theory of perception leads directly to idealism. In order to avoid this danger he maintained a radical direct realism.7 With regard to the second and third theses, Jacobi’s texts are ambiguous; hence these two theses are important for analysing Hegel’s critique of Jacobi’s views. 96 HEGEL’S CRITIQUE OF ‘IMMEDIATE KNOWLEDGE’: I. In Enz. §70 Hegel undertakes a direct, if obscure, critique of Jacobi’s conception of ‘immediate knowledge’: The contention of [Jacobi’s] standpoint is, namely, that neither the idea as a mere subjective thought, nor merely a being for itself, is the truth; – being merely for itself, a being not of the idea, is the sensible, finite being of the world. Hence it is immediately contended that the idea only as mediated by being and vice versa, being only as mediated by the idea, is the truth. The thesis of immediate knowledge rightly wants, not indeterminate, empty immediacy, abstract being or pure unity for itself, but rather the unity of the idea with being. But it is thoughtless not to see that the unity of different determinations is not merely purely immediate, i.e., utterly indeterminate and empty unity, but that even in [the unity sought by immediate knowledge] it is posited that the one determination has truth only through the other. … That the determination of mediation is contained in this very immediacy itself, is pointed out here as a fact …. (Enz. §70)

Hegel’s aim to show that putative ‘immediate’ knowledge is in fact mediated is as powerful a criticism of immediate knowledge as possible – if his objection can be understood. Two difficulties in understanding Hegel’s objection are these: First, what does ‘idea’ mean here? Is it to be taken in a subjective or an objective sense? Second, what kind of ‘unity’ of idea and being does Hegel mean to point out? There are at least three possible interpretations of Hegel’s objection, each based on different answers to these two questions. 1. If Hegel’s phrase ‘the idea as a merely subjective thought’ is stressed and accordingly if the meaning of ‘idea’ is derived from the preceding section (Enz. §69) and through that from Enz. §64, then Hegel’s use of the term ‘idea’ 7 Cf. DH 34, 58, 108, 143, 175, 176, 208–209, 230–231, 283, and Jacobi’s letter to Bouterwek (8 Jan. 1804): ‘The third between the knowing subject and the things to be known, assumed since Locke, was first fundamentally removed by me, so far as I know’ (Jacobi 1868, 64). Jacobi claims this originality six years after having in his conversation with Humboldt credited it to Reid (see n. 47). This, too, speaks poorly of his intellectual rigour.

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in this passage has a general epistemological sense of a representation.8 On this interpretation, Hegel contends that to know something is to recognise something as an extant correlate of the content of a representation. Such a contention, along the lines of the second thesis stated above (§92), that ‘immediate knowledge’ consists in the correspondence of a representation with an object, is to be found in Jacobi’s writings: This leads to the concept of an immediate certainty, which not only requires no proof, but downright excludes all proof, and is solely the representation itself which corresponds with the represented thing (and therefore has its ground in itself). (SB 1:210)

Against this thesis Hegel’s charge is fully just, that such knowledge is not ‘immediate’ simply because it eschews syllogism. Because this kind of knowledge unites two factors, an object and a representation, such knowledge is in this way and in this sense mediated; it is thoughtless of Jacobi not to see this.9 Jacobi, no doubt, would try to evade this criticism through an ambiguity. He contends, even though he uses words like ‘God’, ‘omnipotence’, ‘provi8 In Enz. §64 Hegel states, ‘What is known by this immediate knowledge, that the infinite, eternal, God, which is represented by us, also exists, –that the certainty of its being is immediately and inseparably connected in consciousness with this representation’. In Enz. §69 he states, ‘The previously cited (§64) transition from the subjective idea to being is the main point of interest for the standpoint of immediate knowledge, which it maintains as an original, unmediated connection’. One might object that Hegel’s talk here about the idea as a subjective thought, etc., stems from his confrontation with Schelling (cf. VGP 3:420/H&S 3:512) and that this reveals that Hegel here attempts to understand Jacobi’s intuitionism on the model of Schelling’s ‘intellectual intuitions’, a subordination Jacobi would strongly protest (cf. ‘Brief an Fichte’, op. cit.). The relation between Jacobi and Schelling cannot be discussed here. It is important to note, however, that the question of how appropriate is Hegel’s formulation of the issue arises also in his analysis of Schelling. Here I attempt to settle this question only in connection with Jacobi. 9 Although the ontological argument for God sets the context for Jacobi’s ‘immediate knowledge’ of God, one should distinguish between them carefully – more so than Hegel does in Enz. §76, where he says of both Descartes and Jacobi that they insist on ‘the inseparability of the representation of God and of God’s existence, so that [the representation of God’s existence] is contained in the representation of God itself … so that [God’s existence] is necessary and eternal’. Hegel’s formulation of this point is sufficiently abstract nearly to describe both Descartes’s and Jacobi’s positions. But if one asks what his expression means, their views must be considered more closely, and upon closer examination the differences between them are apparent. Descartes maintains a representational account of perception and thought (per Thesis 1, §95) and seeks to demonstrate the existence of God, whereas Jacobi sought to reject both representational accounts of perception and knowledge as well as knowledge by means of proofs. (On Descartes’s account of knowledge of God, see HER, 20–34.) Hegel appears more sensitive to the differences between Descartes and Jacobi in his review of the third volume of Jacobi’s Werke, where he remarks that Jacobi’s doctrine of immediate knowledge stands on the place earlier occupied by the ontological argument (MM 4:437; emphasis added). I leave aside Hegel’s other remarks about Descartes in ‘The Third Attitude’ because they unilluminating.

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dence’ and the like,10 many of which are plainly descriptive terms, that absolutely no representation is required for ‘immediate knowledge’ (DH 34, 58, 175). Jacobi appears to claim that the kind of ‘immediate knowledge’ he intends is unconditioned by anything other than the existence of the subject and object of knowledge. He reasons that we are born human; humans are rational beings. Since reason (as Jacobi came to say) is a capacity for immediate knowledge, we are capable without further ado of immediately knowing God, the world, values and our own bodies. Accordingly, ‘immediate knowledge’ of an object depends solely upon the existence of the subject and the object and is utterly unaffected by anything else.11 If Jacobi’s doctrine of ‘immediate knowledge’ is restricted to the third of the theses stated above (§92), then this interpretation of Hegel’s objection commits a petitio principii by relying upon an epistemological sense of ‘idea’. Can Hegel avoid this petitio against Jacobi? A second interpretation of Hegel’s objection offers just this prospect. 2. In view of some of his earlier remarks, I suggest that Hegel’s objection in Enz. §70 turns on a quite general question concerning ‘knowledge by acquaintance’: How can one, simply by an immediate, direct, intuitive relation to an object, determine the object’s character or kind? For example, how can Jacobi determine that God, rather than a misidentified tree or a mauvais genie, is immediately present to him? Hegel’s implicit answer to this question is that without using some kind of representation, some kind of classification, such crucial cognitive determinations (specifications, classifications) are impossible. Jacobi contends that, Hegel’s questions not withstanding, we can immediately identify the objects of our knowledge. Against this contention Hegel directs his remarks that the content of any assertion or position, despite its apparent ‘immediacy’, is comprehensible only due to a variety of mediations, including maturation, education, reflection or repetition (Enz. §§66, 67). Hegel notes that a mathematician is ‘immediately’ aware of many solutions to mathematical equations, though only because of long practice at mathematics. Accordingly, Jacobi’s supposed ‘immediate knowledge’ also has its presuppositions and conditions. This construal of Hegel’s objection may at first appear indirect and weak, merely ad hominem. At the very least Jacobi owes us an answer to the question, why presumed instances of ‘immediate knowledge’, for example, that ‘reason’ is distinct from ‘understanding’, or that reason is the capacity for supersensible knowledge, were at first unclear to him and only became clear 10 DH 46, 56, 58, 62, 77, 230–1; cf. „Über die Unzertrenlichkeit des Begriffs der Freiheit und Vorsehung von dem Begriff der Vernunft“ (Werke 2:311–23, passim.) and „Von den Göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung“ (Werke 3:247–462, passim.). 11 Clearest on this point, perhaps, is Humboldt’s (1916, 14:61) report of Jacobi’s own account of his view from 1 and 4 Nov. 1788.

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to him after several years (DH 5–11, cf. SB 2:248). Is the presumed ‘immediacy’ of this knowledge credible in view of this admitted connection between ‘immediate’ knowledge and time, a time which doubtless contained much reflection and reconsideration by Jacobi? Jacobi’s claim that ‘immediate knowledge’ is inexplicable (DH 106, SB 272) hardly supplements his view; in the present context this claim would amount merely to a dodge to escape any attempt to judge the soundness of his appeal to allegedly ‘immediate’ knowledge of important truths or beings. A deeper point can be found in Hegel’s objection, however. Although Hegel’s most explicit discussion of this point is not in the Vorbegriff, and so cannot be detailed here,12 is there any such knowledge? Insofar as the doctrine of ‘immediate knowledge’ concerns common, if also religious, objects or beings, which according to Jacobi it certainly does, then there should be universal agreement about these matters of (alleged) fact (Enz. §72). Yet there is no such universal agreement, and without considerable philosophical education one wouldn’t even understand Jacobi’s contention. Hegel’s appeal to the cultural variability of religious belief (Enz. §72) and to the necessity of education (Enz. §§66, 67, 67R) against Jacobi makes exactly the right point: An object is only known insofar as it is identified as the object that it is. And such identification of objects requires a representational system of classification (in the widest sense) and accordingly excludes Jacobi’s presumed cognitive ‘immediacy’. Such a system is one of one’s main acquisitions through being raised within a culture, and differences amongst these representational systems are largely responsible for many of the differences of opinion about those objects Jacobi claims we know ‘immediately’. This may appear to be a needlessly indirect way of making the point, but it has two advantages in arguing against Jacobi. First, it avoids epistemological subtleties which would allow Jacobi to equivocate. Jacobi’s grasp of epistemology is no more firm than his admittedly weak grasp of metaphysics (SB 1:161). Second, Jacobi cannot escape this objection by cavilling, for he cannot deny his being a member of his culture and he cannot deny his views having been formed in that culture, without utterly undermining his own credibility. Like Hamann’s other student, Kierkegaard, Jacobi’s view of faith is only plau12

The most pertinent text is chapter I of the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, ‘SenseCertainty’. While the dialectic of the ‘here’ may not befit the Godhead, the dialectic of the ‘now’ meets the point directly: What kind of knowledge of God would someone have, if s/he could not discern whether what is now immediately present is God and then (on another occasion) the devil or a tree spirit? This problem bears comparison with the most fundamental flaw of Descartes’ attempt to outwit the mauvais genie, namely: that for all Descartes does or can show, all of his alleged innate ideas of simple natures may have been implanted into his mind by the mauvais genie rather than by God. This would leave all of Descartes’ beliefs and reasoning intact, whilst being incorrigibly false (HER 23–30).

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sible and would only be conceived after historical and rational criticism of religion had seriously threatened religious faith. Hegel’s objection is thus sound and decisive. Hegel’s staunch insistence upon the role of representations in knowledge and on the social context of individual subjects, his vindication of Thesis 2 over Thesis 3 (from §92), shows how far he stands not only from Jacobi’s intuitionism but also from the Modern empiricist tradition, or the contemporary philosophical trade in ‘intuitions’. 3. The ambiguity noted above concerning the meaning of ‘idea’ in Enz. §70 allows yet another reconstruction of Hegel’s objection to Jacobi’s doctrine. In Hegel’s own use of the term ‘idea’ does not designate mental representations, but rather an ontological structure of the world (such as natural kinds or laws of nature).13 A trace of this Hegelian usage appears in the passage under discussion: ‘– being merely for itself, a being not of the idea, is the sensible, finite being of the world’ (Enz. §70). If ‘idea’ here has the general ontological sense of a characteristic or structure of the world, then Hegel appeals to an Aristotelian thesis against Jacobi, namely that anything extant must be a determinate something. That is, it must unite two constitutive aspects, as extant ‘this’ and as a determinate ‘such’: ‘the idea only as mediated by being and vice versa, being only as mediated by the idea, is the truth’ (Enz. §70). According to this Thesis any object is ‘mediated’ in the sense that it must unite at least two aspects within itself, as an extant instance of one or another kind of quality or feature. Thus any known object is complex or ‘mediated’ because it consists in at least two aspects. Hegel contends that ‘mediated’ objects of knowledge require a ‘mediated’ form of knowledge (Enz. §74).14 If Hegel were right, that any object of knowledge, due to its complexity, requires a ‘mediated’ form of knowledge, then ‘immediate knowledge’ would be utterly impossible. Unfortunately, Hegel’s contention is hardly obvious. Thus this third, ontological interpretation of Hegel’s objection to Jacobi in Enz. §70 fails. However, the main point of this version of Hegel’s objection is developed in a subsequent passage.

13 ‘Now insofar as the expression idea is reserved for the objective or real concept and is distinguished from the [subjective] concept, even more so from the mere representation …’ (WdL II, 12:174.1–3). 14 ‘Such insight, because the content brings mediation with it, is knowledge which contains mediation’ (Enz. §74). The ‘content’ discussed in this passage are extra-mental objects, following Jacobi’s contention that, e.g., God is immanent in consciousness (DH 119). Although I have taken this thesis from a subsequent section, the ontological interpretation of ‘idea’ in Enz. §70 requires that this thesis is implicit here, too. Otherwise Hegel’s objection would have no logical and hence no critical bearing on Jacobi’s position.

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97 HEGEL’S CRITIQUE OF ‘IMMEDIATE KNOWLEDGE’: II. 97.1 Hegel develops the issue of the ‘mediation’ inherent in known objects and the cognitive ‘mediation’ this (purportedly) requires in this passage: The general nature of the form of immediacy must still be briefly presented. It is namely this form itself, because it is one-sided, which makes its content one-sided and thus finite. It gives the universal the one-sidedness of an abstraction, so that God becomes an indeterminate being …. It gives the particular the determination to be, to relate to itself. But the particular rather is related to something other outside of itself; through the form [of immediacy] the finite is posited as absolute. … Only the insight that [the particular] is not self-sufficient, but rather mediated through an other, demotes it to its [proper] finitude and untruth. Such insight, because the content brings mediation with it, is knowledge which contains mediation. … That understanding [i.e., Jacobi’s], which meant to dissociate itself from finite knowledge, from the identity of the understanding of metaphysics and the Enlightenment, itself immediately makes this immediacy, that is, abstract self-relation, abstract identity, into its principle and criterion of truth. (Enz. §74)

In this objection to Jacobi Hegel plainly presumes the validity of his own ontology. Hegel’s ontology cannot be detailed here, much less defended, but enough may be said about it to see how several points he makes about Jacobi’s views follow from it. Hegel’s terms ‘self-relation’ and ‘relation to another’, ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’, ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’, are used to formulate his debate with ontological atomism. Atomistic ontologies consist of objects whose identity conditions are mutually independent and which are at most only externally related. The basic model of Hegel’s ontology is a thorough (moderate, molecular) ontological holism. According to Hegel, the causal characteristics of things are partially constitutive of their identity conditions and the individual properties of things obtain only as members of contrastive sets of properties. Hence the causal interdependence of particulars, as well as similarities and differences of their properties, belie the mutual interdependence of their identity conditions. According to Hegel, particular sensible things are grounded only in the whole world-system, because their characteristics obtain only in and through contrast with opposed characteristics of other things and because they are generated, sustained, changed and corrupted through their causal interactions with other things. Conversely, the (Hegelian) concept (Begriff), as the principle of the constitution of characteristics through contrast, obtains only in and as the interconnection of things and their properties in the world. On Hegel’s view, the world-system as a whole is ‘infinite’ in the sense that it is all that there is; it is all-encompassing. The ‘idea’ and ‘spirit’ are to be understood as further (historical and normative) specifications of this one basic onto-

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logical structure (HER, 140–5). Three points pertaining to Hegel’s assessment and critique of Jacobi may be elucidated on this basis. 97.2 The conceptual connection between mutually opposed characteristics of things is ‘immediate’ in a way made evident by Hegel’s analysis of Jacobi’s doctrine. Syllogisms consist of (at least) three terms, where the two ‘extremes’ are mediated by an intervening ‘middle’ term (cf. Enz. §64R). Following a hint in Jacobi’s repudiation of syllogistic mediation, on Hegel’s view the conceptual connection between opposed pairs of characteristics is also ‘immediate’ in the sense that their connection requires no mediating middle term. Note that Hegel expressly uses the term ‘immediate’ to describe this relation in presenting his basic ontology in the Phenomenology of Spirit.15 By the same token, this connection is equally well ‘mediated’ in exactly the sense Hegel uses against Jacobi in Enz. §70: ‘… the unity of different determinations is not merely purely immediate, … the one determination has truth only through the other’. Two-termed relations are relations of mutual mediation – also in Jacobi’s case of any (purported) subject and object of immediate knowledge. Hegel’s thesis that the characteristics of things obtain only through their mutual contrast leads directly to his doctrine of ‘concrete identity’, namely, that the identity conditions of one thing are determinate and can be determined only in connection with the identity conditions of other things. Hegel opposes this conception of identity to the more common conception of identity, that the identity conditions of a thing can be given singly and in isolation from other things, which Hegel calls ‘abstract identity’. According to Hegel, this conception of identity is basic to traditional metaphysics; because Jacobi had not repudiated this view of identity (cf. DH 37, 74; SB 1:169–70), he failed to overcome that tradition (Enz. §74). Hegel claims to have found in his critique of Jacobi a new way of thinking immediacy and mediation together (Enz. §§65, 65R, 70, 75) which he employs in the Phenomenology of Spirit and in the Logic. That Jacobi’s stress upon immediacy led to Hegel’s development of this procedure is no small philosophical service, at least in Hegel’s view.16 15 Since on Hegel’s view something subsists only through its contrast with or ‘opposition to’ other things, each thing ‘is the opposite of an opposite, or the other is immediately in it’ (PhdG, 9:98.36–7/¶160). 16 I speak here of Jacobi’s views ‘leading’ to Hegel’s in Hegel’s way of understanding such a process, where the process is one of absolute spirit’s self-development, and where this development needn’t require that Hegel was consciously influenced by Jacobi’s view. It is this point of view which Hegel adopts in assessing a philosopher’s contributions to the history of philosophy, and so this point of view is the relevant one for determining Hegel’s assessment of Jacobi’s contributions. Jacobi may have had an inkling of Hegel’s view, for his extracts from Jordan Bruno von Nola in the first Appendix to the Letters on Spinoza contain the following passages: ‘To him who has followed our observations up to now, Heraclitus’s assertion of the thoroughgoing coincidence of opposition in nature, which contains all contradictions, but also re-

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97.3 If Hegel were right that extant things and their features are mutually interrelated in the way he holds, then there would be a good sense for his claim against Jacobi that mediated objects require a mediated kind of cognition. If things are mutually interrelated in Hegel’s way, then in order to determine the properties of one thing and so to determine the content of one’s knowledge of that thing, one must articulate the connections between that thing and other things. Such articulation would require at the very least comparisons, and so any merely ‘immediate’ relation to an object would not suffice to know that object. Hegel states: Only the insight that [the particular] is not self-sufficient, but rather mediated through an other, demotes it to its [proper] finitude and untruth. Such insight, because the content brings mediation with it, is knowledge which contains mediation. (Enz. §74)

Thus if Hegel’s ontological holism were true, ‘immediate knowledge’ would be utterly impossible. 97.4 The reasoning just rehearsed also shows why Jacobi’s retreat to the Altar of the Unknown God is no accident (Enz. §73; cf. SB 1:245). Due to his attempt to forego any and every mediation, Jacobi ultimately must be incapable of articulating a single characteristic of God, and so must restrict himself to speaking of ‘the highest being’ (Enz. §63R), if even this. These three points are interesting, but plainly presuppose Hegel’s own ontology. Thus Jacobi may rejoin that Hegel commits a petitio principii .

solves them in unity and truth, cannot be an affront’ (SB 243–4). ‘The love of the one is the hate of the other. Thus in the substance and innermost ground of things hate and love, friendship and strife, are one and the same. As the principle, the concept of diverse and mutually destructive (sich einander aufhebender) objects, is just one principle of knowledge, so the principle of diverse and mutually destructive actual things, is likewise only one principle of being’ (SB 244). ‘In order to drive into the deepest secrets of nature one must never tire of researching the opposed and conflicting extreme ends of things, the maximum and minimum. To find the point of unification is not the greatest; rather, to develop that point out of its opposite: that is the particular and deepest secret of art. The highest good, the highest perfection and bliss, rest on the unity which the whole encompasses’ (SB 245). These statements are remarkable from Hegel’s perspective, but their significance should not be overstated. Although Jacobi frequently quoted other philosophers in order to present his own beliefs, his views of Reid and Hume shows that his understanding of his sources is not always trustworthy. These passages are much more striking in post-Hegelian retrospect than within their original context; Jacobi neither wrote nor justified these statements, he only used them. (Bruno’s writings were familiar to Hegel; VGP 3:22–39/H&S 3:119–37.)

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98 HEGEL’S CRITIQUE OF ‘IMMEDIATE KNOWLEDGE’: III. 98.1 In Enz. §75 Hegel avoids petitio principii against Jacobi by propounding an internal critique of Jacobi’s doctrine: The assessment of this third position, proposed as the truth about thought, must be taken up only in a way which this standpoint itself provides and countenances. It is hereby pointed out as factually false that there is an immediate kind of knowledge, a knowledge lacking mediation, whether with an other or with itself. Similarly it is declared as factual untruth that thought proceeds only with determinations mediated through other finite and conditioned [determinations] and that mediation [i.e., discursive thought] destroys itself in these mediations. Logic itself and the whole of philosophy is the example of the fact of such knowledge. (Enz. §75)

At first glance this objection is astounding. The first sentence stresses that the assessment of a position must be internal and recalls Hegel’s previous reminders that ‘immediate knowledge is asserted only as a fact’ (Enz. §65) and that ‘immediate knowledge should be taken as a fact’ (Enz. §66). How then could a deliberate petitio principii count as internal critique? The soundness of this objection is attributable, not to Hegel’s greatness (or, outlandishness), but to the weakness of Jacobi’s position. If there were ‘immediate knowledge’, as Jacobi but not Hegel presumes, then the two alleged facts Hegel here asserts would be as evident and as well justified as any claim to immediate knowledge made by Jacobi. Yet Hegel’s assertions directly entail that there is no ‘immediate knowledge’ at all. It is already a very strong criticism to show that the principles of a theory of knowledge are unknowable in accord with that theory, as Kant argued against Hume, and Hegel against Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. This criticism of Jacobi goes further to show that according to the principle of ‘immediate knowledge’ it is possible to know immediately that the principle of ‘immediate knowledge’ is false! Hegel’s objection is a sound reductio ad absurdum formulated as a reflexive inconsistency. 98.2 Of course it is also possible to claim, in accord with the principle of ‘immediate knowledge’, that there is ‘immediate knowledge’. It all depends on what one asserts. At this point a second aspect of this objection becomes apparent. Hegel’s two assertions are the most outstanding examples of a general problem: as a merely formal doctrine, the principle of ‘immediate knowledge’ sets absolutely no limits on the possible content of a state of awareness or of an assertion (Enz. §74). Thus the range of alleged ‘immediately known’ truths may contain utterly irreconcilable claims, whether in ethics (Enz. §§72, 74), in religion (Enz. §§72, 74) or in perceptual experience (Enz. §76). However, Hegel notes in another connection, the claim that an assertion reports the ‘immediate’ contents of one’s consciousness is a claim to justify

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one’s assertion as being true because it is ‘immediate’.17 Principles of justification are supposed to discriminate between known and unknown claims by discriminating between warranted and unwarranted (or justified and unjustified) claims. However, any principle of justification which equally warrants any claim and its negation is no principle of justification whatsoever, and indeed (and in principle), Jacobi’s principle of immediate knowledge can warrant any claim and its negation! Hegel’s objection is also a sound reductio ad absurdum deriving a contradiction at the object-level (based upon the obvious fact of disagreement) which reflects on the meta-level epistemic principle. If Jacobi were to stone-wall and deny that there is disagreement, this denial could serve as the disputed proposition and Hegel’s counter-argument would still go through. 98.3 There is yet a third aspect to Hegel’s objection. Any attempt to evaluate or reconcile diverse and conflicting claims would directly introduce mediation and destroy the intended ‘immediacy’ of knowledge. This further aspect of Hegel’s objection perhaps is not a direct refutation of Jacobi’s doctrine, for it doesn’t show that ‘immediate knowledge’ is impossible. But this phase of his objection suffices to show that, despite its feeling of certainty, alleged ‘immediate knowledge’ does not, pace Jacobi, guarantee the truth of its claims.18 Jacobi’s principle fails to distinguish between genuine insight and mere dogmatic conviction. ‘Immediate knowledge’ is thus a highly problematic last epistemological refuge (cf. Enz. §77). The significance of this point can be appreciated by setting it in a broader context. Jacobi whole-heartedly adopted the first part of Kant’s dictum, that concepts without intuitions are empty (KdrV B75/A51), but neglected the second, that intuitions without concepts are blind (DH 31–2). The third phase of Hegel’s objection in Enz. §75 show that incompatible claims, insofar as they remain mere claims, don’t readily come to agreement. Although Jacobi knew that there are incompatible opinions, his writings fail to recognise how serious a problem this is, especially for his own position. His best presentation of this problem and his best solution to it are expressed thus: Men’s ways of representing (Vorstellungsarten) differ, and not everyone sees the same in things. According to my way of representing, in the being composed of soul and body, in the life thus endlessly multiplied by separation and combination, the free hand of an all-sufficient giver is visible, I would say, so much so that one can touch it. (DH 273; cf. 97, SB 1:72, 2:156)

17

Hegel notes this in connection with conscience theories of ethics (PhdG, 9:333–4, 336–7, 338–9/¶¶618–9, 624–5, 629–30), which display a strictly analogous intuitionism. 18 Jacobi claims that ‘… perception of the actual and the feeling of truth … are one and the same thing’ (DH 232–3).

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The problem with this is not only Jacobi’s concession that we inevitably rely upon modes of representing, indeed often on different modes of representing, but more importantly the exhibition that his ultimate appeal can only be rhetorical, to exhort us to see things his way. If we try it and yet disagree, what then? Jacobi’s contention, that truth feels different from error (cf. DH 57, 106, 232–3) doesn’t at all underwrite this method of reaching agreement. As Hegel says elsewhere, following Sextus Empiricus (AL 1.315, cf. 2.464), ‘one bare assurance is worth as much as another’ (PhdG, 9:55.23–24/¶76). At the end of the Preface to the Phenomenology Hegel elaborates: Insofar as each calls on feeling, on his inner oracle, he is finished with him who disagrees; he must declare that he has nothing more to say to him who in himself doesn’t find or feel the same; – in other words, he tramples the roots of humanity under foot. For the nature of man is to press forward towards agreement with others, and to find his existence only in the achieved community of consciousness. (PhdG, 9:47.34–48.2/¶69)

Here Hegel further characterises the importance of mutual recognition and its significance for rational justification, examined above (§§83–91). Now in his discussion of his highly esteemed ‘principle of honour’ Jacobi grants that he’s prepared to deny precisely the human communality Hegel stressed: [If one] disavows in any decisive way the feeling of honour, if he shows that carries inner shame, or that he can no longer feel self respect, then we throw him away mercilessly, he is dung under our feet. (SB 2:30; cf. DH 62)

To such an inclination Hegel quite justifiably retorts: There is nothing quicker nor more convenient than to have to make the mere assurance, that I find a content in my consciousness with the certainty of its truth and that therefore this certainty doesn’t belong to me as a particular subject, but rather to the nature of spirit itself. (Enz. §71R)

To this Hegel could have added: nothing is more dangerous! Of course both authors have employed figures of speech, but these figures are revealing. Jacobi himself doubtlessly had no tendency toward violence, but his shocking and irresponsible expression shows how neigh is physical violence when rational communication and judgment fail to provide reconciliation, or at least understanding. The difficulty for Jacobi’s view of ‘immediate knowledge’ is that in principle it excludes any attempt to assess the legitimacy of its claims. The assessment or reconciliation of conflicting claims, however, is an urgent priority of our collective, public life. This is one reason for Hegel’s drive toward presuppositionlessness, not as a Quixotic attempt to proceed from utterly nothing on the basis of utterly nothing, but to ground the possibility of

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thorough, constructive self-criticism (cf. Enz. §§41Z, 78; PhdG, 9:55–6, 133–4/ ¶¶76–8, 234–5). If he, Kant and Jacobi are right, that ordinary ‘mediate’ knowledge has serious limits, then we should hope there is a credible alternative both to that and to Jacobi’s ‘immediate knowledge’ for Hegel to develop (cf. Enz. §§65, 65R, 70, 75). 99 SOME PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HEGEL’S CRITIQUE OF JACOBI’S INTUITIONISM. Jacobi unequivocally rejected both scepticism and rational cognition – excepting in the vacuous, merely nominal sense he later gave to the term ‘reason’ as a label for his preferred brand of aconceptual intuitionism. However, Jacobi’s salto mortale solves absolutely no problems at all. Hegel recognised that it is very much to Jacobi’s credit that he rejected scepticism, and that by criticising typical forms of deductive and causal reasoning as he did, Jacobi – like Richard Rorty, the later Feyerabend or Derrida – threw down the gauntlet to philosophers to provide a more thorough critique of reason and rational justification than Kant had provided. Hegel’s philosophy accepts that challenge. Indeed, I shall continue to argue that Hegel’s philosophy meets it! Hegel’s critique of Jacobi’s aconceptual intuitionism poses fundamental problems for all forms of aconceptual intuitionism. Hence it is no surprise that Hegel also rejected Schelling’s aconceptual, intellectual intuitionism (above, §§37–42), despite its favour amongst many of Hegel’s declared advocates – and critics. Hegel’s criticisms of Jacobi’s intuitionism are unlikely to impress or even to interest contemporary epistemologists. However, Hegel’s success in criticising such a minimal, even incohate view as Jacobi’s strictly internally is subtle, shrewd and insightful, in ways which reveal how Hegel’s critique of aconceptual intuitionism also raises important points about justification, criteria of justification and epistemology which must be addressed by any cogent philosophy. ‘Intuitionism’ – if not structured by a very definite constructive procedure or method of justification, as in intuitionist mathematics or logic – cannot distinguish in any principled or reliable way between which claims are, and which are not, justified, accurate or credible. In principle, such unstructured ‘intuitionism’ cannot distinguish in any principled or reliable way between which claims are, and which are not, true, nor even approximate. In principle, such unstructured intuitionism provides no resources for addressing the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion. In principle, unstructured intuitionism provides no resources to avoid or resolve petitio principii. Unstructured intuitionism provides no cogent epistemology at all.

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Instead, it is the abdication of epistemology, and of cognitive responsibility. If instead of claiming to appeal to ‘intuitions’, if contemporary philosophers admitted to working on hunches, much would be gained for clarity, due modesty and more constructively solving problems (cf. Perlmutter 1998). Kant had excellent reasons to introduce and articulate a ‘changed manner of thinking’ (KdrV, Bxviii–xix), because he realised that mere conceptual analysis is insufficient to address any substantive philosophical issues, and because he realised that developing a tenable, cogent theory of human knowledge requires identifying, cataloguing and assessing our actual cognitive capacities – and their attendant incapacities – and using these guides to specify the relevant scope and limits of various kinds of legitimate and illegitimate cognitive judgments. These methodological aspects of Kant’s Critical philosophy – of Kant’s Critique of reason throughout the three Critiques, together with the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and the Metaphysics of Morals (above, §§2–3) – are likewise central to Hegel’s philosophy, for reasons considered in Parts I and II, and for further reasons to be examined in this Part III. Hegel’s critique of unstructured intuitionism raise quite general issues about the legitimate roles and also the limits of philosophical appeals to ‘intuitions’ and to conceptual analysis, and how philosophers’ ‘intuitions’ or conceptual analyses may be linked – or may fail to be linked – to relevant domains of inquiry and to intellectual and cultural history more broadly. Between ‘intuitions’ or basic data (of whatever sort) and propositions, there is an enormous, fundamental role for rational judgment, and so for a cogent Critical account of rational judgment.19 Taking ‘intuitions’ or one’s preferred conceptual ‘analyses’ at face value threatens to result in historicist relativism, despite the protestations of those who insist upon the cogency or relevance of their ‘intuitions’ or their preferred ‘analysis’. How so is a central topic of the following chapter 15.

19

Below (§119) I show why ‘stances’ cannot substitute for cogent judgment.

CHAPTER 15

Analytic Philosophy and the Long Tail of Scientia: Hegel and the Historicity of Philosophy 100

INTRODUCTION.

Unresolved and often ill-understood issues of both substance and method have divided Hegelian philosophy from analytic philosophy since the latter’s inception early in the Twentieth Century. Here I focus on one persisting strand of Cartesianism: the demand for infallibilist justification, even in empirical domains. Used in the Mediaeval period as their Latin counterpart to Aristotle’s episteme, to designate the highest possible form of knowledge, considered to be perfect, infallible, demonstrative knowledge of necessary truths, the term was not univocal; there were a host of distinctive theories of knowledge, but their forms of demonstration drew upon Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (Grellard 2011); not only his Prior Analytics. Only upon Tempier’s condemnation of neo-Aristotelian heresies in March 1277 were the demands upon scientia elevated to deductivist Infallibilism by the demand to demonstrate the impossibility of all logically possible alternatives to what is (claimed to be) known. Few epistemologists now affirm such stringent standards of justification, whether regarding empirical knowledge or philosophical accounts of empirical knowledge. Nevertheless, substantive commitment to infallibilism remains widespread, not only amongst critics of fallibilist accounts of empirical justification, but in the wide-spread use of mere logical possibilities as (purported) counter-examples to an otherwise credible form or instance of cognitive justification. Examining these issues is not only aided by careful philosophical history, examining these issues helps to highlight the crucial roles of historical philosophy in formulating, assessing and justifying any credible contemporary philosophical view. Restricting discussion to epistemology and history and philosophy of science, I shall examine some important though neglected links between philosophical method, rational justification and philosophical history. 101 WHY BOTHER WITH PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY? I begin indirectly, with this question: What reasons favour ahistorical philos-

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ophy? Two are familiar to me. One is triumphalist: according to many prominent analytical philosophers, philosophical ‘analysis’ (however understood) is the sole legitimate philosophical technique and province; other philosophical approaches are bankrupt.1 Because very few if any historical philosophers used such ‘analytic’ methods, most history of philosophy is philosophically irrelevant. The second reason formalist: many prominent analytical philosophers hold that genuine philosophical understanding and insight is only possible to the extent that issues and terminology can be rigorously defined and analysed formally and that philosophical justification requires logical deduction. In its extreme form, formalism rejects not only the history of philosophy, but all non-formal substantive domains of philosophy. More generous forms of formalism welcome all substantive and historical domains of philosophy, though only to the extent that they admit suitably rigorous formalisation. Now I do not claim that all analytical philosophers fall into one of these groups; here I examine two tendencies characteristic of those philosophers who eschew the philosophical importance of philosophy’s history. Both reasons favouring ahistorical philosophy are heirs to Hume’s (En §4) Verification Empiricism, according to which the only propositions which can be justified a priori are analytic, whereas synthetic propositions can only be justified, if at all, empirically. Generally speaking, ahistorical philosophers – whether broadly analytic or specifically formalist – assign synthetic propositions either to commonsense or to the empirical sciences, retaining for philosophy only the a priori domain of analytic propositions and their philosophical analysis.2 Starting in the 1950s this overt empiricism was subject to sustained criticism by analytic philosophers. Nevertheless, the presumption that rational justification requires strict deduction remains very influential in mainstream analytic philosophy. In this regard both empiricists and many self-styled postempiricists remain committed to the post-1277 rationalist ideal of scientia, according to which any claim can be justified only by deducing it logically from some set of rationally acceptable and accepted first principles. Commitment to the infallibilist, deductivist ideal of scientia is an enduring legacy of 1

Likewise, according to many prominent phenomenologists, Husserlian ‘phenomenology’ is the sole legitimate philosophical technique and province; other philosophical approaches are bankrupt. I do not pursue these issues here; much more credible contributions to epistemology and philosophy of science were made by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The Humean inheritance of phenomenology is indicated by Husserl’s praise of Hume as a protophenomenologist (Ideen I, §62). Unfortunately, Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1901; Part 2, §§32–39) and his student’s dissertation on Hume (Sauer 1930) are over-confident and superficial; contrast Meinong’s (1877, 1882) two splendid Hume studies. 2 An important exception is Wittgenstein’s attempt to understand realism whilst dispensing with empiricism, in part by appeal to ‘hinge propositions’ (1969, §§337, 341, 343).

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Descartes, who first attempted to assimilate the non-formal domain of empirical knowledge to the strictures of infallibilist deductivism when attempting to outwit the possibility of global perceptual scepticism. Infallibilist deductivism can be identified as a pervasive though suppressed premiss in much contemporary philosophical reasoning. Consider first a brief example. Only by assuming infallibilist deductivism is Hume’s (En §4.2) infamous Problem of Induction a significant problem. Hume’s argument to show that inductive reasoning is circular assimilates all inductive reasoning to simple numerical induction, and presumes that the rule of induction must itself be justified deductively, which it cannot, because it is neither an analytic proposition, nor one which itself can be justified by empirical evidence, without presuming that rule in its (attempted) justification. To presume that Hume’s Problem of Induction reveals a fundamental problem for empirical science is profoundly mistaken, however fundamental this problem may be to empiricist philosophy of science. As both Francis Bacon and J.S. Mill – and many philosophers during the interim between – knew, the natural sciences have never relied upon simple numerical induction; indeed they couldn’t, in part for reasons already indicated by Aristotle when he noted that induction is insufficient for identifying essential characteristics of anything because it cannot distinguish universal accidental correlations from essential characteristics which belong to the definition or essence of something, and that complete enumerative induction (outside mathematical domains) is difficult to obtain due to controversies about what does or does not belong to the relevant group of cases.3 Likewise, the presumption that the form of induction Newton used in the Principia is simple numerical induction is profoundly mistaken. To the contrary, Newton’s methods and criteria of theoretical adequacy exceed those now current within philosophy of science (Harper 2011).4 The commitment to infallibilist deductivism still prevalent in mainstream analytic philosophy is indicated, not by express premises but by the typical use of counter-examples to refute or at least to defeat the justification of philosophical views, including philosophical accounts of empirical or specifically scientific knowledge. It is widely presumed that relevant counter-examples need only be logically possible. However, mere logical possibilities defeat justification only if justification requires strict deduction. This presumed re3 Post. An. 27b, 92b; Top. 8.2, 157a23–34. These points pertain to modern forms of inductive inference, although Aristotle’s ‘induction’ concerned, not inference, but proper identification of groups of individuals which share a common characteristic. 4 Popper (1971) is a notable exception to the then-reigning positivist orthodoxy about induction; Will (1974) develops a thorough critique of that orthodoxy. Popper’s solution to the problem of induction won him accolades among his followers though neglect from others (Musgrave 2004); Will’s penetrating critique was even more widely shunned.

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quirement of strict deduction for rational justification is a commitment to scientia.5 Let me clarify this with a third example. 102

VAN FRAASSEN’S CONSTRUCTIVE EMPIRICISM.

Bas van Fraassen’s ‘Constructive Empiricism’ distinguishes fundamentally between merely accepting a scientific theory because it is ‘empirically adequate’ and believing it to be true. ‘Empirical adequacy’ is adequacy to describe, predict, retrodict and systematise relevant empirical data. His distinction between accepting a scientific theory and believing it to be true is based on regarding a weaker belief as better justified than a stronger one, if they are based on the same evidence (etc.), where ‘stronger’ beliefs make richer claims about the relevant domain. Obviously enough, ‘… the assertion of empirical adequacy is a great deal weaker than the assertion of truth …’ (SI 69, cf. 36). Very briefly, van Fraassen argued along these lines: 1) Natural scientists accept scientific theories, hypotheses or explanations only because they are ‘empirically adequate’. 2) ‘Empirical adequacy’ is adequacy to describe, predict, retrodict and systematise the relevant empirical data. 3) Empirical adequacy is much weaker than and does not involve the (alleged) truth of any scientific theory or hypothesis. 4) The LAW OF WEAKENING: If two beliefs are based upon and are equally adequate to the same evidence, the stronger of those two beliefs is less well justified by that evidence than is the weaker (less committal) belief. 5) Scientific realism and constructive empiricism both have the same evidence base: empirical adequacy. ˆ 6) Constructive Empiricism is better justified than Scientific Realism, as an interpretation of any particular scientific theory, and as an interpretation of natural science in general. In The Scientific Image (1980; ‘SI’), van Fraassen appeals repeatedly and centrally to this ‘Law of Weakening’ to justify his Constructive Empiricism. Indeed, van Fraassen contends that this contrast in strength or weakness of belief is simply a matter of logic. In this connection he states:

5 I do not say that this suppressed premiss is found throughout analytic philosophy in its various forms, but it has been and remains very prevalent. To this tendency alone I object here; this study neither addresses nor assesses analytic philosophy as a whole.

323 … the ‘if … then’ [in English] is not correctly identified with any of the sorts of implication traditionally discussed in logical theory, for those obey the Law of Weakening: 1. If A then B; hence: if A and C then B. But our conditionals, in natural language, typically do not obey that law: 2. If the match is struck it will light; hence (?): if the match is dunked in coffee and struck, it will light; the reader will think of many other examples. The explanation of why that ‘law’ does not hold is that our conditionals carry a tacit ceteris paribus clause …. (van Fraassen SI, 114–5; underscoring added)

Note that the logical consequence of this tacit ceteris paribus clause is that the ‘Law of Weakening’ is, in principle, inapplicable to empirical explanations (ibid.). Because the ‘Law of Weakening’ holds only within systems of strict deduction, it is irrelevant to any domains which employ ceteris paribus clauses. Therefore the ‘Law of Weakening’ is irrelevant to issues about scientific explanation, because explanations employ, ineliminably, ceteris paribus clauses! Thus van Fraassen’s use of the Law of Weakening, involved in his distinction between accepting a scientific theory and believing it to be true, is based upon a deductivist-infallibilist presumption about empirical justification. This fatal flaw in van Fraassen’s analysis in The Scientific Image – that its key premiss, the Law of Weakening, is irrelevant to any and all causal-explanatory domains – has been overlooked for more than three decades. This neglect corroborates how pervasive is the model of infallibilist deductivism in mainstream analytic philosophy.6 I do not reject analytic or formal techniques in philosophy; I only protest the presumption that such techniques suffice in non-formal, substantive philosophical domains. The wide-spread presumption of infallibilist deductivism rests, I submit, upon insufficient attention to the contrast between formal and non-formal domains. Strictly speaking, formal domains are those which involve no existence postulates. Strictly speaking, the one purely formal domain is a careful reconstruction of Aristotle’s Square of Opposition (Wolff 2009). All further logical or mathematical domains involve various sorts of existence postulates. We may define ‘formal domains’ more broadly to include all formally defined logistic systems (Lewis 1930 [1970, 10]). These are many and intrinsically fascinating. The important point here was made by Lewis (MWO 298): the relevance of any logistic system to a non-formal, substantive domain rests, not upon formal considerations alone, but also on substantive considerations of how helpful the use of a specific logistic system 6

I discuss van Fraassen (2002) below, §119, and his Constructive Empiricism in Westphal (2014a, forthcoming b). For discussion of van Fraassen (2008), see Okruhlick (2009).

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may be within a non-formal, substantive domain (Westphal 2010b, §2). This point was seconded by Carnap (1950b). Deduction, within any specified logistic system, suffices for justification only within the formal domain specified by that logistic system. As classically conceived, conceptual ‘analysis’ of key terms or principles aimed to define them by providing the necessary and sufficient conditions of their use. Conceptual ‘analysis’, in this strict sense, is modelled on and pertains to formal domains. Famously, Gettier (1963) brought to a dead halt the reigning approach to epistemology, which sought a pure conceptual analysis of knowledge as justified true belief. Various repairs were attempted, but the better wisdom is that epistemology must in some way take our actual cognitive processes into account. Before considering this point more closely, note that Gettier’s result brought home points about philosophical method and strategy which followed – largely unnoticed – in the wake of two important points Carnap made in 1950. The first point Carnap made when he adopted a moderately holistic semantics in ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’ (1950b, rev. 1956). A direct consequence of Carnap’s very moderate holism in semantics – highlighted by Wick (1951) – is that because our concepts are interrelated, however indirectly, we cannot isolate philosophical problems from one another to solve or dissolve them piecemeal, because the semantics of the terms and principles involved bear on at least some other, related problems. (How far these relations may extend varies.7) The ‘divide and conquer’ approach to resolving philosophical problems central to the anti-systematic orientation of classical analytic philosophy died in principle then and there, however much philosophers continue to try to isolate their preferred problems from the rest of the field, and to proliferate ever more specialised, mutually indifferent sub-specialties. This profusion has resulted in loss of philosophical focus, which requires considering specific issues within the context of directly and indirectly related issues. The best analytic philosophers always have worked this way, though fewer may have stressed this feature of their skills and understanding. Unfortunately, as graduate training becomes ever briefly, the requisite skills, knowledge and understanding are declining markedly. The second point Carnap (1950a, 1–18) made is that pure conceptual analysis is inadequate for philosophy of science, which instead requires the ‘explication’ of key terms or concepts in use within some domain studied philosophically. The ‘explication’ of a term or principle, in this sense, aimed to provide a partial specification of its meaning or significance, for certain purposes. 7 The supposition that atomism and radical holism form an exclusive and exhaustive disjunction is false (HER, 141–5; Westphal 2003a, §§32, 34); in semantics, a wide range of ‘molecular’ options is available.

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Explications are thus both revisable and are rooted in actual usage and thus in linguistic practices, which are rooted within whatever practices make use of that term. More importantly, the criteria for adequate explication are not set simply by one’s philosophical predilections or programme; they are also set in part by the actual use of the term in question amongst relevant practitioners. Whereas ‘analysis’ is suited to strictly formal domains, ‘explication’ is suited to non-formal domains. This point is crucial both to semantics and to philosophical method. However often philosophers subsequently claimed to provide an ‘analysis’ of some term, because their chosen term is a term in use, their account of it instead counts, properly speaking, as an explication. Adopting explication as a philosophical method may preserve semantics as first philosophy, though it entails that philosophical semantics has no priority over semantics of natural language.8 Quine and his followers never got this important point (Westphal 2015b). I don’t believe Carnap himself recognised how rooting explication in terms-in-use roots explication not only in our linguistic practices, but in all of our practices, within which alone our linguistic practices can have any structure and function.9 (On this count, Brandom follows Quine rather than Carnap; see below, §§136, 137.) Carnap’s replacement of ‘analysis’ by ‘explication’ may appear to subvert his entire formalist orientation. However, Carnap never held the pure formalism so often ascribed to him! He (1932–33, cf. 1941, §5) always insisted that using his formalised syntax requires its proper complement, ‘descriptive semantics’, to determine which protocol sentences were uttered by any specific community, especially, by ‘scientists of our cultural circle’. The wide-spread neglect of the non-formal aspects of Carnap’s semantics reflects the wide-spread formalist presumption of infallibilist deductivism within analytic philosophy.10 Consider these methodological questions: What, if anything, can guide proper analysis or explication? On what basis can an analysis or explication be assessed? Most importantly, what can limit or counter-act the importation of linguistic or conceptual confusions into an analysis, an explication, one’s 8 Note that here I use ‘semantics’ in the sense of theory of conceptual content or linguistic meaning, rather than in the sense of theory of reference. 9 This central point of Wittgenstein’s was developed very subtly by Will (1997). 10 Quine’s radical holism does not follow from Carnap’s semantics, nor from any difficulties in it (Westphal 2015b). Quine’s radical holism requires the suppressed premiss that his purely extensionalist ‘logical point of view’ sufficies for all domains of philosophical inquiry, whether formal or non-formal. Quine’s presumption is an instance and also a major source of the persistence of infallibilist deductivism within subsequent analytic philosophy. One indicator that analytic philosophers have rescinded infallibilist deductivism would be if they were to re-read From a Logical Point of View as a reductio ad absurdum against the sufficiency of Quine’s logical point of view for non-formal, substantive domains of philosophy – though without giving up on substantive, constructive philosophy.

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use the formal mode of speech or one’s preferred meta-linguistic construction?11 On this important point Wilfrid Sellars followed the sage advice of Aristotle: because philosophical issues are so complex, elusive and easily obscured by incautious phrasing, one must consult carefully the opinions of the many and the wise. Sellars (SM 67–9) found the wise throughout philosophical history, from the pre-Socratics to the present day,12 because core issues regarding the logical forms of thought and the connection of thought with things are perennial, arising in distinctive, paradigmatic forms in each era. Sellars’ expansive research catalogues and critically assesses philosophical locutions, that is, so to speak, the ‘ordinary language’ of philosophers. Only by examining these can one find the most suitable, least misleading formulations of issues, specific theses, distinctions, their relations and their best uses.13 Even when cast in the formal mode of speech, philosophical analysis or explication must be systematic as well as historical; indeed an analysis or explication can only be systematic by also being historical. The semantic interconnections amongst philosophical issues, via the semantic relations of their central terms, provides a crucial check against inapt formulations, analyses and explications. In this regard, some important works of German analytical philosophy, such as Andreas Bartels’ Bedeutung and Begriffsgeschichte (1994), Müller and Schmieder’s Begriffsgeschichte der Naturwissenschaften (2008) and their new critical compendium, Begriffsgeschichte und historische Semantik (2016), approach the kinds of topics and issues fruitful for cogent Hegelian philosophy, especially when considered in connection with works like Pirmin Stekeler’s Hegel’s Analytische Philosophie: Die Wissenschaft der Logik als kritische Theorie der Bedeutung (1992) and his dialogical commentary on Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (2014). Those interested in Hegel and analytic philosophy are advised to attend to contemporary German analytic philosophy, much of which does not restrict itself to the individualist, ahistorical and largely preKantian presumptions so characteristic of Anglophone analytic philosophy, and is all the richer for it. These philosophical benefits are mutual. According to Carnap (1931, 91; 1956b, 49–52), one way to specify the meaning of a term, concept or phrase is to specify which inferences can, and which cannot, be drawn using that term, concept or phrase. Carnap’s methodological pointer provides a crucial her11

For a concise example of how easy are such errors see below, §134.3. E.g., Sellars (SM, 62, 71, 77) mentions Parmenides thrice; contemporary counterparts to Heraclitus are radical sense-datum theorists, trope theorists and causal process timeslicers, neo-Humeans all. 13 Sellars knew the piecemeal method of analytic puzzle-solving was doomed in its own terms when Carnap (1950b) adopted moderately holistic semantics; see Wick (1951). 12

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meneutical method for specifying the meaning of key terms used in any philosophical text. This method is extremely important for Hegel’s texts, because Hegel persistently states, explicates and re-explicates the meaning or significance (intension) of his terms contextually. This belongs to Hegel’s Parmenidean exercises, which place enormous demands upon his readers, but which can be met with diligent use of Carnap’s hermeneutical advice. The results are as revealing as they are astonishing, and always philosophically instructive. Some of these benefits, I hope, are exhibited in the present study. 103

FROM FORMULATION TO JUSTIFICATION.

These basic semantic points about explicating key terms, concepts or principles within non-formal domains are necessary for properly stating a philosophical view. What about justifying a philosophical view within a substantive, non-formal domain? Justification in non-formal domains requires something in addition to strict logical deduction. The fundamental problem is that justification in non-formal domains requires non-formal, substantive principles and premises. Controversies over these, and over which logistic system to use within any non-formal domain, can readily founder upon the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion (quoted above, §12). Consider why Chisholm (1982, 65–6) held there to be no satisfactory solution to what he formulated as ‘The Problem of the Criterion’. He contends that this Problem admits only three responses: Particularism, Methodism and Scepticism. Particularists believe they can identify various particular instances of knowledge, which enable them to construct a general account of the nature and criteria of knowledge. In contrast, Methodists believe they can identify the nature and criteria of knowledge, which enable them to distinguish genuine from illegitimate particular instances of knowledge. In contrast to both Particularism and Methodism, Sceptics believe that no particular cases of knowledge can be identified without knowing the nature or criteria of knowledge, and that the nature or criteria of knowledge cannot be known without identifying particular cases of genuine knowledge. Chisholm (1982, 75, cf. 67) favours particularism, but thinks that any attempt to solve this problem commits a basic petitio principii (cf. above §61.) Petitio principii is, however, the cardinal justificatory sin identified in the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion; Sextus Empiricus (AL 1.315, cf. 2.464) notes drily: ‘a bare assertion counterbalances a bare assertion’. In non-formal domains the Dilemma of the Criterion refutes both coherentist and foundationalist models of rational justification, including both scientia and historia. Can the Dilemma of the Criterion be avoided or resolved? Only by advancing

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beyond deductivist models of rational justification (and also, e.g., ‘Reflective Equilibrium’). Indeed, it can be solved only by developing an option neglected by Chisholm and by analytic philosophers generally. One key to solving the Dilemma of the Criterion is to analyse, justify and exploit the possibility of constructive self-criticism. A few analytic philosophers mention the importance of self-criticism, yet none have examined whether or how it is possible. Neither philosophers nor historians of philosophy noticed that Hegel states the Dilemma of the Criterion in the middle of the Introduction (Einleitung) to the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where he then cogently analyses and defends the possibility of constructive self-criticism. In the body of the Phenomenology Hegel uses this analysis to assess a broad, representative range of models of human knowledge and action, including Pyrrhonian Scepticism. This assessment enables him to show both that the Dilemma of the Criterion is soluble and that we are able to know the world itself, at least in part. Analysing and justifying our capacity to know the world itself, Hegel further argues, also requires our mutual critical assessment (per above, §§83–91). This is because each of us is a decidedly finite rational being. We each know only a fragment of knowledge pertaining to any substantive issue of justification. We each have our own philosophical strengths, predilections and preferences – and their complementary shortcomings in other regards. At bottom: we are each fallible. Consequently, even the most scrupulously self-critical amongst us faces the difficulty in practice, in any case of justifying or purporting to justify any significant non-formal, substantive claim or judgment, to determine whether or the extent to which we ourselves have justified our judgment because we have sufficiently fulfilled all relevant justificatory requirements, or whether instead we merely believe we have fulfilled those requirements and thus merely believe we have justified our conclusion. To make this distinction reliably and effectively requires the constructive critical assessment of others; and likewise in each of their cases too. In non-formal domains, rational justification is fundamentally a social phenomenon. Moreover, in non-formal domains both principles and specific claims are and remain justified to the extent that they are adequate to their intended domains and are superior to their relevant alternatives, whether historical or contemporary. Hence in non-formal domains rational justification is fundamentally also an historical phenomenon. Hegel fully appreciated these points; he was the first to understand and to show that these social and historical aspects of rational justification in nonformal domains are consistent with – indeed ultimately they require and justify – realism about the objects of empirical knowledge and strict objectivity about basic practical norms. It is still widely supposed that ‘pragmatic real-

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ism’ is oxymoronic. This supposition, Hegel rightly argued, rests upon a series of false dichotomies (Westphal 2003a). Hegel elevated the history of philosophy to a specifically philosophical discipline because he recognised (already in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit) that comprehensive, critical, philosophical history of philosophy is essential to philosophical explication, to philosophical assessment and to philosophical justification in non-formal, substantive domains. Thus in non-formal domains of philosophy, cultural and intellectual history – including all forms of empirical inquiry – play central, ineliminable roles within rational justification. For the same reasons, in justifying specifically philosophical views in substantive domains, history of philosophy plays a central, ineliminable role. Philosophy itself, as a rational examination of substantive issues within substantive (non-formal) domains, is essentially historical and social. These points entail that, in non-formal domains, rational judgment – including philosophical judgment and especially those judgments involved in assessing and then affirming (or denying, restricting or revising) the justification of one’s own philosophical views – is characterised by historicity: We each can make our judgments only on the basis of our best available information, options, understanding, insights and our best assessment of them and of our use of them. We can only rationally justify our own philosophical judgments (in non-formal domains) by proposing them for informed critical scrutiny. Hence our own philosophical judgments, so far as we can justify them rationally, are retrospective with regard to historically prior formulations, information, issues and views; they are circumspective with regard to contemporary formulations, information, issues and views; they are prospective with regard to the generation of new information or considerations by future events, including those events known as critical feedback from others; and they are reflexive with regard to understanding and assessing how, for each of us, I philosophise now within my rich intellectual and cultural context structured by the considerations just indicated and the social practices and historical processes which undergird and make possible such considerations. All of this is entailed by the sole alternative to scientia, namely, justificatory fallibilism, in substantive philosophy. 104

WHAT KIND OF HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY DOES PHILOSOPHY REQUIRE?

In substantive, non-formal domains, cogent, discerning philosophy requires cogent, discerning history of philosophy. Obviously, ‘history as window dressing’ – spicing up an essay with passing historical allusions – cannot suffice; neither can the assimilation of historical views to contemporary predilec-

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tions, too often exhibited by ‘analytic’ studies of historical texts in philosophy. Of perhaps greatest concern in this regard is that Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979; 2nd rev. ed. 2009) could only make a splash amongst a readership woefully ignorant of the history of their chosen field. The same misfortune is exhibited also in McDowell’s and in Brandom’s shallow historical allusions to Kant or to Hegel.14 The misfortune in Brandom’s cavalier attitude towards his philosophical predecessors (including Sellars) is that he thereby forecloses so many important opportunities for critically assessing the views he espouses. The most important point in this regard is rather that the current ‘star system’ in the field is produced and sustained by starry-eyed fans; knowledge, understanding and justification all require careful scrutiny of information, views, evidence, reasoning and analysis – including that proffered by one’s own teachers or presumed experts. Sapere aude! begins with caveat emptor! To support philosophical analysis and insight, historical studies must be philosophically subtle and acute, more so than they often are. Consider two brief examples. A familiar question is whether in the Meditations Descartes argued in a vicious circle, also familiar is the extensive literature responding both pro and con. However, a more exacting examination of the Meditations, within the Pyrrhonian context in which Descartes expressly wrote, reveals that the key question is instead, How many vicious circles infect Descartes’ Meditations? No less than five (HER, 18–34)! On a different count, most contemporary analytic philosophers restrict their consideration of Hume to his two Enquiries. Quine, to his credit, referred to an extremely important section in Hume’s Treatise, ‘Of Scepticism with regard to the senses’. Unfortunately, Quine did not read this section with sufficient care: careful examination of Hume’s analysis in that section shows that, at its core, Quine’s semantics is incoherent (Westphal 2015b). Likewise, careful study of Hume’s account of abstract ideas shows that pure extensionalism cannot suffice for semantic content (Westphal 2013a). Thus Carnap was right that Quine’s commitment to extensionalism was unduly restrictive and dogmatic (Creath 1991). Hegel’s texts, too, require this kind of broadly and deeply informed, discerning philosophical scrutiny. We should consider seriously how and how often his writings receive such scrutiny in our own work and in that of our Hegelian colleagues. We would also do well to consider, How much of what is written on Hegel can be read for philosophical understanding or insight by non-specialist readers? Regrettably, there are very few. One unfortunate tendency by much scholarship on Hegel is to try to read historical philosophical 14

On McDowell, see below, §107, and Westphal (2008); on McDowell and Brandom, see Redding (2007, 2011); on Brandom, see de Laurentiis (2007), Nuzzo (2007) and below, §§136–137.

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texts through the (purported) lense of Hegel’s texts. This inverts Hegel’s own philosophical, explicative and expository methods, which presume (as Harris stressed; above, §5) our independent access to and understanding of his philosophical sources. One crucial example of this has been examined above, and recurs below: Hegel’s adoption and further use of Tetens’ sense of ‘realisieren’ with respect to demonstrating – pointing or picking out – relevant instances of key philosophical concepts or principles, especially those which are a priori. Neglect of this crucial bit of philosophical history, and its further, central use by Kant, leads to the prevalence of neo-Platonic (mis-)interpretations of Hegel’s philosophy, according to which Hegel’s Begriff realises itself into existence, together with its own proper instantiations, ex nihilo. That is not mysticism; that neo-Platonic fantasy is an utterly mysterious salto mortale of reason and rational comprehension. There is yet another, more important reason why cogent, discerning philosophy must be historical: the subject-matter of philosophy changes historically. Hegel had, of course, a grand view about the central historical change in philosophy: the self-development of spirit, its self-articulation and, on that basis, its increasingly profound self-understanding, all achieved via our understanding and comprehension of nature, history and the realms of spirit. My present concern, however, is not substantive claims such as Hegel’s philosophy of history, but rather methodological. Consider another less ambitious, more methodological reason for historical change in philosophy’s subject matter: The problems and issues central to non-formal domains of philosophy shift and are reconfigured due to other cultural developments, whether economic, political, moral or, in Modernity, natural-scientific. The nonformal subject matter of philosophy is linked to such developments, at the very least, by the links explication forges to terms-in-use within non-formal domains of practice and inquiry. Moreover, even the formal or the logical domains of philosophy shift significantly through history. This is not to reject philosophia perennis, though it is to insist that any philosophia perennis can only be identified by understanding how its core issues are posed in distinctive ways in different philosophical eras, traditions, cultures or regions. One vital resource for understanding the views or issues found within any such era or tradition, including one’s own, is in terms of their contrasts and similarities with their various counterparts. All of these considerations pertain, directly and indirectly, to the articulation, explication, assessment and justification of any philosophical view in any non-formal domain. To neglect these considerations is to court various forms of philosophical mishap, both methodological and substantive, and to risk parochialism, undue confidence, error or irrelevance. These are amongst Hegel’s critical points in ‘The Animal Kingdom of

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the Spirit’, a very defective form of social spirit in which individuals claim that their own sheer creative originality suffices to command attention from all others, whilst disregarding (in effect) Kant’s observation that the problem with creative originality is the production of original nonsense (KdU §46). Hegel’s ‘The Animal Kingdom of the Spirit’ is a direct literary counterpart to Hobbes’ lawless, heedless state of nature, a decided echo of the earlier struggle for recognition, and a premonition of the fate of the beautiful soul. It must be said, Hegel’s analysis of ‘The Animal Kingdom of the Spirit’ has greater scope and relevance today, both within and outside philosophy, than it had in Hegel’s day regarding the Romantics. Within philosophy, too often priority is given to developing one’s ‘own’ view, one’s ‘own’ analysis or one’s ‘own’ interpretation, rather than to the requirements upon developing a cogent view, a cogent analysis or a cogent interpretation. We can and must do better, though so doing requires developing a much broader and more discerning philosophical perspective. This Hegel did, in ways detailed in the remainder of this Part III. 105

PHILOSOPHY: ITS HISTORY AND OURS.

One reason for chronic misunderstanding of Hegel’s challenging and revolutionary views is that important relations between philosophy and its history are often over-simplified, not least because the issues and views of historical philosophers are too often reduced to stereotypes if not caricatures. For example, if the views of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century philosophers were as meagre as Richard Rorty’s characterisations in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979; 2nd rev. ed. 2009), philosophy’s history would rightly be dismissed. The views Rorty presented and criticised were – by now we should be able to use the past tense – the caricatures of historical views then typical in graduate seminars in (largely) analytic departments. I was fortunate to have studied in one of the few analytic departments which took (and still takes) historical philosophy seriously as philosophy.15 ‘Philosophers’ as well as ‘historians’ must reconsider relations between philosophy and its history, not as they now are or are presumed to be, but as 15

I gratefully acknowledge my many debts to the Philosophy Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where (during my time there) seven regular faculty taught or researched Kant’s philosophy, and where good students are still provided the time to study the field in the breadth and depth required for command of the relevant issues, literature and languages. One of its most illustrious members, Julius Rudolf Weinberg (1908 –1971; cf. Bennett et al 1970–71), was perhaps the first Jew to obtain a permanent philosophy post in the USA after WWII without changing his name. (Well into the 1950s it was common for US businesses to require a letter of reference from a prospective employee’s minister or priest; i.e., Gentiles only, please.)

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they can and ought to be. To reconsider relations between philosophy and its history productively, consider Hegel’s views on this topic, and two central reasons for their rejection by mainstream analytic philosophers. Before doing so, we should acknowledge and set aside an historical issue, in order to focus on some central systematic relations between philosophy and history. In 1841, aged 66 and turned bitter and conservative, Schelling was called by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV to Berlin to ‘stamp out the dragonseed of Hegelian pantheism root and branch’.16 Ever since, the ‘received view’ of Hegel and his philosophy has largely been that of his detractors, who were untroubled about accuracy or considered assessment.17 The level of rhetorical invective was no less at the advent of distinctively analytical philosophy. Famously, Moore and Russell revolted against British Idealism, with Hegel tossed in for good measure. Replying to F.C.S. Schiller’s review of The Analysis of Mind in 1922, Russell exhorted: ‘I should take ‘back to the 18th century’ as a battle-cry, if I could entertain any hope that others would rally to it’ (CP 9:39). Russell stated that his differences with Schiller, a British pragmatist, were so fundamental that they could not be settled by logical argument without petitio principii, so that ‘the remarks which I shall have to make will be of the nature of rhetoric rather than logic’ (CP 9:30). In this connection Russell acknowledged, ‘I dislike the heart as an inspirer of beliefs; I much prefer the spleen …’ (CP 9:30). He then excoriated romanticism, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and futurism for having contributed nothing ‘that deserves to be remembered’ (CP 9:41). Most analytic philosophers were taken in by Russell’s rhetorical invective; few could then know that at this time Russell regarded Schiller as ‘certainly among the two or three most eminent of living British philosophers’ and was writing very strong recommendations for him!18 The results of Russell’s invective linger in the remarkable capacity philosophers still have, as Frederick Will once remarked to me, no longer to understand what one says as soon as one mentions the name ‘Hegel’. Passions and factionalism easily thwart reasonable discussion and rational assessment, also in philosophy, and especially so during the ideologically inflamed Twentieth Century, which took its toll upon philosophy in ways only now being plumbed (in mainstream Anglophone philosophy; cf. Reisch 2005, 2007; Erickson et al., 2013). In the Twentieth Century philosophical methods and strategies proliferated; in many regards, for the good. Too often, though, practitioners formed schools or ‘cultural circles’ (Kulturkreise, as they were called by Logical Positivists), many of which defined themselves in opposition to what they regar16 Quoted from his instructions from Friedrich Wilhelm IV by Bunsen (1869, 2:133) in his request (1 Aug. 1840) to Schelling to take up Hegel’s vacant chair in Berlin. 17 See Fulda (2003), 305–19. On Russell’s objections to Hegel, see Westphal (2010a). 18 The editorial introduction to Russell’s reply reprints one of these letters (CP 9:37–8).

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ded as Hegelianism. Unlike Russell, Carnap advocated a principle of tolerance, which he exhibited generously in Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928), gladly citing every source which pointed toward a growing, credible consensus about how best to philosophise; twice he cites Dilthey favourably (§§12, 23), Nietzsche thrice (§§65, 67, 163). At that time he was on excellent speaking terms with Heidegger. Unfortunately, his ecumenical attitude soon subsided, as he wrote to Flitner and publicised in his impatient and uncomprehending remarks on the purported metaphysics of Hegel and Heidegger.19 The World War II, the rise of engineering and science curricula, the Cold War and misplaced chauvinism and nationalism took heavy tolls also on philosophy, though they are not the only causes of the fragmentation of the field. Another key reason for the easy triumph of Logical Positivism in the USA was noted to me by William Hay, who observed: ‘Dewey’s message was, “Go out and do it!” His good students got the message, leaving behind in the academy the starry-eyed admirers’. Hay remarked upon a trend; he neither said nor thought that there were no competent pragmatists left in US universities, but about the trend he is correct: most of Dewey’s best students went into education, policy studies, government and social services. In view of the fragmentation and contracting historical perspective typical in the field today, it is illuminating to look back to the end of the Nineteenth Century, when philosophy was vigorously international, multi-disciplinary, historical and systematic – and polyglot. All academics had working rudiments, most had reading fluency, in English, French, German, some Latin and often some Ancient Greek. In its first decade (1876–1885), Mind published numerous reports on the state of the art in philosophy and psychology – broadly conceived to include physiology and ethology – across Europe and North America. Their articles and book reviews reflected this broad, inclusive vigour; their index for the decade is fascinating. Mind published extended reports by leading figures on recent philosophy in Cambridge, London, Oxford, Dublin, Scotland, France, Germany, Holland, Italy and the USA; on psychology in Holland, on physiological psychology and on psychology of perception in Germany. Mind published three reports on philosophy journals in France, Germany, Italy and the USA; one on physiology journals; two reports on pathology, two more on physiology and pathology, and two on functions of the cerebrum. Mind published critical review articles on studies of English philosophy and its history by authors in France and Germany, and reviewed such studies by others, including one from Russia. These articles were keen to understand and assess how foreign philosophers with different philosophical 19

Carnap’s letter to Flitner (9. April 1931) is quoted by Gabriel (2004, 14); Carnap (1932) comments on Hegel’s and Heidegger’s purported metaphysics.

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perspectives and orientations understood and assessed English philosophy. In those same years Mind published extended, detailed articles on such topics as the relation of Greek philosophy to modern thought, recent Hegelian contributions to English philosophy, a ‘biographical sketch of an infant’ by Charles Darwin, on whether there can ‘be a natural science of man’ by T.H. Green, on von Hartmann’s Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewußtseins (‘Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness’), on Herman Lotze, on relations between philosophy and science, between psychology and philosophy, on comparative human psychology, on political economy as a moral science, on the classification of the sciences and on scientific philosophy as a theory of human knowledge (see below, §149). Similar comprehensive, detailed surveys of contemporaneous philosophy were also published by leading German and French journals; Arthur Liebert (founding editor of Kant-Studien) published extensive reports on philosophy in Germany in Mind and (primarily) in The Philosophical Review, from 1926 to 1938. More significant to the present study are the monumental books series in history and philosophy of law spearheaded by John Henry Wigmore, who wrote and edited as excellently as he did voluminously, including – with the assistance of his junior colleague, Albert Kocourek – three series of translations of current research in philosophy of law and in history of law: Ancient, Anglo-American and Continental. That comprehensive approach to history and philosophy of law was, like its cosmopolitan counterparts within philosophy, eclipsed by the sectarian, nationalist and often racist madness of two world wars in the Twentieth Century. Logical Positivism – infamous now amongst critics for excessive scientism (the notion that science alone provides genuine knowledge) – began as an international, cosmopolitan, multi-disciplinary, polyglot movement, not only to promote scientific knowledge, but also to promote public education and progressive political reform (Mormann 2004, Uebel 2011). Several leading positivists were non-aligned Marxists or socialists, who had political as well as intellectual or cultural reasons to flee fascism in Europe. Those who reached US shores soon felt the harsh winds of Cold War ideology and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC, 1947–1975). Already alert to political reaction in Europe, they strategically shifted emphasis to the purely scientific, and hence to the (officially) non-political character of their philosophical programme.20 Logical Positivism began as an Enlightenment programme; if its methods support enlightenment, it can achieve these aims by promoting and employing its methods, without announcing its en20

McCumber (2001), Reisch (2005), (2007). McCumber aims to show the issue merits examination; that assay did not aim to prove a positive case.

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lightenment aims and agenda. Carnap was politically active to his last days.21 These features of recent European philosophy contrast starkly to the fragmentation of so much of the field today – though I hasten to stress that there are important and equally illuminating exceptions in some areas of semantics and philosophy of mind, in cognitive science, in those areas of history and philosophy of science which aim to account philosophically for scientific knowledge (rather than trimming the sciences to fit their philosophical predilections) and in feminist philosophy.22 Note that monolingual academic research, including philosophy, only developed after about 1950, only amongst larger linguistic groups, and primarily amongst Anglophones. The one clear sign of our regaining some healthy cosmopolitan perspective – not in philosophy, but in history and philosophy of law – is the Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence, edited by Enrico Pattaro, in thirteen hefty volumes, complete but for the final volume of indexes. Yet this monumental study, too, shows signs of the intellectual and cultural disruptions of the Twentieth Century: The exemplary efforts of Wigmore et al are mentioned not at all; Paul Vinogradoff’s pioneering research in history and philosophy of law is scarcely mentioned twice (8:204, 11:4), and the Code of Hammurabi is mentioned only briefly (6:4–6, 168; 9:337; 12:96). A complete English translation of Hammurabi’s code (by Davies, 1905) is included in Kocourek and Wigmore (1915, 1:387–442); discovered in 1901–02, the monolith bearing Hammurabi’s code immediately attracted international interest. Harper’s transcription, transliteration, translation and facsimile appeared in 1904; it retains interest today (Wright 2009).23 These historical factors highlight some of the social and intellectual currents, cross-currents and undercurrents which have conditioned (inter alia) philosophical thought in the past century, for better and for worse, wittingly and unwittingly, for they have also conditioned thought about Hegel’s thought. Both the received view of Hegel’s thought and Hegel’s thought itself require careful disentangling and re-assessment (cf. Stewart 1996). Why? Because philosophical issues are complex and subtle, whilst clarity of thought and assessment are difficult: we cannot afford to forego insights, no matter their provenance. Philosophical issues are greatly clarified and focussed by examining them with more than one set of concerns, and more than one ap21

FBI (1954), Mormann (2000), 36; cf. Kallen (1946), Carnap (1963), 81–3. See, e.g., Kaplan (see Almog and Leonardi, 2009), Wettstein (2004), Burge (2005), Haag (2007); Cleermanns (2003), Bayne et al (2009); Harper (2011), Malament (2002), Wimsatt (2007); Antony and Witt (2002), Bartky (2002), (2012), Harding (2004), Keller and Longino (1996) and Kincaid et al (2007). 23 Basic Anglophone bibliography on history and philosophy of law is available from the author’s webpage, under ‘Research Materials’. 22

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proach or method. If Hegel held the views commonly ascribed to him, especially those pressed by his critics, he and his writings would best be forgotten. Hegel’s actual views are, however, very different, very sophisticated and in many important philosophical regards very powerful. Why then have Hegel’s views been so obscured by convenient caricatures? His difficult style is only partly responsible: The common caricatures of Hegel’s views are exactly what results by assimilating Hegel’s actual views to the framework of familiar philosophical views and options which Hegel himself had, for sound and considered reasons, criticised, rejected and superceded. Unfortunately, too many expositors have failed to explain, or even to appreciate this important feature of Hegel’s philosophy. Long derided for (supposedly) neglecting epistemology, Hegel’s profoundly anti-Cartesian epistemology in many important regards is far ahead of the field. Some of these regards can be appreciated by considering the modern epistemological predicament (§106), residual commitment of ahistorical philosophers to justificatory infallibilism (§107), some necessary conditions of singular, specifically cognitive reference (§108) and pragmatic accounts of the a priori (§109). These points illuminate how Hegel’s moderate collectivism (just mentioned) bears upon important justificatory relations between philosophy and its history discussed above (§101). They also illuminate how recent history has affected, indeed distorted, our understanding of a central philosophical topic, widely presumed to be non-political and ahistorical: epistemology. 106

THE MODERN EPISTEMOLOGICAL PREDICAMENT.

The issue about social ontology just mentioned is closely linked to another about human knowledge. Outstanding individuals produced the scientific revolution. Though there were many of them, great minds like Galileo’s or Newton’s or Mendel’s stand out, and the social and historical aspects of their achievements often disappear into the shadows of their staggering innovations. In the Seventeenth Century this contrast appeared to be even more important, and more categorical, due to the contrast of the methods and the findings of newly established natural sciences, to the Neo-Aristotelian natural philosophy of what became known (none too charitably) as the Middle Ages. Pyrrhonian scepticism was used by Catholic theologians to assert the superiority of faith and divine revelation over reasoned knowledge. Commonly it was supposed that divine omnipotence entailed that God could produce any event without the occurrence of its typical cause(s), including those events which are – or at least appear to us to be – our experiences of objects and events in our surroundings. To establish something stable and durable in the

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sciences, Descartes famously sought to reject all of his preconceived opinions and pursue sceptical doubt so radically that he could establish secure and certain foundations for knowledge (Med. 1, ¶1; AT 7:17, cf. 12). This involved rejecting everything – or so he supposed, ‘everything’ – he had been taught to believe by his senses, or through them by other people, in order to discover for himself knowledge which is demonstrably infallible because it survives the sceptical hypothesis that he might be deceived by an omnipotent mauvais genie. In this one fell swoop Descartes bequeathed to posterity three key features of the Modern epistemological predicament, which survived translation into the Empiricist tradition and into analytic epistemology until at least the mid-1960s, when Gettier (1963) published his famous article, ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’ The three relevant features the Modern epistemological predicament can be stated as theses: 1. The Ego-centric Predicament: What we seem to think, feel or experience is known infallibly, because it is exactly what it appears to us to be; the epistemological question is whether any of our experiences can be known to correspond to anything beyond our mental awareness. 2. Epistemological Individualism: Only what one can know, in principle, by oneself can count as genuine knowledge. 3. Infallibilism about Justification: Justification sufficient for knowledge entails the truth of what is believed; any belief less justified than thsat may be false. These three theses entail two further converse theses: 4. Historicist Relativism: If (or insofar as) human belief is (ineliminably, irreducibly) a social or historical phenomenon, truth and justification give way to social or historical relativism. 5. Refutation by Counter-example: If there is a logically possible alternative to a (philosophical) thesis, view or conceptual analysis, then that thesis, view or analysis is not, and cannot be, justified sufficiently to count as knowledge. Now the sciences are plainly historical and social phenomena. This is one reason why accounting for scientific knowledge within the constraints of the Modern epistemological predicament requires reference to what individuals can ‘in principle’ know through their own capacities, abilities and efforts. Accordingly, history figures in human knowledge only regarding the contingent

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and justificatorily irrelevant chronology of the discovery of various important methods or truths. These same points hold, purportedly, also for philosophy: in principle, philosophy too is an ahistorical discipline. 107

RESIDUAL INFALLIBILISM.

In the wake of Gettier’s (1963) article, overt empiricism was subject to sustained criticism by analytic epistemologists. Many believe that analytic criticism of empiricism began with Quine’s (1951) ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’. I disagree.24 Much more significant, methodologically and substantively, was Carnap’s (1950a, 1–18) explication, advocacy and use of conceptual ‘explication’, which was later echoed by Gettier’s critique of epistemology qua pure conceptual analysis. Carnap’s crucial methodological shift has not often enough been recognised in theory nor followed in analytical practice.25 The commitment to infallibilism among contemporary philosophers is indicated by their use of counter-examples to refute, or at least to defeat the justification of philosophical views, including philosophical accounts of empirical or specifically scientific knowledge. It is widely presumed that relevant counter-examples need only be logically possible. However, mere logical possibilities defeat justification only if justification consists in strict deduction. This presumed requirement of strict deduction for rational justification is their commitment to infallibilism. Consider briefly global perceptual scepticism. Global perceptual sceptics stress that as a matter purely of logic, all our beliefs or experiences could be as they are, even if none were true, justified or veridical (Stroud 1994b, 241–2, 245). From this they infer that we have no perceptual knowledge, or more cautiously that we cannot, or do not know that we have any perceptual knowledge; or they challenge us to prove that we have perceptual knowledge whilst barring appeal to any putative cognitive relations between our beliefs and experiences and their putative worldly objects.26 Global perceptual skeptics demand that our cognitive capacities be proven a priori fit for any logically possible environment before trusting them in our actual environment of spatio-temporal objects, events and people. This challenge may appear unanswerable. However, it presupposes that logical deduction is not only suffi24

See Uebel (1992), Westphal (2015b). The implications were noted at the time by Wick (1951), but his important point was rejected by true believers. Williamson (2007) is one of the few contemporary analytic philosophers who has developed views of philosophical method which address the insufficiency of classical conceptual analysis, yet he persists in addressing philosophical issues piecemeal, and with little regard to philosophical history. Carus (2007) highlights the centrality of explication to Carnap’s philosophy. 26 Stroud (1989), 34, 36, 48; (1994a), 301–4; (1996), 358. 25

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cient, but also necessary for cognitive justification. This is justificatory infallibilism. Justificatory infallibilism is central, e.g., to McDowell’s recent views. He stresses that the fallibility of our perceptual-cognitive capacities qua capacities does not entail that any particular perception is fallible, so that (trivially) when one sees a table, it is that table one sees. McDowell (2010, 253) asserts that such perceptions involve or provide ‘indefeasible warrant for belief’, and that it is sheer ‘fantasy’ to suppose that anything less than such indefeasible and infallible (2010, 245) warrant can provide for empirical knowledge. He contends that an experience in which some aspect of objective reality is there for a subject, perceptually present to her … is a more demanding condition than an experience’s being merely veridical …. (McDowell 2010, 245)

and further that To have an experience describable in those terms is to have an indefeasible warrant for believing that things are as the experience is revealing them to be. If an aspect of objective reality is perceptually present to someone, there is no possibility, compatibly with her experience’s being as it is, that she might be wrong in believing that things are the way her experience is revealing them to be …. (McDowell 2010, 245)

What more stringent conditions, requirements or achievements are involved in perceptual presence, beyond veridicality, McDowell does not specify; he (2010, 245) avows: ‘I think the idea that experience at its best makes aspects of objective reality present to us is completely natural and intuitive’. Such ‘natural ideas’ about knowledge – or what philosophers today bandy about as ‘intuitions’ – Hegel (1807) carefully scrutinised. There is no valid inference from ‘it is a table I see’ to ‘it cannot possibly be other than a table I see’; cognitive, justificatory necessity cannot be deduced from assertoric (‘factive’) premises. If it is a table I see, then a table there is, and I see it; but this cannot foreclose upon a situation in which what I see, like Austin’s (1965, 354) apparent goldfinch in his garden, does ‘something outrageous (explodes, quotes Mrs. Woolf, or what not)’. The corrigibility involved in the open texture of our empirical concepts, and in our specific use of them on any occasion, is a crucial cognitive, justificatory and epistemological resource (Will 1997, esp. xxi– xxii, xli–xlii, li, 10–2, 129, 159, 170–1), which McDowell neglects, together with the problems with infallibilism noted above (§82.1), with the ‘narrow content’ infallibilism requires (above, §§82.2–82.6, 84–86) and Dretske’s reasons for rescinding his (1971) analysis of conclusive reasons as unstable and developing instead his (1981) fallibilist information-theoretic epistemology (cf. Dret-

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ske 2006). The presumption that cognitive justification even within nonformal domains requires logical entailment is the contemporary inheritance of Cartesianism (per above, §§82.2, 82.4), amongst epistemologists more faithful to Tempier’s declared infallibilism than even Descartes himself. As noted above (§85), within any specified logistic system, deduction suffices for justification only within the formal domain specified by that logistic system. However, in non-formal, substantive domains, justificatory infallibilism is not too stringent for rational justification, in principle it is irrelevant to non-formal domains. Logical deduction may be relevant to rational justification in non-formal, substantive domains, but in principle it is insufficient for justification in those domains. Justification in non-formal domains requires identifying and assessing (at the least) the semantic and existence postulates constitutive of some specified domain, and their use in any piece of justificatory reasoning. Logical possibilities are expressed by synthetic propositions. In non-formal, substantive domains, mere logical possibilities as such have no cognitive status and so cannot refute or otherwise undermine rational justification in the non-formal, substantive domains of empirical knowledge (and of morals), for reasons provided by Kant’s and Hegel’s semantics of singular cognitive reference (§108). These issues about the fallibility and context-dependence of veridical perception are developed further below (§§136–139). 108

SOME NECESSARY CONDITIONS OF OUR SINGULAR COGNITIVE REFERENCE.

Whatever conceptual content or linguistic meaning (intension) synthetic statements may have, no synthetic statement has cognitive status unless and until it is referred by the Speaker (the renowned S) to particulars s/he has located in space and time (per above, §§2.3, 55.1, 66–68). Until it is so referred, that statement does not suffice for predication, i.e., for ascription of any (putative) characteristics to any (putative) individual(s). No description as such suffices for ascription (predication), whilst ascription alone suffices neither for accurate, nor for justified ascription; both are required for knowledge. In principle, specificity of description (intension) cannot secure singularity of reference, because any description may be either empty or ambiguous, because either no object, or several objects, may satisfy it. Russell’s (1904) theory of definite descriptions suffices as a semantic account of conceptual content or linguistic meaning (intension) to avoid putative reference to nonexistent (subsistent) entities. However, in principle definite descriptions cannot suffice for epistemology. Including ‘the’ or even ‘the one and only’ (or any other grammatically singular referring phrase) within an attributive phrase cannot rule out that this attributive phrase logically is either empty or ambig-

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uous because it has no, or more than one corresponding instance (object). In principle merely uttering descriptions is insufficient for knowledge, because until a descriptive statement is referred to particulars Someone has located in space and time, it has no truth value, no assessable accuracy or appropriateness and no assessable justification. This is central to Kant’s and Hegel’s Semantics of Singular Cognitive Reference (above, §§55.1, 57.1, 66–68).27 A closely related point holds of tokens of demonstrative terms, such as ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘now’, ‘then’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘these’ or ‘those’: Whatever semantic or linguistic use, intension or ‘character’ such terms may have, no use of such a term suffices for specifically cognitive reference unless and until the Speaker specifies the relevant spatio-temporal scope of the region(s) occupied by the event(s) or object(s) to which S/he refers. Predication requires both description and reference (per Evans 1975); cognition in non-formal, substantive domains requires specifying, at least roughly or implicitly, the particulars one purports to know in part by specifying some of their characteristics, and in part by specifying their spatio-temporal region(s). Only upon that basis can one make any definite cognitive claim; only on that basis can its truth-value – or its accuracy or appropriateness – be assessed; and only on that basis can its justification be either claimed or assessed. Hence philosophy of language (and of mind) can augment epistemology, but they cannot supplant it, because knowledge requires both specifically cognitive reference, sufficient accuracy and justification, none of which can be reduced to, nor supplanted by, semantics of linguistic meaning (intension) or philosophy of mind. These requirements for specifically cognitive reference achieve one key aim of meaning verificationism without invoking meaning verificationism!28 Regardless of whether the concepts or terms used in cognitive judgment are a priori, a posteriori or mixed, whatever may be the conceptual content or linguistic meaning (intension) of our claims, judgments or propositions, they have no cognitive significance unless and until they are referred to particulars we have located within space and time. This requirement is a necessary condition for the truth-value, and the truth-evaluability, of our claims (etc.), and it is a necessary condition for us to know enough about our claims and whatever about which we make those claims to discover and thereby to determine their truth value. It is also necessary (though not sufficient) for our assessing the justification of our cognitive claims about those particulars. These basic considerations about singular cognitive reference justify four important consequences:

27 28

Externalist aspects of justification in perception are not presently germane. Varieties of empiricism are defined and discussed in HER, 48–50.

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1. Within non-formal, substantive domains, mere logical possibilities as such have no cognitive status, and so can neither defeat nor undermine cognitive justification. In non-formal, substantive domains, logical gaps as such are not cognitive or justificatory gaps. 2. Traditional metaphysical claims to knowledge beyond sensory experience (or without empirical evidence) are cognitively vacuous. 3. Global sceptical hypotheses about perception – whether Pyrrhonian, Cartesian or Humean – are cognitively vacuous. 4. The causal descriptions found in contemporary ‘causal theories’ of mental or behavioural phenomena are pseudo-scientific. They cannot count as theories (nor even hypotheses) because those descriptions are too vague for causal ascription, much less for justified – nor even justifiable – causal ascription, which alone could count as theory or knowledge (Westphal 2016b). If these remarks may not ‘sound’ like Hegel, so much worse for the din of the Hegel mythology. These remarks summarise the key reasons for, and the key implications of, Kant’s specifically cognitive semantics. Kant’s decisive achievement in this regard has gone unrecognised until recently,29 because most readers took Kant at his word, that his theory of knowledge requires his Transcendental Idealism. Most analytic philosophers rejected both by rejecting ‘the’ synthetic a priori: a position they share with Hume, though only by neglecting the good sense which can be made of ‘synthetic necessary truths’ (Toulmin 1949). Neo-Kantian attempts to disentangle Kant’s theory of knowledge from his transcendental idealism were unsuccessful in this regard.30 Hegel took a more challenging though more productive tack: to avoid petitio principii, the assessment of other philosophical views must be based upon thorough, strictly internal critique. By 1802 Hegel had identified two key points of a sound internal critique of Kant’s transcendental idealism (above, §§25–36). In the 1807 Phenomenology Hegel argued independently for Kant’s cognitive semantics, without appeal to transcendental idealism (nor to any comparable view), by strictly internal critique of aconceptual ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ and of the purported cognitive sufficiency of (grammatically) definite descriptions. In ‘Force and Understanding’ (PhdG, chapt. III) Hegel used this cognitive semantics to undergird Newton’s Rule 4 of Natural Philosophy and to rebut a host of empiricist objections to Newton’s causal realism about gravitational force.31 In ‘Self-Consciousness’ (PhdG, chapt. IV) Hegel used this same cognitive semantics to undermine Pyrrhonian scepticism, and 29

Melnick (1989), KTPR, Bird (2006). I stress: in this regard; I do not dismiss neo-Kantians en bloc. 31 See Westphal (2009b), (2015a). Newton’s (1999, 796) Rule 4 is quoted above (p. 179 n. 48) and discussed below, §138.7. 30

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implicitly also Cartesian and global perceptual scepticism (above, §§65–70). In ‘Reason Observing Nature: Psychology’ (PhdG, chapt. VAb) Hegel exposed the pseudo-scientific pretensions of purported causal-deterministic empirical psychology (below, §§141–146). The first two chapters of Hegel’s Logic – the infamous triad of being, nothing and becoming; and the analysis of Dasein (‘being-there’) – in a different way also argue for this same semantics of singular cognitive reference (deixis). Both here, as in ‘Sense Certainty’ (PhdG, chapt. I), Hegel demonstrates that determining (at least roughly) the origin of any relevant, implicit spatio-temporal reference system (the Speaker) and (at least roughly) the scope of the relevant spatio-temporal region of any designated particular(s) is possible only by competent use of the concepts ‘space’, ‘spaces’, ‘time’, ‘times’, ‘I’, and ‘individuation’. These concepts must be used competently to define or to learn any empirical concept. Hence neither ostensive designation nor singular cognitive reference are possible on the basis of concept-free ‘knowledge by acquaintance’, i.e., ‘sense certainty’. Accordingly, the term ‘knowledge’ in Russell’s account of ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description’ has no justified use; his account presumed rather than analysed our knowledge of particulars.32 I do not claim that these are the sole aims or results of Hegel’s analyses; I do maintain that Hegel succeeds in justifying these results (Westphal 2000, 2002–03, 2010a). So doing is plenty of stout philosophy for the spare, compact pages Hegel devoted to them. Neither do I claim that these are obviously Hegel’s analyses or conclusions; I do maintain that scrupulous interpretation of his text and issues, within their historical and systematic contexts, substantiates my attributions to him of these views. These implications of Hegel’s semantics of singular cognitive reference illuminate his pragmatic approach to the a priori status of fundamental concepts and principles. 109

THE PRAGMATIC A PRIORI.

One standard tenet of empiricism is semantic atomism: that, at least in many basic cases, the meaning of a term or the content of concept can be defined or specified independently of other term or concept. Carnap came closest to working out semantic atomism in detail, with the ultimate result that seman32

Russell (1911). Russell (1912, CP 6:365; 1914, 48–49 n.) charged that Hegel failed to distinguish between identity and predication, but neglected that the view Hegel criticises conflates them; by reductio of that conflation Hegel proves they are distinct (Westphal 2010a)! A useful class exercise for students is to devise possible scenarios in which Russell’s (1911) grammatically definite descriptions turn out to be logically ambiguous, because there may be more than one relevant individual, or none – as in a tied, or an invalidated election.

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tic atomism is false: The meaning of any one term or the content of any one concept (intension) can be defined or specified only in conjunction with at least some other terms or concepts (and we cannot determine a priori which others). For any terms or concepts of interest in philosophy, this moderate (or ‘molecular’) semantic holism is often fairly extensive: The meanings and proper use of philosophically salient terms or the content of philosophically salient concepts or principles typically form networks or families, which themselves are more or less integrated with others.33 Hegel concurred because, like Kant, he recognised that linguistic meaning or conceptual content – and accordingly also the content of any judgment – is a function of drawing distinctions and forming contrasting classifications of particulars of greater or lesser generality or specificity. This is Hegel’s Co-determination Thesis (§43). Moderate semantic holism, together with the failures of verificationist theories of linguistic meaning or conceptual content, pose a general problem regarding whether or how it is possible to assess the more general, comprehensive concepts involved in the principles which structure any significant conceptual network, since these general concepts are not linked very directly to empirical test; e.g., the enormous shift from Aristotelianism to Newtonianism, both in science and in common sense. This issue looms large already in the case of empirical systems of classification or empirical theories; it is even larger and more urgent within philosophy. One family of attempts to address this issue falls under the heading, ‘the pragmatic a priori’.34 Recently, some empiricists attempt to develop a pragmatic account of the a priori.35 Empiricism is too meagre a basis (cf. Anderson 2015; Westphal 2013a, 2016b); a much better basis, Hegel saw, is Kant’s Critical philosophy (cf. Buchdahl 1969). Recall one of Hegel’s insights: that even our broadest (non-formal) concepts, the principles they structure and their proper use can be assessed rationally, though only by attending to the social and the historical aspects of rational inquiry and rational justification. As noted, justification in non-formal domains requires more than logical deduction. Traditionally – and this tradition continued at least until 197036 – this ‘something more’ is supposed to be the collocation of experiential evidence, however understood. The problem is not simply one of understanding empirical justification in general. The fundamental problem is that justification in non-formal domains confronts 33

See Wick (1951), Kaplan (1971), HER 51–67. Lewis (1923), Rosenthall (1987), Pancheri (1971). 35 Hempel (1988), Wolters (2003), Mormann (2012). 36 Carnap’s final and most sophisticated version of empiricist semantics appeared in 1963; it was soon recognised to be flawed because its intended atomistic semantics was inconsistent with the contribution to meaning made by the logical syntax of observation reports (Kaplan 1971; HER 50–67). The limitations of the deductivist approaches to justification central to Logical Empiricism were acknowledged in Grünbaum and Salmon (1988). 34

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the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion. In non-formal domains the Dilemma of the Criterion refutes coherentist and foundationalist models of rational justification, and highlights the severe weaknesses of ‘Reflective Equilibrium’. One key to Hegel’s solving the Dilemma of the Criterion is to analyse, justify and exploit the possibility of constructive self-criticism. In the body of the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel uses his analysis to assess a broad, representative range of models of human knowledge and action, including scepticism. This assessment enables him to argue, on the one hand, that the Dilemma of the Criterion is soluble and on the other, that we are able to know the world itself, at least in part. Analysing and justifying our capacity to know the world itself, Hegel further argues, also requires our mutual critical assessment, because each of us is a decidedly finite rational being. We each know only a fragment of knowledge pertaining to any substantive issue of justification. We each have our own philosophical strengths, predilections and preferences – and their complementary shortcomings in other regards. Most basically, we are each fallible. Consequently, in any case of justifying or purporting to justify any significant, substantive claim or judgment, even the most scrupulously self-critical amongst us faces the difficulty in practice of determining whether or the extent to which we ourselves have justified our judgment because we have sufficiently fulfilled all relevant justificatory requirements, or whether instead we merely believe we have fulfilled those requirements and so merely believe we have justified our conclusion. To make this distinction reliably and effectively requires the constructive critical assessment of others; and likewise in each of their cases too. Consequently, in non-formal, substantive domains, rational justification is fundamentally a social phenomenon. In non-formal domains both principles and specific claims are and remain justified to the extent that they are adequate to their intended domains and are superior to their relevant alternatives, whether historical or contemporary. Hence in non-formal domains rational justification is fundamentally also an historical phenomenon. Hegel was the first to understand and to argue that these social and historical aspects of rational justification in non-formal domains are consistent with – indeed ultimately they justify – realism about the objects of empirical knowledge and strict objectivity about practical norms.37 It is still widely supposed that ‘pragmatic realism’ is oxymoronic. This supposition, Hegel rightly argued, rests on a series of false dichotomies – including, e.g., the points discussed earlier about social ontology and the Modern epistemological predicament (§106). Hegel elevated the history of philosophy to a specifically philo37

Regarding the strict objectivity provided by Hegel’s methods for identifying and justifying basic practical norms, see Westphal (2017d), (2018a).

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sophical discipline because he recognised (in the Phenomenology of Spirit) that comprehensive, critical, philosophical history of philosophy is essential to philosophical justification in non-formal, substantive domains. Consequently, cultural and intellectual history play central, ineliminable roles within rational justification in non-formal, substantive domains. Hence in justifying substantive philosophical views, history of philosophy plays a central, ineliminable role. Both Aristotle and Wilfrid Sellars understood this: Because philosophical issues are complex, elusive and easily obscured by incautious phrasing, one must consult carefully the opinions of the many and the wise. Sellars found the wise throughout philosophical history, from the pre-Socratics to the present day,38 because core issues regarding the logical forms of thought and the connection of thought with things are perennial, arising in distinctive, paradigmatic forms in each era. One result of Sellars’ (SM 67–9) expansive research is a catalogue and critical assessment of philosophical locutions, that is, of what might be called the ‘ordinary language’ of philosophers. Only by examining these can one find the most suitable, least misleading formulations of issues, specific theses, distinctions, and their relations. Sellars knew that the anti-systematic, piecemeal method of analytic puzzle-solving was doomed in its own terms by 1950 when Carnap adopted a moderately holistic semantics.39 Thus even when cast in the formal mode of speech – as analyses of terms or sentences – philosophy must be systematic, and it can be properly systematic only by also being historical. The interconnections amongst philosophical issues, both direct and indirect, provide crucial checks against inapt formulations. Ultimately, if surprisingly, Hegel’s transformation of Kant’s Transcendental Logic (Kant’s account of the cognitive roles of our basic categories (above, §§2, 3), meshes wonderfully well with Carnap’s account and use of conceptual explication, though Hegel provided the epistemology Carnap sought to circumvent. Conversely, Carnap’s (1931, 91; 1956b, 49–52) use of inference to specify the meanings of terms or concepts – by specifying which inference can, and which cannot, be drawn by using the term or concept in question – provides a vital hermeneutic tool for interpreting Hegel’s difficult texts, because Hegel contextually specified his terms, concepts and principles, and contextually redefined them as he developed his analyses.

38

E.g., Sellars (SM, 62, 71, 77) mentions Parmenides thrice; today’s counterparts to Heraclitus are radical sense-datum theorists, causal process time-slicers and trope theorists. 39 See Carnap (1950b), Wick (1951). Sellars and Herbert Feigl published Wick’s article in volume two of their journal, Philosophical Studies.

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110 CONCLUSION. Philosophers disregard the history of philosophy – and intellectual and cultural history more broadly – at their own peril, because philosophy – like all forms of human inquiry – is an historical and social, as well as rational phenomenon. Ignoring or dismissing these aspects of thought and inquiry, or neglecting the semantic and justificatory links between various issues or topics within philosophy, condemns us to the very relativism and historicism decried by ahistorical philosophers. Neglecting these social and historical dimensions tends to reduce philosophy to a talking shop, which would abnegate our intellectual responsibility, individually and collectively. The spectre of historicist relativism is exorcised by searching critique of the Modern epistemological predicament (§106) and by sober, critical assessment of the social and historical aspects of human inquiry and rational justification in substantive domains (§§83–91, 101–109). One central reason Hegel’s philosophy has been so widely misunderstood is that he recognised these points and made them central to his philosophy, starting in the (1807) Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he argued en detail that any tenable philosophical theory of human knowledge must take the natural sciences into very close consideration. Whatever may be the sympathies of some of his expositors, Hegel agreed with Carnap that we too have ‘emotional needs’ in philosophy, though these concern clarity of concepts, precision of methods, responsible theses, and achievement through cooperation in which each individual plays his part.40

Hegel referred to this as ‘the rigours of the concept’, and he repudiated well in advance Rorty’s advocacy of ‘edifying philosophy’.41 By now our societies should be sufficiently open, and our conceptual self-understanding sufficiently clear and cogent, to dispense with the fiction of the ahistorical, asocial atomistic person,42 and the fallacy that rejecting that fiction straps us with totalitarian collectivism or historicist relativism. These ideological fictions have too long severed philosophical issues from the rest of human life, abetting philosophical decline into sterile scholasticism, whilst granting too much public sway to poor reasoning, to faction and to outright unreason. This we cannot afford, ever again.

40

Carnap Aufbau (1928), 1st ed. Preface, penultimate paragraph; (1966), xx/(2003), xvii. PhdG GW 9:41.25/¶58, 9:12–14/¶¶7–10, resp.; cf. Rorty (1979/2009), 365–384. 42 This is part of the ‘individualism’ criticised by Tyler Burge (2005, 2007), which appears, e.g., in philosophical appeals to ‘Caruso cases’. 41

CHAPTER 16

Hegel’s Pragmatic Critique and Reconstruction of Kant’s System of Principles II: the Science of Logic and Encyclopaedia 111 INTRODUCTION. Peirce’s study of Kant, and later of Hegel, together with Dewey’s retention of much of Hegel’s social philosophy, are recognised idealist sources of pragmatism. However, the transition from idealism to pragmatic realism was already achieved by Hegel. Hegel’s ‘Objective Logic’ corresponds in part to Kant’s ‘Transcendental Logic’ (WdL I, 21:47.1–3). Hegel faults Kant for relegating concepts of reflection to an Appendix to his Transcendental Logic (WdL II, 12: 19.34–38), and for treating reason as ‘only dialectical’ and as ‘merely regulative’ (WdL II, 12:23.12, .16–17). This chapter extends the findings of chapter 9, regarding Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. There I highlighted three important features of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason which are key enthymemes undergirding Hegel’s critical reconstruction of Kant’s Critical philosophy, and summarised some features of the philosophical context within which Hegel began to re-assess and reconstruct Kant’s transcendental logic. That examination revealed several key steps towards pragmatic realism Hegel took in the 1807 Phenomenology. Building on those findings, this chapter identifies several significant features of Hegel’s pragmatic reconstruction of Kant’s Critical philosophy in the Science of Logic, which corroborate and integrate the previous findings, including: Hegel’s transcendental logic in the Science of Logic and Philosophy of Nature (§112), Hegel’s pragmatic account of the a priori (§113) and a key feature of Hegel’s use of the verb ‘realisieren’ in connection with concepts (§114). These three points are central to Hegel’s specifically cognitive semantics, which – building upon Kant’s Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference (§55.1) – Hegel developed into a systematic, pragmatic realism. Hegel’s re-analysis of Kant’s system of principles, in ‘Of the Transcendental Power of Judgment as such’ (KdrV B171–5), is thus the first and still one of the most sophisticated and adequate pragmatic – specifically pragmatic realist – accounts of the a priori. The pragmatic principle is a rule for clarifying terms, conceptions or principles, not only by interdefining them with others, but also by linking them in © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_0�7

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experience with their relevant domain(s). Christopher Hookway (2002, 46) states the pragmatic principle in these terms: ‘we provide a complete clarification of a conception by listing experiential consequences we would expect actions to have if the concept applies to some specified object’. Such lists may be long, complex, conditional and incomplete. If we take this pragmatic principle as paradigmatic of pragmatism, and distinguish it from verificationism (about conceptual content or about linguistic meaning), we can acknowledge that Hegel did not state, and so did not affirm, the pragmatic principle as such. However, the conjoint implications of several of Hegel’s central doctrines and analyses suffice to show that Hegel espoused and defended pragmatic realism, including a close cousin to the pragmatic maxim. These include: Hegel’s Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference (§112.4); his rejection of transcendent metaphysics (§112.9); his concern with the ‘realisation’ of conceptions and principles (§114); his (moderate) mental content, semantic and justificatory externalisms (§113.2); his social and historical analyses of the rational assessment and justification of our categories, principles and claims, both theoretical and practical (§§113.1, 113.5); his rooting theoretical reason in practical reason, and practical reason in our corporeal behaviour within our worldly and social context (§113.5); and his rooting of philosophy deeply within the natural and social sciences and cultural history (§§113.5, 113.6). These specifics of Hegel’s pragmatic realism are examined in three main stages: §112 examines Hegel’s critique of Kant’s ‘Analytic of Principles’; §113 examines Hegel’s pragmatic account of a priori conceptions; §114 undergirds the findings both sections by examining Hegel’s concern with the ‘realisation’ of our concepts and principles.1 112 TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC IN HEGEL’S SCIENCE OF LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE. 112.1 What of Kant’s Critique of Cognitive Principles can be Justified? If Transcendental Idealism is unjustified for strictly internal reasons (KTPR) as Hegel recognised by 1802 (above, §§25–29), then Hegel’s successor to Kant’s Transcendental Logic, his Science of Logic, must address the question, whether, how or to what extent can Kant’s Principles of cognitive judgment be revamped, augmented and justified? 112.2 Hegel’s Rejection of Rationalism. Hegel’s answer to this question is not 1 The conceptual pragmatism developed by Caruthers (1987) – the minimal thesis that what concepts we appropriately use is in part a matter of choices we make in view of purposes we have – is an inevitable consequence of Carnap’s conceptual explication, linguistic frameworks and their use, assessment and revisions. Caruthers recognises C.I. Lewis’s (MWO) lead, but neglects Carnap’s, James’ and Dewey’s views.

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the purely a priori exercise for which it is still too often mistaken. Taking Hegel’s Science of Logic to be purely a priori requires neglecting its relations to the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit and its many links to historically contingent and natural-scientific conceptions and issues (cf. Burbidge 1996, 2007), and overlooking important differences between Hegel’s own use of the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernables and Leibniz’s (Southgate 2014). The notion that Hegel’s Science of Logic must somehow be purely a priori is itself one of the host of presuppositions we are not to make when reading his book (WdL I, 21:27, 56). That notion precludes doing what Hegel insists we must do: to come to understand the character, aims, methods and findings of his Science of Logic as he develops them in the course of his analysis. The Hegel Mythology feeds upon four related shortcomings: 1. Mistaking Hegel’s views for what results from reading his texts through the lenses of traditional philosophical dichotomies and typologies which Hegel himself had, for considered and considerable reasons, assessed, criticised and rejected (cf. Stewart 1996); 2. Giving priority to (purported) exegesis over critical assessment, an approach which insures the longevity of hear-say and guarantees neglect an author’s concern to justify the views s/he espouses; 3. Neglecting Hegel’s interest and expertise in epistemology, mathematics and the natural sciences; 4. Neglecting issues of whether or how Hegel justified his purported views: recapitulating what Hegel purportedly argues or says evades rather than addresses this critical issue. These errors are illustrated (all too often) by mistaking Hegel for a mad rationalist who sought to relaunch comprehensive metaphysics by deriving it unilaterally from, well, absolutely nothing. The attribution to Hegel of unbridled metaphysical speculation can be traced, e.g., from Trendelenburg, McTaggart and Stace to Klaus Hartmann and Frederick Beiser.2 That Beiser (1995, 1996) disagrees sharply with Hartmann about the character of Hegel’s (purported) metaphysics is secondary to their equally unCritical approach to their favoured metaphysical misconstrual. Perhaps Beiser (2002, 467) is correct that Schelling was ‘the most inventive, brilliant and productive of all the absolute idealists, and indeed the most fertile’. Schelling’s affirmation of objective, organic teleology was important to the development of biology (Richards 2002). 2 Trendelenburg (1843, e.g., 12–13), McTaggart (1910, 1912), Stace (1924), Hartmann (1966, 1971, 1976), Beiser (2005), 53–109. On the closely related interpretations by Pippin, Stern and Houlgate, see Burbidge (2014). Houlgate’s stress on utter ‘presuppositionlessness’ likewise risks our having to be able to bootstrap our own cogitation into existence and proper (enough) functioning ex nihilo. This appears to be no more than wishful fantasy.

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However, it takes more than fancy to philosophise: Hegel dug into the details and understood the requirements and responsibilities of critical assessment and justification in ways Schelling never fathomed. E.g., Schelling responded to G.E. Schulze’s (1803) brilliant, anonymous reductio of intellectual intuitionism by appealing to Hegel’s 1802 essay on scepticism,3 whereas Hegel realised that Schulze had scuttled intellectual intuitionism as such (above, §§37–42, 92–99), so that the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion must instead be solved, which Hegel did (above, §§60–64, 83–91). Exposition or recapitulation of Hegel’s texts alone cannot reply cogently to Peirce’s early summary dismissal of Hegel’s procedure: ‘… Hegel … reaches each category from the last preceding by virtually calling “next!”’ (CP 1.453); Hegel’s presentations must be scrutinised, not only for their content (intension), but also assessed for their merits and for the justification Hegel provides for them. 112.3 The Empirical Grounds of Hegel’s Critique of Cognitive Principles. Deeply entrenched legend to the contrary not withstanding, much of the content, analysis and justification of Hegel’s Science of Logic – both in its original publication and within his Philosophical Encyclopaedia – is interconnected with his Realphilosophie, that is, with Hegel’s philosophies of nature and of spirit (below, §§122–131). Long before Alston (1986) made the point in such terms as these, and in sharp contrast to both his expositors and critics, Hegel recognised that not all forms of epistemic circularity are justificatorily vicious, thank goodness! This is one result of his analysis of the possibility of constructive self-criticism and mutual critical assessment (above, §§60–64, 83–91). Hegel develops a moderate form of conceptual holism by articulating the ways in which and the extent to which the content of our conceptions is defined by contrast and by reciprocal presupposition. Specifying and assessing such conceptual content is central to Hegel’s Science of Logic (WdL II, 12: 27–28), which examines concepts as classificatory and judgmental forms, and hence is not a ‘formal logic’ in any strict deductive sense.4 Hegel’s term ‘logic’ in his title recalls an earlier usage, common in the Modern period, which included syllogism and cognitive judgment, including both inference and perceptual judgment, within the domain of ‘logic’ (cf. Tonelli 1994). 112.4 Hegel’s Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference. Central and basic to Hegel’s Science of Logic is the Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference, which He3

See Schelling (1805), §64; SW 7:153, cf. 193; cf. Hegel (1802) and Schulze (1803). I agree with Redding (2015) that Hegel developed a ‘weak’ rather than a ‘strong’ (Brandomian) inferentialism about conceptual content (intension) and linguistic meaning. Hegel knew and understood purely formal deduction from his teacher in Tübingen, Gottfried Ploucquet, whom Hegel cites (WdL II, 12:110) to distinguish his Science of Logic from that purely deductive logic, and whom Church (1936, 125–6) cites as an important early exponent of purely deductive logic. On Brandom’s inferentialism, see below, §113.2. 4

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gel restates in these terms: … it is an essential proposition of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, that concepts without intuition are empty, and only have validity as connections of the manifold given through intuition. (WdL II, 12:19.15–18)

When Hegel calls this proposition ‘essential’ (wesentlich), he refers not only to its centrality within Kant’s philosophy, but to its philosophical centrality as such. Indeed, Hegel links the Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference (§52.1) to the synthetic propositions Kant sought to justify a priori, and to the transcendental unity of apperception. We can now understand several reasons why Hegel closely links these three doctrines – without appeal to Transcendental Idealism (nor to any such view) – exhibits a crucial epistemological, semantic and ontological insight.5 The objective reference of our conceptions to objects occurs in and is constituted through the original, a priori synthetic unity of apperception: if we were incapable of using any of our conceptual classifications in correct and justifiable cognitive judgments about some particular objects or events surrounding us, we could not identify ourselves in our awareness of them as being distinct to, and as aware of, them, and so would fail to be self-conscious in the ways we typically are (KTPR §65). This cognitive-semantic thesis holds from the micro level of integrating the sensed features of any one perceived spatio-temporal particular (KdrV B137, quoted by Hegel: WdL II, 12:18) to the macro level of integrating the observed positions of astronomical bodies into one comprehensive theory of our solar system; Hegel would have welcomed subsequent extension of astronomy via astrophysics into physical cosmology. One aspect of Hegel’s opening analysis in the Science of Logic, from ‘being’ up through ‘Dasein’ (existence or ‘being-there’), is that there is and can be no determinate thought without a determinate object of thought, one sufficiently structured so as to exist, to be somewhere at some time as something determinate, and to be identifiable as such (da sein zu können, seines daß-seins wegen6). In this regard, Hegel’s opening analysis in the Science of Logic corroborates and reconfirms his semantics of singular cognitive reference from the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit.7 Indeed, this semantics of singular cognitive reference is crucial to Hegel’s aim to specify conceptual categories and principles which ‘can be true’ (WdL II, 12:27.17–20, 28.8–18). In this regard, Hegel’s Science of Logic contributes centrally to meeting the requirement from Tetens and Kant of demonstrating 5

On non-subjective forms of idealism, see Gersh and Moran (2006). Cf. Düsing (1987), whose happy phrasing I rephrase for present purposes. 7 I do not claim this is all Hegel attempts or achieves in the opening triad of WdL; only that this is one of his aims and achievements there. 6

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that our fundamental categories can be ‘realised’ (realisiert), insofar as we can identify and localise objects, events, structures or phenomena which instantiate them (per above, §108). This is Hegel’s central reason for critically examining the content of our conceptions and principles, starting already in the 1807 Phenomenology (Westphal 2009b), and continuing in much greater detail in the Science of Logic. 112.5 Hegel’s Reconfiguration of Kant’s Modal Categories. One of Hegel’s key points, elaborately revised in the second edition of Book 1 of the Science of Logic (Ferrini 1988, 1991–92), is that Kant’s conception of the distinctive character of the categories of modality – namely, that they add nothing to the conception of the (putatively known) object, but express only its relation to our cognitive capacity (KdrV B266) – does not hold of the categories ‘possible’, ‘actual’ or ‘necessary’, nor of any of Kant’s Categories or Principles.8 The closest any cognitive category comes to satisfying Kant’s characterisation of modality, as specifying merely the relation of a known particular to the knowing subject, is ‘measure’ (Maß), though even measure concerns quantitative specification of one or more characteristics of some object or phenomenon. This point bears stressing, because Hegel’s first edition of the Doctrine of Being (1812) allows that measure can be regarded as a modality (WdL I, GW 11: 20), a conciliatory remark conspicuous by its absence from Hegel’s thoroughly revised second edition of the Doctrine of Being (1831).9 The proper measure (Maß) of something specifies numerically one of its qualities, including variable qualities. Only because constitutive qualities of things or events can be measured appropriately rather than arbitrarily – e.g., by naturally occurring rates, ratios or periods – is quantified natural science possible. Indeed, natural philosophy becomes quantified exact natural science as the sciences of measure, which discern appropriate measures of natural events and phenomena.10 Such measures intimate conditions under which (or according to which) the variable quantities of any natural quality occur. In this regard, measure anticipates more robust modal categories by anticipating the identification of conditional necessities, and the constitutive dispositions – causal powers – of entities which manifest these conditional necessities. Hegel expressly criticises Kant’s account of modality in just this connection at the beginning of his chapter on measure (WdL I, 11:189.16–24, 21: 323.13–324.10.)11 8

Cf. WdL I, 21:66–7, esp. 67.11–17; 323.1–234.10, 11:42.1–6, cf. 12:84. I thank Cinzia Ferrini for reminding me of this important point. 10 This shift can be seen to occur methodologically, conceptually and terminologically in the debate between Newton and Huygens about optics in 1673 (Westphal 2009b, §5.2). 11 Logical empiricists advocated sheer conventionalism about measurement. Conventionalism about measurement is mistaken because it neglects the cogency of synthetic 9

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Hegel further argues in the Doctrine of Essence that a complete conception of any kind of thing (Sache) includes its constitutive causal characteristics, whereas a complete conception of any specific thing (Ding) would further include its specific causal history (cf. WdL I, 11:344–7). Accordingly, Kant is mistaken to hold that a complete conception of any thing prescinds from the questions whether it is possible, actual or necessary (KdrV B266), and Hegel is right to remove these categories from Kant’s classification of merely ‘modal’ (merely ‘epistemic’) conceptions. Indeed, only by comprehending the proper conception of something can we forge any properly cognitive relation to it and thus cognise – comprehend, know – it. Furthermore, Kant’s four kinds of Principles are insufficiently integrated, and three of these sets (Kant’s Axioms, Anticipations and Postulates) are too glibly ‘justified’ in terms of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and its consequent constructivism; ‘systematic’ Kant’s presentation is not, nor is it complete, for developments in the natural sciences during Kant’s lifetime – especially in chemistry and biology – outstripped his focus in the Critique of Pure Reason upon narrowly mechanical forms of causation and explanation, a restriction unresolved by the Critique of Judgment, according to which biological life cannot be objectively cognised because in principle mechanical explanations are insufficient whilst teleological judgments are merely heuristic.12 Three further shortcomings of Kant’s System of Principles can be detailed concisely (§§112.6–112.8). Kant’s Principles, Hegel realised, require further and more systematic development, including complementary causal modalities to make any determinate, cognitively legitimate use of Kant’s epistemic modalities and indeed of our most basic conceptual categories. 112.6 ‘The’ Causal Principle: General or Specific? These issues are, Hegel realised, closely connected with Kant’s subsequent realisation that the Categories require spatial as well as temporal schemata (above, §55.3). Whilst correct, providing spatial schemata would still not specify ‘general though sufficient marks’ for ‘the conditions under which objects corresponding to’ the categories ‘can be given’ (KdrV A136/B175). One reason for this is the following. The only causal principle Kant states in the Critique of Pure Reason is unrestricted: ‘Every event has a cause’. However, the principle required for Kant’s Principles of causal judgment in the Analogies of Experience is more necessary truths (Toulmin 1949) and, most importantly, the semantic and justificatory externalism inherent in establishing measurement procedures and scales, namely, that they require, not only theory plus procedure, but also the good fortune to measure a robust natural regularity which is sufficiently unperturbed by further, unknown factors; see Laymon (1991), Parrini (2009). I do not claim Hegel identified or anticipated this specific failing of conventionalism; I note it to corroborate the significance of Hegel’s concern with measure, and to deflect a typical, yet ill-considered rejoinder. 12 Kant, KdU §§64–6; cf. Ferrini (2004); (2009a), 106.

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specific and restricted: Every spatio-temporal event has a distinct, external spatio-temporal cause (or causes). Kant first states this specific causal principle in The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, where he recognised that it cannot be justified on transcendental grounds alone, but also requires Critical metaphysics. However, not even Kant’s Critical metaphysics suffices to justify this specific causal principle, because Kant ultimately presupposes – rather than demonstrates on Critical metaphysical grounds – that hylozoism is false (above, §28.3.2; KTPR, §57). By 1801 Hegel knew that Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations fails to justify dynamic, causal interaction between distinct physical events (above, §§25–29). 112.7 Transcendental Analysis cannot be Purely a Priori. This failure is closely linked to a second reason why adding spatial schemata is insufficient for specifying ‘general though sufficient marks’ for ‘the conditions under which objects corresponding to’ the Categories ‘can be given’: Any spatio-temporal particular or phenomenon we can identify, we cannot identify simply as instantiating Kant’s Categories as such. Instead, recognising any spatio-temporal particular as instantiating any of the Categories requires identifying and individuating it by recognising a variety of its manifest non-categorial characteristics, foremost among these: its occurrent sensed qualities. Such identification is also required to solve the (sensory and intellectual) binding problems (above, §57.3) in each and every case in which we successfully identify and individuate any spatio-temporal particular of any kind or scale. Kant recognised that we use the Categories in conjunction with whatever empirical conceptions we have which pertain to the individual in question, but he did not regard this ubiquitous – indeed crucial – aspect of our competent use of the Categories to be a specifically transcendental issue, although it is a necessary function to be effected by Kant’s Transcendental Power of Imagination for the very possibility of human apperception. Hegel is right that this issue is transcendental, though not ‘pure’ a priori in the ways Kant claims for the Critique of Pure Reason (B3; cf. Cramer 1985). The issue is transcendental because competent conjoint use of the Categories and relevant empirical conceptions is required to identify any particular whatever, and so is required for us to distinguish ourselves from at least some particulars of which we are aware, etc.. In exactly this connection Hegel is correct (above, §57.1), that the Concepts of Reflection – identity and difference, agreement and opposition (or: compatibility and incompatibility), inner and outer – have crucial constitutive roles to play in our identifying and individuating any and all individuals of which we can be self-consciously aware: They are required to use the conceptions ‘cause’ and ‘particular’ in differentiating amongst the various objects, events, processes and phenomena surrounding

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us, filling our sensory-perceptual field, to identify any of their constitutive characteristics and relations and to distinguish these from other incidental characteristics or relations. Kant touches on this crucial point only in passing in the Transcendental Deduction: If for example through apprehension of its manifold I thus make the empirical intuition of a house into a perception, this I do on the basis of the necessary unity of space and the outer sensory intuition as such, and as it were I draw its form in accord with this synthetic unity of the manifold in space. (KdrV §26, B162)

By showing that and how perceptual judgments and causal judgments are discriminatory, Kant implicitly (though correctly) showed that any causal judgment about the character of the causal relation now observed involves two – in his terms (KdrV B97–8) – infinite (negative) judgments that the present case is neither of the other two kinds of causal scenario. Likewise, the discriminatory character of perceptual judgment involves negative infinite judgments by which we distinguish any particular we perceive from other perceptible particulars both spatio-temporally and by their contrasting manifest (sensed, occurrent) characteristics. These contrastive, discriminatory judgments require constitutive use of the Concepts of Reflection, foremost those of ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ and of ‘unity’ and ‘plurality’, to perceive and to self-consciously identify any spatio-temporal particular(s) of which we are aware. Only successful, conjoint, constitutive use of the conceptions ‘space’, ‘spaces’, ‘time’, ‘times’, ‘individual’, ‘individuation’, ‘identity’, ‘diversity’, ‘unity’, ‘plurality’, ‘spatio-temporal cause’ and ‘I’, together with conceptions of relevant sensed qualities, affords us any ‘realisation’ – any demonstrable and demonstrated instantiation – of any of these conceptions. Only when used conjointly are these conceptions able to be true, however minimal or maximal may be this particular truth on this particular occasion regarding this or these perceived, discriminated, individuated particular(s). In these fundamental regards, Hegel’s analysis of our basic conceptions and principles and their humanly possible, legitimate cognitive use is far more systematic and integrated than Kant’s, for it tightly integrates these several points (above, §§43–46, 57), and indeed: in strong support of realism about the objects of human knowledge (above, §§65–70). 112.8 Transcendental Analysis must be Pragmatic. In all of these regards, Hegel profoundly reconstructs Kant’s System of Principles, and does so pragmatically, because he realised, not only that sound transcendental analysis and proof can dispense with Kant’s official restriction to ‘pure’ a priori transcendental conditions of human experience, cognition and agency, but because sound transcendental analysis and proof must dispense with Kant’s official

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restriction. A very basic reason for this conclusion lies in the fallacy of Kant’s purported proof, in the Anticipations of Perception, that because everything real in appearance has an intensity, that intensity has a continuous magnitude (KdrV A166–7/B207–8). This is a non sequitur: In this significant regard Kant oversimplified the quantifiability of natural phenomena. This is one reason Hegel discusses discontinuous functions with such avidity and in such detail in Book I of the Science of Logic (WdL I, 11:121–2, 21:275.31–276.22). This point reflects Hegel’s life-long awareness of the empirical bases for the correct formulation, use and assessment of categorial conceptions and principles (including mathematical quantification), a theme highlighted by his physics instructor Pfleiderer (cf. herein, §§56.1, 123.6). 112.9 Hegel’s Rejection of Transcendent Metaphysics. In significant contrast to Kant, Hegel recognised that the Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference (above, §§2.3, 55.1, 57.1, 57.3, 112.4) suffices to reject all transcendent metaphysics – whether pre-Critical or contemporary, or any ontological (mis)interpretation of Kant’s Transcendental Idealist concept of Dinge an sich – so that Transcendental Idealism is not required to combat metaphysical excesses, including purported determinism about human action (below, §§142–146). In this regard, too, Hegel’s views are profoundly, pragmatically realist. As with robust pragmatic realism, Hegel’s rejection of transcendent metaphysics is not verificationist. Hegel’s rejection turns not on a thesis about conceptual content (intension) or linguistic meaning, but on a basic referential requirement of any candidate cognitive claim (in any non-formal domain), that to have a determinate truth value (or value as an approximation), for this value to be determinable (specifiable), for this claim to have a justificatory status and for this status to be determinable (specifiable), all require locating and individuating the particulars about which that claim purports to be a claim. This thesis holds independently of whether knowledge is cast in terms of sentences, statements or judgments, and of whether it involves a priori, empirical, hybrid or intermediate conceptions. 112.10 Hegel’s Pragmatism is Rooted in Natural Science. Central to Hegel’s issues in the Science of Logic are two key features of quantitative natural science. First, quantitative laws of nature cannot be justified simply by mathematics (WdL I, 21:272) – pace Galileo’s kinematics and Newton’s statics of fluids.13 Second, the natural sciences use conceptions and principles which they do not fully articulate and assess. Such conceptions and principles are open invitations to a priorist philosophers, such as Descartes and Kant, who insist that physical sciences require prior and independent metaphysical founda13

Galilei, Opere, 7:171–3; (1967), 145–8; letter to Pietro Carcavy, 5 June, 1637 (Opere, 17:90–1); Newton, Principia, Bk. II Prop. XIX.

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tions.14 Hegel foreclosed on such metaphysical speculations by philosophical explication of basic scientific conceptions and principles within their explanatory domain(s), to show how they are closely inter-defined in ways which anticipate and found their quantitative as well as their qualitative relations, and which resolve what (e.g.) Descartes and Kant mistook for open metaphysical questions.15 112.11 Hegel’s Functionalism and Emergentism. A further central aim of Hegel’s Science of Logic is to show the ways in which and the extent to which mechanical systems can be self-regulating (as mechanical oscillators) in order to differentiate properly between mechanical, chemical, functional or teleological and properly organic functions, and in order to outline the basic ways in which organic life is possible only through interaction with its organised environment, in which organisms intervene.16 Hegel’s analysis of the conception of life is explicative, not explanatory. Accordingly, Hegel’s view is independent of scientific issues about the truth of natural selection. Hegel rejected natural selection because at that time it lacked sufficient empirical evidence. His philosophical system, however, can readily incorporate natural selection; he would agree with the Classical Pragmatists in taking biological evolution very seriously. Already in the Introduction to ‘Self-Consciousness’ and in ‘Lord and Bondsman’ Hegel argued cogently that our conceptual, classificatory thought is rooted in our biological needs and capacities, and in our labouring – at first altogether manually – upon the materials we need and want (above, §§71–82; HER, 160–2). 112.12 In all of these fundamental regards, Hegel’s model of philosophical science revamps Aristotle’s meta ta physica on the basis of modern natural sciences. In effect, Hegel agrees with Galileo (Opere, 7:75–6/1974, 63) that, if he had fuller observational information about nature, Aristotle would have revised his first principles. 113 HEGEL’S PRAGMATIC A PRIORI. 113.1 Hegel’s Pragmatic Development of Kant’s Constructivism. Another major achievement of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology is to further develop Kant’s constructive method for identifying and justifying his inventory of our basic cognitive capacities, discussed in the Transcendental Doctrine of Method (O’Neill 1992), and central also to Kant’s moral philosophy, including his universalisation tests (O’Neill 1989; Westphal 2016a, §§18–23). Hegel developed 14

See Descartes’ letter to Mersenne, 29 June 1638. WdL, GW 11:344–7, 21:340–1; cf. Falkenburg (1987), 91–241; Moretto (2004). 16 See, respectively, Burbidge (1996), de Vries (1991), Ferrini (2009b, 2011), and Ferrini (2010). 15

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Kant’s constructive method into a sound social and historical account of rational justification in non-formal, substantive domains. Hegel achieved this result by linking his account of the possibility of constructive self-criticism in the Introduction (not the Preface) to the Phenomenology of Spirit (above, §§60–64) with his sustained and thorough criticisms of individualism about the mental throughout ‘Self-Consciousness’, ‘Reason’ and ‘Spirit’ and with his ultimate analysis of mutual recognition and its fundamental role in constructive mutual, critical assessment in ‘Evil and Forgiveness’ (above, §§80, 89). Hegel demonstrates that individual rational judgment, of the kind required for rational justification in non-formal, substantive domains – i.e., in empirical knowledge or in morals (both ethics and justice) – is in fundamental part socially and historically based, although these social and historical aspects of rational justification are consistent with realism about the objects of empirical knowledge and with strict objectivity about basic moral principles. Hegel’s central thesis is that, to judge fully rationally that one judges – in ways which provide rational justification of one’s judgment about any substantive matter – requires recognising one’s inherent fallibility and consequently also recognising our mutual interdependence for assessing our own and each others’ judgments and their justification. This explication provides a pragmatic account of rational justification in substantive domains which puts paid to the traditional distinction, still influential today, between ‘rational’ and ‘historical’ knowledge, as also to the bogey of historicist relativism (cf. Beiser 1993). Many pragmatists understandably share Peirce’s (1877) deep suspicion of a priori methods, and hence reject transcendental analysis and proof. However, carefully crafted transcendental analysis and proof are consistent with pragmatic fallibilism (Westphal 2003b), as C.I. Lewis (MWO) demonstrated – like Hegel – in direct connection with the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold (cf. Westphal 2010b, §2). Indeed, Hegel’s attention to the a priori transcendentally necessary use of impurely a priori conceptions and principles discussed above (§§27–29, 112.7) directly extends his early critical probing of Kant’s transcendental power of imagination and the transcendental affinity of sensory manifold (above, §§34–36). His early rejection of Hegel’s views not withstanding, Peirce later came to admire Hegel’s radical re-analysis of logical categories, especially those concerning essence (Wesen; see Kaag 2011), which is reflected in the correspondences between Kant’s Principles and Hegel’s Science of Logic reviewed above (§51). Peirce appears to have realised later that Hegel’s Science of Logic does not rely on ‘the a priori method’ of fixing belief Peirce had criticised earlier. 113.2 Hegel’s Anti-Cartesian Externalisms. Though the designations are recent, Kant had already argued, soundly on transcendental grounds, for men-

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tal content externalism and for justificatory externalism: 1. Mental Content Externalism: In at least some significant cases, specifying the content of some mental state(s) requires specifying features of the subject’s environment, or of their own somatic states. 2. Justificatory Externalism: In at least some significant cases, the justificatory status of a person’s belief, claim or judgment depends upon (some) factor(s) of which s/he need not be (readily) aware simply by introspection or reflection. Both theses belong to Kant’s profound anti-Cartesian revolt (Westphal 2007), a revolt Hegel carried forward, indeed so boldly that we still struggle to bring his insights and contributions into proper philosophical focus. Hegel adopted and further developed both of these externalist theses. To these Hegel added: 3. Semantic Externalism: In at least some significant cases, the content of conceptions or the meaning of terms (intension) is in part a function of those aspects of the (natural or social) world to which their use pertains. Semantic externalism is expressed in Hegel’s treatment, in the Science of Logic, of the tight interconnections between the Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference, the transcendental unity of apperception, synthetic a priori judgments and Kant’s Refutation of Idealism (cf. above §§44.4, 51, 57, 68). Semantic externalism is central to Hegel’s grounding theoretical reason in practical reason, and practical reason in our bodily actions in their worldly context, in his critique of the alleged Self-Sufficiency of Self-Consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit (above, §68). Semantic externalism is also central to Hegel’s analysis of the self-critical structure of consciousness (above, §§63, 88), which further supports his justificatory externalism. 113.3 Hegel’s Moderate Semantic Holism. Having recognised that categorial and empirical conceptions are mutually interdependent for their use, and that their use requires discriminatory judgments by which we individuate particulars by locating them amongst other particulars within our surroundings (however locally or globally specified; above, §§43, 108), Hegel also advanced a moderate semantic holism and a moderate justificatory holism. In both cases I say ‘moderate’ to indicate Hegel’s stress upon the interdependence of particular, general and universal conceptions, judgments, principles, cognitive claims and their cognitive use and justification. Like Lewis (MWO 107), and as Carnap ultimately admitted (cf. Kaplan 1971), Hegel realised that our conceptions and categories are mutually interdefined. Their (respective) understandings of these mutual interdefinitions must be distinguished from Quine’s. Quine occluded these significant relations in two basic regards: First, by his unarticulated and inarticulate contrast between the ‘periphery’ and the

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‘interior’ of our purported ‘system[s] of statements’ (Quine 1951a, 39–43; 1961, 42–6), a radical holism not at all improved when Quine (1990, §10) adopted the equally unarticulated, equally inarticulate notion of ‘semantic mass’; second, Quine’s neglect of the many cognitive and semantic differences between the ‘interpretation’ of a logical calculus and the use of any scientific theory in the actual investigation of its natural or social domain. Quine’s notion of ontological commitment concerns ‘theories’ interpreted as having some model or other.17 Scientific theories, however, are not by themselves any guide to what exists; that guidance they provide only in connection with experimental and observational procedures, including the evidence collected and assessed as (interim) results of actual scientific investigations, none of which is visible from Quine’s lofty ‘logical point of view’.18 In contrast to Quine’s extentionalist logical point of view, though much like Peirce, Hegel valiantly sought to articulate the fundamental structure and sub-structures of our conceptual systems, because he realised that only by specifying, differentiating and interrelating our conceptions, principles and judgments as thoroughly as we can, can we properly assess their adequacy and their proper scope, domain(s) and use.19 Both assessments are central to Hegel’s lead question of whether or to what extent our fundamental categories, principles and judgments ‘can be true’ (WdL II, 12:27.17–20, 28,8–18). 113.4 Hegel’s Pragmatism is Robustly Realist, not Neo-Pragmatist. All these considerations are brought to bear, e.g., in Hegel’s analysis of perceptual judgment in the Science of Logic, as nicely re-examined by Paul Redding (2014). To Redding’s (2015) critique of Brandom I add Hegel’s manifold, sophisticated forms of externalism and the Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference. Brandom’s ‘strong inferentialism’ remains committed to semantics as first philosophy, and to a sophisticated form of semantic internalism, insofar as inferentially articulated propositional contents are his philosophical arché for all else, including epistemology and ontology. Brandom (2008, 200) adopts Hegel’s phrase ‘determinate negation’ and continues to presume it means the kinds of sentential negations basic to his own strong inferentialism. Brandom’s (2008, 123–6) incompatibility semantics is based upon propositional negations, but if his semantics is not to be an exercise in pure axiomatics, those negations must be rooted in and reflect material incompatibilities of de facto, ultimately natural occurrences and their characteristics (cf. Brandom 17 Quine (1951b, 11) states: ‘On several occasions I have urged, in substance, that 1. The ontology to which an (interpreted) theory is committed comprises all and only the objects over which the bound variables of the theory have to be construed as ranging in order that the statements affirmed in the theory be true.’ 18 For detailed criticism of Quine’s semantics, see Murphey (2012), Westphal (2105b). 19 See above, §§108–109; cf. Westphal (2009b, 2014).

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2008, 47–8). Hence his incompatibility semantics can at best explicate these material phenomena, but cannot constitute them. This requires a realism and a naturalism which Brandom, loyal to Rorty, rejects and seeks to avoid. Hegel himself means something quite different by ‘determinate negation’; he introduced the phrase and used the methods so designated in connection with assessing forms of consciousness or philosophical views through strictly internal critique (above, §§61–64, 87, 90.1; HER 119–28). Furthermore, sentential negation cannot do the job Brandom assigns to it. Sentential negation only generates content if the sentence negated has some (antecedent) semantic content or other (Trendelenberg 1840, 31; 1846, 361). Simply negating uninterpreted sentential variables is semantically vacuous. Semantically interpreted sentential variables, however, have their semantic content prior to and independent of their negation – for any case whatever, however elementary, simple or basic. To obtain any semantic content via sentential negation, at least one semantically interpreted, semantically significant sentence must be presupposed, rather than explicated, by Brandom’s inferentialist semantics. This problem has been at the core of Brandom’s semantics since 1983; others, too, noticed it then.20 Brandom’s (2008) recent reworking of his view has not addressed that problem. By treating our differential corporeal responses to worldly circumstances strictly ‘naturalistically’ (i.e., causally), Brandom inherits a weakness of Sellars’ treatment of sensations as only belonging to the causal order – a weakness central to Rorty’s dismissal of realism21 – and misses Dretske’s insights into the semantic character of information states and their transmissibility, which accords very well with

20 In 1983 Brandom kindly allowed me to audit his first Hegel seminar. The problem is concisely detailed by Rosenkranz (2001) and remains unresolved in Brandom’s (2008); closely related problems are detailed by Dohrn (2009). Brandom’s (2014, 1:28) work in progress on Hegel’s Phenomenology also claims that Hegel means by ‘determinate negation’ what Brandom means by the phrase. This mistaken attribution remains uncorrected from 1983. I do not object to the philosophical genre, ‘thoughts had whilst perusing pages of x’; it can be fruitful. I dissent strongly to mistaking that genre for philosophical scholarship, especially when committed by readers. It is hard to know which is more deplorable: Brandom’s continuing cavalier approach to (inter alia) Hegel’s texts after many of its inevitable shortcomings were brought clearly to his attention (Eason 2007), or Brandom’s treatment of Hegel being lionised by Germans (München 2011, Berlin 2014) who neglect philosophically and exegetically far superior work by, e.g., Wieland (1966), Theunissen (1975) or Cramer (1976), all of which have been republished in standard reference collections. Brandom’s (2014) main title for his ms. is ‘A Spirit of Trust’. His attributions to Hegel are, however, chronically untrustworthy; caveat emptor! 21 E.g., where Rorty (1972, 650, 651 n.1; 1984, 4, 17 n.1; cf. 1979, 154), disregarding (inter alia) Kant’s distinction between sensations and empirical intuitions, claims that ‘unsynthesized intuitions drop out’ of account. According to Kant, there is no such ‘unsynthesised sensory intuition’.

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Kant’s, Hegel’s and Sellars’s sensationist account of sensations.22 Tracking, articulating or expressing content which is (at least in part) sensory is not the same as constituting that content merely inferentially. Brandom’s strong inferentialism exhibits the pervasive neo-pragmatist tendency to hold any first- or lower-order language and its (purported) objects hostage to his preferred (strong inferentialist) meta-language. This is why ‘experience’ is not one of Brandom’s (2000, 205n.7) ‘words’, and why the ‘analytic pragmatism’ ‘toward’ which Brandom (2008) is working is decidedly neo-pragmatist rather than pragmatist. Brandom is working entirely within that mainstream of analytic philosophy which sought, and still seeks, to supplant epistemology with philosophy of language. In just this regard Brandom (2008, v) is ‘still rewriting [his] dissertation’ for Richard Rorty. As has been indicated, Kant’s and Hegel’s semantics of singular cognitive reference, and the constitutive role of justification in knowledge (and in reasonable belief) entail that epistemology cannot be reduced to, nor supplanted by, philosophy of language or philosophy of mind. Merely saying or believing that S is (or is not) justified in believing f, does not suffice, and most certainly does not constitute S’s being cognitively justified. At the very least, S’s cognitive neuro-physio-psychology must be sound and function properly, for S to be cognitively justified in believing or saying anything. Our neuro-physio-psychology makes possible our various forms of discourse and mindedness, not vice-versa. This is a simple corollary to Hegel’s critique of Fichte’s (early) Self-Sufficiency Thesis (above, §§73–77, 80); Brandom’s strong inferentialist semantics is inconsistent this basic aspect of the natural bases of human cognizance (below, §§136, 137). 113.5 Formalised Meta-Languages and Semantic Externalism. The priority within analytic philosophy of meta-languages over first-order languages was undermined when Carnap (1950a 1–18) explicated his method of conceptual explication, which he had implicitly used from at least 1928. Within any nonformal domain – i.e., outside pure axiomatics – recourse to meta-languages can only be fruitful and informative, and can only be assessed, by examining all the more closely the original – antecedent or current – contexts of use in which the explicated terms or phrases have sense, meaning and point. Unlike conceptual analysis, and however unwelcome these implications would have been to Carnap, conceptual explication involves fundamental aspects of semantic externalism: that linguistic meaning and conceptual content are rooted in our corporeal and social practices, which themselves are rooted in our 22 Though I appeal to Dretske’s (1981) account of information and its transmission, I do not endorse his overly simplified account of information decoding; see Westphal (2003a), §§26–28. Brandom (2001) discusses Dretske (1986), but neglects Dretske’s (1990), (1994), and thus misrepresents Dretske’s views on information and misrepresentation. (Dretske 2000b would have appeared too recently for Brandom 2001 to note.)

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natural and social world. These features of linguistic meaning and conceptual content can be explicated, articulated and – with discernment – refined by philosophical reflection, i.e., conceptual explication, perhaps using formalised techniques, though only insofar as these fundamental aspects of semantic externalism are acknowledged in practice – and all the better in theory too. Philosophy of language – and philosophy of mind – can augment epistemology, but cannot supplant it, because (at the very least) neither the phenomena of cognitive justification nor the relevant concepts of cognitive justification are reducible to the concepts, principles or theories of philosophy of language or philosophy of mind.23 Matters can appear otherwise within Brandom’s strong inferentialism only because, and to the extent, that his inferentialist meta-language successfully tracks – that is, follows: reiterates but does not account for – first-order cognitive phenomena, including our justified and justifiable cognitive judgments and our sapient, sensory discrimination of informative natural states of affairs. Hegel already understood these points very well, having recognised the failures of Kant’s attempt to ground physics a priori in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, which in turn was to be grounded by the transcendental Critique of Pure Reason. The minimal semantic content presupposed by any sentential negation, is, in Hegel’s view, in part a function of our sensory experience of the world and what it makes manifest to us. This thesis, however, does not require aconceptual experience, nor any recourse to mythical givenness; this is one direct, important implication of Hegel’s analysis of the self-critical structure of our consciousness of objects, and also of the Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference. Brandom’s strong inferentialism may be in part inspired by Hegel, but most definitely it is not Hegel’s view. Hegel’s genetic method (WdL I, 11:8.4–9, 21:8:16–21) is, like Hume’s, also an analytical method, because it incrementally identifies the proper scope, limits and conditions for the proper use of our conceptions, principles and judgments. Developing, assessing and revising our conceptions, principles and judgments is an historical and social process. For this reason Hegel elevated history of philosophy to a philosophical discipline, because he realised that only by comprehending the insights and the oversights of our predecessors can we identify the character, content and suitability of our current terms, analyses and views. Amongst pragmatists, Peirce and Wilfrid Sellars recognised the philosophical significance of the history of philosophy, in marked contrast to its cavalier mishandling by neo-pragmatists (cf. above, §§100–110). 113.6 Conceptual Analysis, Logical Possibility and Explication. Conceptual analysis classically aspired to providing necessary and sufficient conditions for 23

Cf. Hookway (2003), Westphal (2014).

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the proper use of some problematic concept, term, phrase or principle. This accords with the infallibilist assumptions about justification sufficient for knowledge which held sway in analytical epistemology until Gettier (1963). It also accords with the a priori aspirations of epistemologies aiming to refute global perceptual scepticism. Conceptual analysis, in brief, accords with the Cartesianism inherited from early Modern philosophy, also in its empiricist branches. (Hume had recommended studying Descartes writings as propaedeutic to studying his own.) Such Cartesianism, infallibilism and a priorism linger in the prevalent assumption that mere logical possibilities of an alternative suffice to refute a conceptual ‘analysis’. It is significant that Kant recognised that conceptual analysis is insufficient for addressing substantive philosophical issues (KdrV B264, 408), and that the a priori concepts of concern to him – the Categories – cannot be defined or analysed, but only explicated, that is: partially expounded for the purposes of a particular inquiry and use (KdrV B25–8, 108–9). It is significant that Kant (KdrV B755–8) and Carnap (above, §102) drew very much the same distinction between conceptual analysis and conceptual explication, and for very nearly the same reasons, despite their disagreement about a priori concepts and their significance. Kant regretted lacking a German counterpart to ‘explicatio’ (KdrV, B758); Hegel adopted and employed the Germanisms ‘Explikation’ and ‘explizieren’, adding them to the second edition of Book I of the Logic.24 Hegel’s use of the terms ‘Explication’, ‘explizieren’ and their cognates clearly indicates that he regards this as central to his methods. Hegel agreed with Kant that many fundamental concepts are a priori, insofar as they cannot be defined or acquired in accord with concept empiricism, though unlike Kant yet very much in accord with Carnap’s explication and use of ‘explication’, Hegel recognised that the adequacy of any conceptual explication can only be assessed within possible contexts of its actual use (and not within merely imaginary contexts of its allegedly possible use). This holds for individual concepts, terms, phrases or principles, and for any fragments of languages to which they are central (or even relevant). Due to moderate semantic holism (above, §§109, 113.3), the more general is the meaning or significance of concepts, terms, phrases or principles, the more broad-scale must be the context within which they are explicated, and within which their explications are assessed. Consequently, informed, careful history of philosophy – and intellectual history more broadly – is required for informed, insightful philosophical explication and assessment of broad, general concepts and principles – as distinct to conceptual analysis. The significance of Hegel’s use of conceptual explication is reinforced by some important, neglected points about his 24

WdL I, 21:127.7, 157.3; cf. Enz. §§10, 84, 280Z, 334R, 464R, 573R.

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account of ‘the realisation of the concept’. Examining these points further corroborates, reinforces and integrates the findings of this and the preceding section (§§112, 113). 114 HEGEL’S ONTOLOGY AND THE REALISATION OF THE CONCEPT. 114.1 I have argued that in central regards Hegel developed a sophisticated pragmatic realism, and that his pragmatic realism is in several important regards sound, whilst hardly mentioning a key term in these issues: idealism, other than to indicate Hegel’s rejection of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Typically, the ontological sense of ‘idealism’ is taken to connote the dependence of some particular’s existence or characteristics (or both) upon some numerically distinct mind. Hegel deliberately and expressly used the term ‘idealism’ in a broader sense, indicating ontological dependence, not specifically upon minds, but upon anything else. Hegel’s idealism is a moderate ontological holism (not a block universe), deliberately consistent with realism about the objects of empirical knowledge (HER, 145–5). Nevertheless, myths die hard, especially amongst their proponents, and the notion that, somehow, Hegel’s fully fledged Weltgeist is supposed to generate itself ex nihilo through the self-realisation of the concept, dies especially hard, especially amongst Hegel’s detractors. A few sensible words here about Hegel’s uses of the term ‘realise’ (and its cognates) serve to corroborate the preceding interpretation and to disarm some habitual objections. (For brevity I set aside Hegel’s social ontology and philosophy of history.) 114.2 Hegel uses the term ‘realise’ in three basic, related ways. One concerns the ‘realisation’ of an aim or goal through action, by achieving that aim or goal (e.g., Enz. §204). 114.3 A second is Tetens’ and Kant’s sense of the term, i.e., demonstrating that a conception or principle has instances by locating relevant instances (Westphal 1998ab, §8). As Redding (2014) rightly notes, Hegel’s treatment of judgment in the Science of Logic is concerned with judgments about particulars, such as perceptual judgments. In contrast to considering relevant classifications (intension, as „Begriffsbestimmungen“, eine „gesetzte Bestimmtheit“ eines Begriffs, or „die bestimmten Begriffe“; WdL II, 12:53.3–6),25 judgments specify which of these specific or determinate conceptions are instantiated: 25 „Das Urtheil ist die am Begriffe selbst gesetzte Bestimmtheit desselben. Die Begriffsbestimmungen, oder was, wie sich gezeigt hat, dasselbe ist, die bestimmten Begriffe sind schon für sich betrachtet worden; aber diese Betrachtung war mehr eine subjective Reflexion, oder subjective Abstraction“. The entire section merits and requires detailed examination. (All references in this § are to WdL II, GW 12).

368 What determinate concepts there are, and how these determinations are necessary, must be shown in judgment. (WdL II, 12:53.12–14)26

Judgment is ‘the other’ function of the concept, complementing (provisional, presumptive) classification. Hegel states: Hence the judgment can be called the next realisation of the concept, insofar as reality designates as such the entering into existence as determinate being. (WdL II, 12:53.15–17)27

‘Determinate being’, „Daseyn als bestimmtes Seyn“, recalls Hegel’s analysis in the second chapter of the doctrine of being, Das Daseyn, in which (per above, §112.4) Hegel argues that any extant object must be sufficiently structured so as to exist, to be somewhere at some time as something determinate, and to be identifiable as such. That corroborates and reconfirms Hegel’s semantics of singular cognitive reference from the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, which is further developed and corroborated in his account of judgment, which centrally concerns specific judgments about extant particulars and their characteristics. ‘Subject’ and ‘predicate’ are names of logical place holders; only in specific judgments about specific particulars are ‘subject’ terms and ‘predicate’ terms specified in any determinate way (WdL II, 12:53.17–54.34). Only by specifying our conceptions in determinate judgments about identified particulars do we ‘realise’ our conceptions, without which they remain subjective representations („Vorstellungen“; WdL II, 12:55.10–22). Hegel states this as directly and concretely as could be wished: Hence bound up with judging is the reflection, whether this or that predicate in the head, could or should be ascribed to the object, which is out there unto itself; judging itself consists in first combining a predicate with the subject, so that if this connection did not occur, subject and predicate, each of them would remain what it is, the former an extant object, the latter a representation in the head. (WdL II, 12:55.17–22)28 26 „Was es für bestimmte Begriffe gibt, und wie sich diese Bestimmungen desselben nothwendig ergeben, diß hat sich im Urtheil zu zeigen“. 27 „Das Urteil kann daher die nächste Realisierung des Begriffs genannt werden, insofern die Realität das Treten ins Dasein als bestimmtes Sein überhaupt bezeichnet“ (WdL II, 12: 53.15–17). 28 „Mit dem Urtheilen ist hernach die Reflexion verbunden, ob dieses oder jenes Prädicat, das im Kopfe ist, dem Gegenstande, der draussen für sich ist, beygelegt werden könne und solle; das Urtheilen selbst besteht darin, daß erst durch dasselbe ein Prädicat mit dem Subjecte verbunden wird, so daß wenn diese Verbindung nicht Statt fände, Subject und Prädicat, jedes für sich doch bliebe was es ist, jenes, ein existirender Gegenstand, dieses eine Vorstellung im Kopfe’ (WdL II, 12:55.17–22). Sans (2004, 86, cf. 99) does not quote this specific passage, but realises that Hegel’s view is indeed sensible, as sensible as saying that the previous days’ rains are the way in which the weather has in this period come to be. In connection with Hegel’s (purported) ‘identity theory of judgment’, Sans (2004, 102) rightly

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This point is developed in detail in Hegel’s account of the syllogistic figures,29 which taken together provide for the ‘realisation’ of the concept.30 114.4 A third sense of ‘Realisieren’ concerns structures fully articulating or manifesting themselves. These three uses of ‘realise’ are related. Achieving one’s aim ‘realises’ one’s preconceived aim by producing its instantiation; this links the first and second senses. I have spoken of ‘conceptions’, whereas Hegel uses either ‘Vorstellung’ or ‘Begriff’: ‘representation’ or ‘concept’. In Hegel’s usage, a ‘Vorstellung’ is in some significant way merely a subjective representation, because it is not properly instantiated by the world or by some (purportedly relevant) aspect(s) of it, whereas ‘Begriffe’ (he holds) are actual structures of the world, which we comprehend when thinking and judging adequately and properly about those actual worldly structures. For this latter case I use the term ‘conception’, in connection with our thinking and judging, to grant Hegel his decidedly ontological sense of ‘concept’ as some actual structure of or in the world. Why does he cast his ontology in terms of structures – concepts – articulating or manifesting ‘themselves’? Because whatever exists, exists now, and exists as something in some or another definite way(s), which persists only so long and to the extent that it maintains its constitutive integrity. (Hegel’s use of reflexive grammatical constructions may be no more than their typical German use in the passive voice. If so, ‘themselves’ may be omitted from the end of the question just posed, so that Hegel’s view would be that actual structures manifestly articulate the world.) asks how plausible Hegel’s account of judgment is in these terms: „Man kann natürlich fragen, welche sachliche Plausibilität die Deutung der Beziehung zwischen dem Subjekt und dem Prädikat des Urteils als Verhältnis der Identität besitzt. Um die Frage zu beantworten, ist es erforderlich, zwischen der Analyse der logischen Form einerseits und ihren ontologischen Implikationen andererseits zu unterscheiden“. In framing his options in these terms (cf. 104), Sans neglects both the older, broader sense of ‘logic’ to which Hegel cleaves, according to which ‘logic’ concerns not only valid and invalid forms of syllogism, but the use of concepts, classifications and principles in cognition, and also Hegel’s important lessons about the use of the conception, ‘identity’ in perceptual judgments (PhdG, chapt. II; cf. Westphal 1998a). That broader sense of ‘logic’ is fundamental to Kant’s transcendental logic, which is a special a priori version of such a logic, and is expressly Hegel’s model and point of departure. Sans has examined these important passages more carefully than most other commentators, but even to his account we can well ask Hegel’s titular question, „Wer denkt abstrakt?“ Understanding Hegel’s Logic systematically requires more than reading his analysis carefully in sequence, but reading his carefully sequential analysis in its anticipation of its realisation in cognitive use in our knowledge of particular natural or social phenomena, as outlined in his philosophies of nature and of spirit. Though he does not consider Hegel’s account of truth in connection with specific judgments about particulars, Léonard (1974, §§213–4) appears to agree with the account developed here. 29 Lau (2004), Redding (2014), Stovall (forthcoming). 30 „Damit ist der Begriff überhaupt realisirt worden; bestimmter hat er eine solche Realität gewonnen, welche Objektivität ist“ (WdL II, 12:125.27–8; cf. 101, 119, and esp. 128).

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The persistence of the constitutive integrity of spatio-temporal particulars is, Hegel realised, a function of their causal integrity, which is a function of the cohesion of its material constituents and whatever connects its constituents together, whether mechanically, magnetically, chemically or electrically (Enz. §309). Consequently, it is misleading or even confused to say that causal relations and structures persist because material particulars persist. Conversely, material particulars do not persist because causal relations and structures persist. Rather, the persistence of any material particular is the persistence of its causal structures and relations over some period of time within some region of space; and vice-versa: these are mutually, constitutively interdependent aspects of extant, worldly structure. To represent particular continuants as four-dimensional space-time worms is our representation, and we must be very careful, Hegel argues in detail, not to mistakenly reify our manners of representing – things as four-dimensional objects. I have cast Hegel’s view in terms of material particulars to accord with his view that the distinction between any ‘substance’ and its ‘accidents’ or ‘properties’ is only our own analytical distinction, which if reified thwarts knowledge and comprehension, in any particular case or in general (Westphal 1998a). Comprehending a material particular requires discriminating, identifying and comprehending its persisting, constitutive structures and relations, and determining – that is: discovering and specifying – as well as we can which of these structures and relations are fundamental to the particular in question, which are less fundamental and which are merely incidental to it. Hegel’s holistic analysis repeatedly stresses that what anything is, exists only in its various internal structure(s) and its relations, it is manifest only in its various internal structure(s) and its relations, and its cognisable and comprehensible only in its various internal structure(s) and its relations (see below, §§122–126). 114.5 Accordingly, to realise any of our conceptions in the second sense (per Tetens and Kant), requires us to comprehend how our true and justified judgments about any known particular differentiate and integrate our recognition of its constitutive structures and relations, and any relevant incidental structures or relations it may also exhibit. What we ‘posit’ or affirm in our cognitive judgments must track what these causal structures ‘posit’ or produce as they continue to work themselves out.31 These themes are fundamental to Hegel’s analysis (inter alia) of ‘absolute knowing’ in the 1807 Phenomenology32 and to both ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ in the second part of his Science of Logic.33 31

Cf. WdL II, 12:54, 57.6–58.17, 190.28–191.6, 240.2–19; Enz. §§193+R, 309, 445. PhdG, 9:427.28–428.3/¶798; see de Laurentiis (2009). 33 Hegel’s account of subject/predicate relations bears comparing with Klaus Reich’s (2001, 72–6) very suggestive remarks about Kant’s use of the term ‘quaeitas’, and with 32

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Hegel’s ontology is more holistic or organic than those of the Classical Pragmatists, but he agrees with them about one important point: that our conceptual classifications are intellectual, practical coping devices for grappling with and – with care, diligence and due attention – classifying, characterising and comprehending the world we inhabit, including its history, which includes us and our history – for however long we may manage to continue, individually and collectively. If this sounds too sober and sound to be ‘Hegel’, recall that Theunissen argued in detail that all of the conceptual mediations examined by Hegel in his Science of Logic aim inter alia to reconfirm that those conceptual mediations only are and only are true insofar as they are instantiated by actual, extant, determinate beings which we correctly judge to be as they are.34 Lau (2004) likewise details how Hegel’s Science of Logic is primarily a critical theory of forms of judgment and of our proper understanding of such judgments – all stated, of course, as propositions. Though he does not mention Tetens (neither does Theunissen), Lau (2004, 50–2) recognises and documents Hegel’s use of the term ‘realisieren’ in just the sense Tetens first established. Accordingly, Hegel’s Logic is a theory of categories, standing squarely in the tradition marked by Aristotle and Kant.35 This is made especially plain by important commonalities in Kant’s, Hegel’s and Peirce’s analyses of ampliative syllogisms (see Stovall, forthcoming). 115 CONCLUSION. Hegel did not state, and so did not affirm, the pragmatic principle as such. However, the conjoint implications of his several epistemic and logical doctrines examined herein provide excellent grounds for classifying Hegel’s philosophy as pragmatic realism, and as involving a very close cousin (to say the least) to the pragmatic maxim. Ploucquet’s re-conception of ‘existence’ as the self-manifestation of force(s), cf. Ploucquet (1751), §VIII; (1753), §§20, 30, 40, 43; (1772), Ontologia: §227; (1778), Ontologia: §§157, 160–2, 167–8, Metaphysica: §§80, 83. 34 Theunissen (1978), 385–433; Manfred Frank kindly reminded me of Theunissen’s conclusions on this point; I had not re-read Sein und Schein since studying with Theunissen in 1983–84 (as a DAAD Doctoral Fellow). There I first sketched my understanding of Hegel’s ontology (cf. HER, 140–5), and was as surprised and delighted as he to find, as we did, entire agreement about Hegel’s sophisticated, if complex, realism. 35 I omit Klaus Hartmann’s (1966, 1971, 1976) well-known account of Hegel’s category theory because his interpretation is unconvincing; see Beiser (1995), (1996); Westphal (1999). Hegel’s rejection of Kant’s transcendental idealism and his reconstruction and further development of Kant’s transcendental critique of judgment is also reflected in the clearly Kantian structure of his cognitive psychology, in his ‘Philosophy of Subjective Spirit’; for discussion see de Vries (1987), Surber (2013); cf. below, §§127–131.

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To these considerations we may add Hegel’s non-reductive naturalism, or more specifically, his commitment to emergence and to understanding the organisation and behaviour of complex systems (below, §§122–126), themes which only recently have gained a hearing within analytic philosophy.36 We may also add that Hegel’s social ontology, according to which individual human beings are fundamentally social practitioners, and that social practices and social practitioners are mutually interdependent for their existence and characteristics,37 was adopted and further elaborated by both Dewey (1930) and Mead (1934, 1964). Finally, Hegel’s interests in intellectual, cultural and political history, and in the philosophical understanding and cultural significance of the natural and social sciences exhibit a central interest shared by Peirce, which Dewey (1920) called ‘Reconstruction in Philosophy’. Hegel’s views are thus squarely within the pragmatist fold, more specifically: within the unjustly neglected pragmatic realist fold. Hegel’s views likewise accord with Rein Vihalemm’s (2011, 2012, 2013) ‘practical realism’. Hegel’s ontological holism, together with his incisive account of the social and historical aspects of rational justification, form a sophisticated basis for the comprehensive, holistic thinking required today, both in theory and in practice. Yes, everything must indeed be made as simple as possible, but as Einstein (2000, 314) adroitly noted: no simpler! This is no joking matter: Today we verge upon killing our field, and our environment, with over-simplifications which merely appear to be convenient or expedient!

36 37

Beckermann et al (1992); Wimsatt (1995, 2000). Westphal (2003a), §§29–37.

CHAPTER 17

Science and the Philosophers 116 INTRODUCTION. The advent of distinctively Modern European philosophy at the turn of the Seventeenth Century (C.E.) was occasioned by two major developments: the painful recognition after thirty years of religious wars that principles of public conduct must be justified independently of sectarian religious dogma; and the growth of natural science, especially discoveries in astronomy that linked terrestrial and celestial physics in a newly mathematicised, explanatory mechanics founded by Galileo and dramatically extended by Newton. The roles of reason and empirical evidence in inquiry, and their superiority to custom and tradition for knowledge of nature were undeniable, though their respective roles and proper epistemological accounting were far from obvious. I review briefly some key points in the advent of natural science in order show that some fundamental philosophical predilections have obscured the proper roles of reason and evidence in the philosophical accounting of scientific knowledge. Though these predilections are more readily apparent among Seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers, they are no less prevalent in mainstream analytical philosophy of science. Their diagnosis augurs a fundamental philosophical reorientation. 117 THE ADVENT OF MODERN SCIENCE. GALILEO directly disputed authority as a criterion of truth in scientific matters. Unlike Bacon, he did not think that sensory evidence could serve as this criterion, for he was well aware of the relativity of motion and the illusions and appearances that can infect observation. He relied on rigorous mathematical formulability as a criterion. This was not a Pythagorean or Platonic vision; mathematical formulae alone were not enough. On the contrary, he held that mathematical formulation of laws of nature demonstrate genuine regularities in natural phenomena. This requires that mathematical formulae be fitted to careful observation, and the joint satisfaction of these two demands must also be rationally intelligible. Galileo formulated a genuinely scientific methodology. His ‘resoluto-compositive’ method involves making an hypothesis, e.g., that the speed attained © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_0�8

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by a ball falling a certain distance is constant, regardless of the slope it descends. If this hypothesis is true, then in certain circumstances that ought to exemplify or instantiate the hypothesis, certain consequences follow from the hypothesis, and those consequences ought to be observed in those circumstances. If observation accords, within tolerable limits, with those deductive consequences, this is taken to confirm the hypothesis. Galileo eschewed the investigation of ultimate causes of motion in favour of investigating the actual properties of motions: The present does not seem to be an opportune time to enter into the investigation of the cause of the acceleration of natural motion, concerning which various philosophers have produced various opinions …. Such fantasies, and others like them, would have to be examined, but with little gain. For the present it suffices our Author that we understand him to want us to investigate and demonstrate some the attributes [passiones] of a motion so accelerated (whatever be the cause of its acceleration) …. (Galilei, Opere 8:202, cf. 7:260–1; 1974, 158–9, cf. 1967, 234–5)

This is to say, physics can be pursued independently of metaphysics – and ultimately physics constrains the metaphysics of nature. Descartes was incensed by this, but Galileo showed himself to be a scientist more than a metaphysician in this regard, and practising scientists rightly followed suit. Newton’s gravitational theory integrated Kepler’s celestial physics with Galileo’s terrestrial physics, producing a general mechanics that applied not only to our earth and solar system, but to the universe as a whole. Newton insisted that his laws of motion be ‘deduced from the phenomena’. In this, he improved on Galileo’s method. Newton called his method ‘analysis and synthesis’. Basic principles are to be derived by a careful quantitative analysis of particular phenomena, in this case, observed motions. Once successful principles are determined for those particular motions, the principles are generalised to see if they can account for other cases of motions: … whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this experimental philosophy, propositions are deduced from the phenomena and made general by induction. The impenetrability, the mobility, and the impetus of bodies, and the laws of motion and the law of gravity have been found by this method. And it is enough that gravity really exists and acts according to the laws which we have set forth and is sufficient to explain all the motions of the heavenly bodies and of our sea. (General Scholium; Newton 1999, 943)

The synthetic aspect of Newton’s method lies in this final phrase, showing that the principles reached by analysis of particular phenomena in fact serve to explain accurately a wide range of related phenomena. Newton knows that

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this method is fallible, but also that there’s none better (Query 31; Newton 1953, 404–5). The fallibility of Newton’s method is easily over-estimated because of the contemporary fixation on prediction and retrodiction. By requiring that natural laws be ‘deduced from the phenomena’, Newton rejected Galileo’s appeal, in part, to purely a priori demonstrations based upon geometry and thought experiments, and upon Galileo’s glib appeal, in effect, to what are now called ceteris paribus clauses.1 Newton’s method requires accounting for the discrepancies between his idealised basic gravitational model and actual natural phenomena. Through repeated use of the same explanatory resources, Newton sought to account for whatever associated events and circumstances produced such discrepancies. Repeatedly using the explanatory resources of his theory of gravity to account for the exact measurements of the phenomena in question provides for convergent, increasingly accurate, ever less idealised measurement of causal parameters that explain those phenomena. The success of such repeated approximations, progressively reducing the idealisations of the scientific model and explanation, proves that there is a genuine causal phenomenon by measuring that phenomenon ever more exactly. This is a vastly richer, more demanding and far more illuminating account of empirical success of a scientific theory than mere prediction and retrodiction (Harper 2011, Smith 2002). Newton was notoriously reticent about the status of gravity. Newtonian mechanics is committed to its existence, yet explained neither its causes nor its manner of acting. The problem was that gravity appears to involve action at a distance, and – according to the reigning mechanical philosophy, which still followed Aristotle by recognising only action by contact – that was preposterous, utterly impossible. Despite Newton’s reticence on this point, his mechanics revised Boyle’s claim that matter is inert. Though this redefinition has some precedents in Gilbert’s work on magnets and in Kepler’s speculations about solar force, Newton’s theory gave unprecedented support to the claim that matter has active properties. Newton knew he was transcending the bounds of ‘mechanical’, that is, corpuscular, philosophy: [The force of gravity] acts not in proportion to the quantity of the surfaces of the particles upon which it acts (as mechanical causes are wont to do [sic]), but in proportion to the quantity of solid matter …. (Gen. Schol. Newton 1999, 943)

To the charge that he lapsed into discredited Aristotelian occult qualities, Newton replied that he did not postulate a single alleged cause of a particular 1

Galilei, Opere, 7:171–3; (1967), 145–8; letter to Pietro Carcavy, 5 June, 1637 (Opere, 17:90–1). I thank Cinzia Ferrini for discussion of this point.

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effect, but rather a general force, formulable in a quantified law of nature, which explained a huge range of otherwise diverse phenomena, previously thought to be unrelated: To tell us that every species of things is endow’d with an occult specifick Quality by which it acts and produces manifest Effects, is to tell us nothing: But to derive two or three general Principles of Motion from Phænomena, and afterwards to tell us how the Properties and Actions of all corporeal Things follow from those manifest Principles, would be a very great step in philosophy, though the Causes of those Principles were not yet discover’d: And therefore I scruple not to propose the Principles of Motion above-mentioned [sc., gravity and inertia], they being of very general Extent, and leave their Causes to be found out. (Query 31; Newton 1952, 401–2)

Newton allows that there may well be a cause of gravity; he didn’t know how to explain gravity itself, and his later work speculated about various possible forms of mechanical aether that might explain gravity. Despite the controversy about even apparent action at a distance, Newton was quite right that it sufficed for his explanatory, scientific purposes to show that bodies do behave in accord with the law of gravity he formulated, which provided excellent grounds to treat gravity as a cause or force, even if perhaps not an ultimate cause or force. François De Gandt (1995, 265–72) notes that Newton’s mathematical theory of orbital motion forged an important kind of theoretical independence from metaphysical and physical questions about the ultimate nature of space, time, or gravity. Newton is thus entitled to his reticence about the status of gravity. When Newton (1999, 407) says that he refers ‘the absolute force’ of gravitational attraction ‘to the centre’ of a mass, ‘as endued with some cause, without which those motive forces would not be propagated through the spaces round about’, he shrewdly prescinds from metaphysical issues about the allegedly essential or constitutive qualities of matter. Newton’s physics requires only that matter have some power of gravitational attraction; whether that power be constitutive of matter, or instead be endowed to matter by the Creator, Newton deliberately leaves undecided. That issue is irrelevant to physical dynamics. In his chemical researches, Robert Boyle relied upon ‘transdiction’, inferring from observed phenomena some properties of sub-observable components of observable bodies, such as corpuscles (Mandelbaum 1964, 61–117). Boyle argued abductively, by refusing to take mere logical possibilities as objections to this transdiction. Newton’s third rule of reasoning in philosophy does the same:

377 Those qualities of bodies that cannot be intended and remitted, and that belong to all bodies on which experiments can be made should be taken as qualities of all bodies universally. (Newton 1999, 795)2

This rule may appear to concern only gross bodies that happen to be out of sight or out of reach, say, in outer space. However, it concerns ‘all bodies universally’. Unrestricted in this way, this rule covers sub-observable bodies, too, as Newton clearly stated in related passages (Newton 1999, 409, 795–6). Newton’s laws of motion rely on mass, and mass must be attributable to any and every part of a body; otherwise the laws of motion cannot be successfully quantified. This is why Newton needs ‘transdiction’, and the theoretical success of Newtonian Mechanics justifies attributing to any sub-observable parts of bodies the same kinds of properties his theory ascribes to gross bodies: volume, mass, mobility, rigidity, inertia, gravity. Newton’s quantitative analysis of molar phenomena provides enormously strong grounds for attributing specific properties to matter, even to unobservably small bits of it. It suffices for Newton’s dynamics that matter have a gravitational power of attraction; whether that power is constitutive of matter, or is divinely endowed to it, is physically irrelevant! Newton shrewdly set ‘modal intuitions’ aside to do physics. I have deliberately stressed Galileo’s and Newton’s methods. Bacon recognised that good science requires the joint use of sensory observation and rational analysis, but he did not appreciate the extent to which both scientific observation and rational analysis are driven by the effort to provide an accurate quantitative, mathematical treatment of physical phenomena. The Modern exact sciences are built upon this effort to integrate all three: observation, reason and mathematics. In discussing the relevance of the almost purely mathematical framework of Principia Books I and II to Newton’s ‘System of the World’ (Book III), De Gandt (1995, 267) remarks: The solidity of the inductive fabric is due to its mathematical framework, which makes it possible to establish an extremely tight network in which observation and theory advance on and regulate each other.

Borrowing terminology from logical empiricism, this might suggest that Newton’s mathematics forms the ‘correspondence rules’ between his theoretical and observational language. This suggestion is too glib. Newton’s mathematical framework plays a constitutive role in his theoretical postulates and for the mutual regulation of theory and observation (cf. Smith 2002). A third point about the development of natural science is that the Age of Newton was also the age of the founding of national and international scientific societies. These societies served, developed and highlighted the impor2

By ‘intended and remitted’, Newton means ‘intensified or diminished’.

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tance of two key features of natural science: They served to disseminate scientific information and techniques, and they initiated the development and use of the peer review process. The replication of key observations and experiments to check reported observational or theoretical results rightly became a sine qua non of scientific integrity and the legitimacy, the very justification of scientific data and theory. 118 MODERN PHILOSOPHICAL REACTION. One fascinating point about these elementary features of mechanics is how recalcitrant they have been to philosophical understanding, right from their inception. Modern philosophers largely agreed that sensation and conception formed poles on a continuum, though rationalists and empiricists disagreed about which pole was clear and trustworthy, and which was a dim, confused, vague intimation of the other pole. In accounting philosophically for scientific knowledge, empiricists emphasised observation. Rationalists emphasised rational reflection, to which they gave higher priority than mathematics, yet none denied the relevance of observation. 118.1 Descartes. Descartes (to Mersenne, 29 June 1638) upbraided Galileo for philosophising without a foundation, because Galileo didn’t worry about ultimate causes of motion, but only about specific laws governing specific kinematic phenomena. Galileo acknowledged that his new physics required a new metaphysics (and theology); to this extent he agreed that Descartes’s issues were legitimate. However, Descartes gave priority to epistemology over metaphysics, and priority to metaphysics over natural science. Descartes aimed first to analyse reason, then to analyse sensation and then to combine these into an account of empirical knowledge. He held that we have a set of basic ideas, or ‘common notions’ of ‘eternal truths’, which are given to us innately by God, and which are known to be true by their intuitive self-evidence, through the ‘light of nature’. Descartes held that developing reliable natural-scientific knowledge requires determining which clear and distinct ideas known by reason are instantiated by the objects of perception, and how the objects we perceive produce their effects (both on one another, and on us) in virtue of their instantiating those ideas of reason. Empirical knowledge is not deductively derived from clear and distinct basic knowledge because objects instantiating any of several different arrangements of simple natures might produce any given empirical phenomenon. The role of experiment in Descartes’ theory of science is to ascertain the parameters of empirical phenomena precisely so as to eliminate, so far as possible, alternative arrangements of simple natures instantiated in physical objects, so as to leave us with

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one clearly superior explanation (Prin., prefatory letter from the Author). The problem with Descartes’s proposal is that his set of alleged ‘common notions’ of ‘simple natures’ is derived by a priori reflection and alleged intuitive self-evidence. Descartes granted that his explanations might be false; God may have arranged the world to function differently than Descartes’ explanations propose (Prin. 4:204). This is especially true of explanations which appeal to unobservable physical micro-structures. (This is the issue of transdiction, again.) Descartes sought to guarantee that he at least had the correct set of ‘common notions’ with his proof of God’s existence and veracity, and that God implants in us ideas of the simple natures on the basis of which God created the universe. Descartes chose this high rationalist road because of his fascination with the infallibilist ideal of the axiomatic-deductive model of logical and mathematical knowledge, and because he abhorred scepticism. Because custom and tradition are social and historical phenomena, because they have so seriously misled us about the nature of nature, and because the route to genuine knowledge of nature was discovered by brilliant, scientifically minded individuals, it seemed obvious, undeniable, that genuine knowledge is an individual phenomenon, and that only an individualist epistemology can defend realism about the objects of knowledge. Any social or historical account of empirical knowledge can only land us in error, relativism or scepticism. Descartes’ concern to avoid or refute scepticism embedded infallibilist notions of cognitive justification deeply into the core of epistemology, along with the axiomatic-deductive model of rational justification. The individualism and infallibilism of Descartes’ epistemology meet in Descartes’ foundationalism, the thesis that there are some basic elements of knowledge, each of which is known to each of us individually, whilst all other items of knowledge are derived from them. Descartes’ foundationalism was rationalist; the basic items of knowledge concern elementary truths self-evident to reason. Descartes’s physics, based on these methods, was far from adequate. Descartes’s fascination with geometry led him to focus on extension as the sole essential attribute of material substance, to the exclusion of mass or force (Prin. 2:64). As a result, Descartes repeated the error that Galileo had exposed, that acceleration is proportional to distance (extension of a motion) rather than to time (To Mersenne, 13 Nov. & 18 Dec. 1629). Descartes, too, sought to resolve phenomena into their most basic elements (Rule 2). Descartes differed from Galileo about this, however, because Descartes thought he could know in advance, by a priori reflection, the full set of basic elements; whereas Galileo derived his basic elements piecemeal solely through reso-

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luto-compositive analysis of the natural phenomenon itself. Nevertheless, Descartes’ epistemological package has dominated epistemology down to the present day, even among many philosophers, including empiricists, who regarded themselves as Descartes’ philosophical antipodes. Descartes’ epistemological package consists in these four theses: 1. Only individualist epistemology can uphold realism about the objects of knowledge; 2. Human knowledge has foundations; 3. The structure of empirical knowledge ultimately conforms to the axiomaticdeductive model; 4. Empirical justification is infallibilist. This package has dominated epistemology, in part because it has provided part of the framework within which philosophers have thought, so that these particular views are revealed as key implicit assumptions or enthymemes in their reasoning, and only rarely as explicit premises, much less conclusions to philosophical demonstrations. 118.2 Hume. The relations of Hume’s philosophy to Descartes’ is a rich, fascinating, important, and still largely unwritten chapter in the history of philosophy. Though Hume rejected Descartes’ rationalism and dualism, he also recommended Descartes’ works as propaedeutic to his own. Seizing upon the alleged clear and unequivocal nature of sensory impressions, and upon the empirical basis of natural science, Hume dispensed with Descartes’ cogito and modelled his philosophy on Newton’s (En §1.8, 1.9). Accordingly, Hume identified a set of basic objects and a set of basic laws governing those objects, which he claimed were the minimum sufficient basis for an entire philosophical account of human nature, including human knowledge. Hume’s basic objects are impressions and ideas; his basic principles are concept- and verification-empiricism, and his basic laws are that impressions and ideas are associated solely by their resemblance, spatial or temporal contiguity, or constant conjunction, including the special case of cause and effect. On this basis, Hume officially defended total empirical skepticism as the inevitable consequence of Cartesian infallibilism, deductivism, and individualism. He recognised that such a dire conclusion reflected directly back onto his basic assumptions and principles, yet claimed to find no fault with them, and plead the privilege of the sceptic to be as befuddled by his own scepticism as he was by his official epistemology (T App., ¶21). One striking feature of Hume’s philosophy is the astonishing though rarely noticed way in which it reveals the great extent to which Modern empiri-

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cists latched onto the empirical basis of natural science, whilst disregarding the fundamental role of mathematics in physical mechanics: Hume’s infamous psychological laws of association, central to his claim to follow the Newtonian model, are entirely qualitative. Hume does not even suggest how to quantify them mathematically; he does not even recognise this question is worth asking, because he didn’t understand that mathematical quantification is a conditio sine qua non for (candidate) causal laws. Hume’s attempt to ‘introduce the experimental method’ (T 1) into moral (as contrasted to natural) philosophy starts on the wrong foot. 118.3 Kant. Kant finally broke the Modern presumption that sensation and conception are poles of a continuum. Instead, they are distinct, jointly necessary components of human knowledge. Kant also broke another key bone of contention between Modern rationalists and empiricists, namely that rationalists believed that our having a priori concepts sufficed to legitimate metaphysics, while empiricists believed that banishing metaphysics required rejecting a priori concepts. Kant argued that we do indeed possess a priori concepts, though through his sophisticated theory of cognitive reference, Kant shows that we can only use a priori concepts in legitimate cognitive judgments about spatiotemporal objects and events. Singular cognitive reference requires singular sensory presentation, and this singularity of reference requires spatiotemporal specification. Grammatically definite descriptions, however specific, cannot suffice, because no purported definite description determines or indicates whether it is empty, definite or ambiguous. (This is one lesson of Kant’s criticism of Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernables.) Kant also broke with Cartesian foundationalism, by rejecting internalism about cognitive justification, and by rejecting the foundationalist assumption, still prevalent today, that our inner experience has epistemic priority over our outer experience. Kant’s transcendental idealism tried to justify and to explain the applicability of mathematics to nature, and thus also our use of mathematics in natural science. In his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant refuted the philosophical objections to action at a distance, he showed how to use reference frames to establish any relevantly ‘absolute’ space within which to understand the motions of bodies, and he sought to show how gravity can be understood as essential to, and so as inherent in, matter as such. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason sought to lay the philosophical foundation for a deeply rationalist account of natural science. Like Descartes, Kant held that epistemology has priority over metaphysics, which in turn has priority over physics; Newtonian mechanics cannot be properly founded without an a priori explication and defence of its most basic concepts and principles.

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Kant’s notion of ‘properly founding’ natural science retained the axiomaticdeductive model, and sought to justify Newton’s three Laws as corollaries constructed a priori on the basis of Kant’s principles of causal judgment defended in the Critique of Pure Reason. Unfortunately for Kant’s project, even if his arguments for transcendental idealism were valid, which they are not, his idealism fails to provide an adequate basis for Kant’s model of scientia: his metaphysical constructions of the concept of matter fail to show that gravity is inherent in matter, and they also fail to justify a priori Newton’s Laws of Motion, or even Kant’s variants of Newton’s laws (per above, §§26, 28). Modern philosophers, including Kant, failed to develop an adequate account of natural scientific knowledge. Their repeated failures to understand natural science may appear to support Quine’s dictum that two kinds of people are drawn to philosophy: those interested in philosophy, and those interested in its history. A closer look, however, belies this patronising dismissal of our philosophical predecessors. 119 VAN FRAASSEN’S EMPIRICIST STANCE. In The Empirical Stance, Bas van Fraassen complains of the poor understanding of science current even among self-styled philosophers of science, noting that these misunderstandings were learned from their teachers, especially from Quine (ES 11, cf. 29). One misunderstanding (omitted by van Fraassen) is glaring: no natural scientist begins from the egocentric Cartesian-Humean predicament; natural scientists begin with observing natural phenomena, natural events in nature. ‘The positing of bodies’, simply is not ‘rudimentary physical science’ (pace Quine 1975, 67–68). Quine can suppose otherwise only by conflating or shifting amongst several distinct, even incompatible kinds of ‘naturalism’ (Haack 1993, 118–38). Quine’s attempt to refashion natural science to accord with that predicament is one more attempt to assimilate science to unquestioned philosophical predilections; in this regard it is inconsistent with Quine’s professed scientism, that science alone is the legitimate model and instance of genuine knowledge. A key source of naturalism, according to Quine (1981, 72), is ‘unregenerate realism’. This tenet cannot be justified by, nor in accord with, Quine’s semantics and epistemology! Quine’s logical acumen is renowned, but his epistemological views demonstrate by reductio ad absurdum the insufficiency of ‘the logical point of view’ to understand empirical knowledge (Westphal 2015b).

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Van Fraassen praises the astonishing ‘critical armamentarium’ developed by analytic philosophy (ES 18, 30).3 I certainly agree that analytic philosophy has developed indispensable critical resources, which I have used throughout this study, yet I contend that it is far from complete or sufficient, especially regarding issues concerning human knowledge: there are vast critical resources that have yet to be assimilated from traditions and stances typically neglected, if not outright rejected, by analytic philosophers. Van Fraassen rightly stresses how widely variable our understanding of ‘empiricism’ has been throughout philosophy (ES 32–34, 201–25), and endeavours to stake out a new version of empiricism. His new version of empiricism attempts to evade standard philosophical objections to empiricism by distinguishing between philosophical theses and philosophical stances. The standard objections to empiricism all bear upon empiricist theses. Van Fraassen proposes to scuttle these objections by identifying empiricism with a certain kind of stance. He argues that empiricism cannot consist in express empiricist theses, because no sound principle of empiricism has yet been found. All key theses of empiricism have been refuted, indeed by empiricists themselves, and nothing can foreclose on future proposals for key empiricist theses suffering the same fate. If empiricism continues, despite the critical demise of every key empiricist thesis to date, then empiricism must consist of something other than, certainly in addition to, its key theses (ES 46–7). This non-propositional core of, e.g., empiricism is a philosophical stance. Most generally, philosophical stances are ‘philosophical positions that cannot be captured in dogmas’ (ES 47). Thus van Fraassen insists that there is more to a philosophical position than its propositions, and this ‘more’ is essential to a philosophical position being a philosophical stance; it’s an attitude rather than a belief or set of beliefs. Van Fraassen’s empirical stance is this: Empiricists reject demands for explanation, especially explanation by postulate, and any forms of abduction. They hold some version of the naive principle empiricism, that information only comes through the senses. They have certain kinds of ideals of epistemic rationality, of significance (or meaning). They admire natural science, and their idea of rationality does not bar disagreement. (ES 47)

Important to van Fraassen is that none of these factors is itself a belief, though any of them may be associated with various empiricist beliefs. By adopting the empiricist stance, philosophers are free to espouse their key 3 This may seem surprising in view of his early training in phenomenological philosophy of science. However, at the time he studied, only early Husserl was on the ‘continental’ agenda; the later Husserl and Heidegger were yet to be discovered.

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Principle of Naive Empiricism, that ‘experience is the only source of information’ (ES 45, 47), without fear of theoretical refutation. Van Fraassen deliberately leaves this principle undeveloped, for his main concern is with identifying and calling our attention to philosophical stances. Van Fraassen’s express concern with philosophical stances performs a genuine philosophical service: It draws philosophical attention to the basic context within which philosophers develop, present and defend their express views or theses. The question, ‘What else besides propositions belongs to a philosophical view?’ has been too long suppressed, especially in analytical philosophy. Simply raising this issue calls for richer forms of philosophical reflection than have been common in the analytic tradition, in which philosophers have followed Mill’s reduction of ‘reflection’ to ‘introspection’, and then banished introspection as a disreputable method (Scharff 1995). As a result, their methods remain profoundly pre-Kantian (cf. above, §§2, 3). Stance theory entered feminist philosophy forcefully with Nancy Hartsock’s (1983) work, which developed in part by reconsidering Marx’s reflections on how class membership conditions what one knows, believes or pays attention to. ‘Stances’ are news to today’s heirs of logical empiricism because they have resolutely neglected feminist and Marxist epistemology, and have forgotten their own positivist roots within a particular cultural circle (see below). Teller (2001, 123–5) rightly notes that van Fraassen is a voluntarist; he’s an advocate, recommending his views and stance, rather than arguing for or justifying them. (Great shades of conventionalism and emotivism!) How compelling a recommendation can van Fraassen provide for his empirical stance? Consider two significant details. First, van Fraassen condemns the revival of essentially Seventeenth Century metaphysics within the analytic tradition (ES xviii, 1–30), without noticing the great extent to which analytic philosophy began by reviving essentially Eighteenth Century Humean epistemology, as attested by Russell and Quine. To reject ‘demands for explanation’ and ‘any forms of abduction’ is to reject natural scientific knowledge almost entirely. If perception alone can provide sufficient basis for belief, whilst the entire nonobservational theoretical structure of a science can only be a candidate only for acceptance (ES 89–90; 2001, 151–3), then we are only entitled to accept, but not to believe, that even sub-observable particles or quantities of matter have mass or chemical dispositions. On van Fraassen’s empiricist principles, ‘transdiction’ cannot justify belief. Newton’s methods show otherwise (Harper 2011). Second, van Fraassen rejects explanation and abduction on the basis of antecedent, non-scientific philosophical predilections, namely, his presumed philosophical ‘stance’, despite the fact that no coherent (much less ‘plausible’

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or ‘illuminating’) formulation of its key Principle of Naive Empiricism, that only sensation provides information about the world, has been given in several centuries. Van Fraassen condemns metaphysics in these terms: …. I see metaphysical concoctions not as underpinnings but as the canopies of baroque four-poster beds. … Metaphysical theories purport to interpret what we already understand to be the case. But to interpret is to interpret into something, something granted as already understood. (ES 3)

Van Fraassen contends that this metaphysical strategy attempts to explain the understood in terms of the hopelessly obscure and unfounded (ES 3). Yet van Fraassen regularly deploys the epistemological version of this same strategy by providing ‘an empiricist view’ of whatever topics he writes on. Like the other philosophers discussed above, van Fraassen, too, is engaged in cutting science to fit his antecedent epistemological presumptions, in his case ‘empiricist’ presumptions. However, van Fraassen’s strategy is worse than that of the metaphysicians he condemns: Until and unless a coherent version of his Principle of Naive Empiricism can be stated, restricting the phenomena of human knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, to what fits his empiricist view is to interpret knowledge into the antecedently incoherent and thus demonstrably false! This strategy cannot be given any legitimate voluntarist recommendation, unless van Fraassen wishes to join the ranks of philosophical irrationalists, who offend against reason far worse than the post-German idealists he thinks fell prey to the illusions of reason (ES 2). The term ‘empiricism’ has become a philosophical mantra, like ‘naturalism’, which is recited almost automatically by analytic epistemologists or philosophers of science to proclaim their philosophical sobriety. The point of the term ‘empirical’ is that empirical evidence is crucial for justifying, evaluating, formulating, or even understanding empirical claims about specific features of the world. Empiricists, however, have no monopoly upon this core sense of ‘empirical’; rationalists, pragmatists, phenomenologists and others acknowledge, indeed insist upon this point, too. The real issue is how best to understand the nature and role of empirical evidence within human experience, empirical knowledge and the sciences. In the interest of honesty in advertising, van Fraassen’s position must be called ‘the empiricist stance’. Note that van Fraassen continues the individualist tradition in epistemology; this is built into his Bayesian understanding of rational justification. The individualism required by the Bayesian approach to rational justification is expressed concisely by Paul Teller, in comments on van Fraassen’s book. In recommending a moderate contextualism, Teller states:

386 The pursuit of knowledge is a deeply social enterprise; and many of us accept, in the spirit of reliabilism, that we are better off, if, on the whole, we do not brush aside the contrary opinions of those we acknowledge as worthy interlocutors. But to go this far is already to accord some weight to both the opinions and the values of many of our peers even though nothing rationally compels us to do so. (Teller 2001, 125)

On Teller’s as on van Fraassen’s view, nothing rationally compels us to accord any weight to the opinions or values of our peers, because rational justification is an individual affair. Is this individualism tenable, even in its own epistemological terms? Does van Fraassen’s empiricist stance offer any real basis for understanding how and why science is ‘a deeply social enterprise’? Consider the following case. One philosopher has taken the naïve principle of empiricism, that all information reaches us only through sensation, very seriously and developed a genuine epistemology based squarely on it: Fred Dretske. On his view, mere receipt of information does not suffice for knowledge, because information yields belief or knowledge only by decoding. Dretske tries to preserve the core empiricist model of his epistemology by defining knowledge recursively, positing an elementary level of information acquisition at which no background information is required to decode this information. Perhaps there is such a primitive level at which there is no distinction between receiving information and decoding it. However, if background information isn’t relevant at that level, background interests of the organism are, such as interests in safety, food, shelter, mates, or the like. More importantly, this basic level is at best proto-cognitive. If decoded information has a proposition-like structure (in Dretske’s terms, it has a digital rather than an analog form), no decoded information at this level can have an express propositional structure, because such structure is linguistic. Surprisingly, Dretske says nothing about the role of language either in information decoding or in our information channels themselves. Dretske attempts to account for conceptual content solely in terms of referential opacity. Lacking from his account of conceptual content is thus the key role of inferential articulation in both identifying and using conceptual content (Sellars 1981). The fundamental importance of inferential articulation for specifying conceptual content reinforces the central role of language in information decoding and processing. These brief observations lend contemporary support to Leibniz’ (New Essays 2:1.2) dictum: nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses – except for the intellect itself! Leibniz’ closing qualifier is the Achilles’ heel of empiricism, including contemporary empiricism (cf. Turnbull 1959, Westphal 2005, 2103a).

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The crucial need to account epistemologically for the structure and functioning of the mind is only one lesson of Dretske’s information theory. His theory also puts paid to the egocentric predicament, including Quine’s version of it. ‘Saving the surface’ does not ‘save all’! This is because what information a subject can receive from a signal is a function of the state of the environment and the causal laws governing it, as well as the sensitivities of an organism’s receptors and the organism’s decoding capacities and abilities. Only within a determinate kind of environment can any organism receive – much less decode – any genuine information, and to know what information an organism decodes we must determine what of its information it saves, not what information might be saved (by some omniscient – hence non-natural – radical translator?) from its sensory input. More significantly, Dretske’s own account and examples of simple concept acquisition betray some of the essentially linguistic and social dimensions of human knowledge. Dretske’s examples of simple concepts are ‘red’ and ‘robin’; his discussion of acquiring these simple concepts expressly involves a teacher, a second person who helps instill the correct use of the terms ‘red’ and ‘robin’ in the nascently lingual child, obviously, in the presence of relevant instances of those concepts (Westphal 2003a, §27). One striking feature of the Cartesian epistemological package that has remained the epistemological package right into the present day, expressly found in Quine’s, Van Fraassen’s and Dretske’s views, is epistemic individualism. This is one key reason why philosophical accounts of science have failed to account philosophically for natural-scientific knowledge. Whatever may have been their explicit epistemological or methodological theories or commitments, in their scientific practice, Eighteenth Century scientists exhibited clear recognition of some key social dimensions of cognitive justification, which include constructive mutual critical assessment. What compels us rationally to attend to the critical assessment by our peers of our own views is recognition of our own human fallibility, a fact recurrently manifest in our attempts to formulate or to justify any worth-while empirical claim or theory.4 Precisely because they have used ‘empiricism’ as a membership badge, empiricists have refused to engage the more thorough critiques of empiricism developed by philosophers with different orientations or ‘stances’. Highlighting philosophical stances (cf. ES 49) almost unwittingly raises again a very important though largely neglected issue remaining from early logical positivism. Early logical positivists recognised that their views were shared within a particular ‘cultural circle’, and they delimited the relevant range of protocol 4 On the social aspects of legitimate cognitive consensus, see Longino (1994); on the social aspects of empirical evidence, see Haack (2003), 57–91; on the social aspects of rational justification, see above, §§83–91, 100–110.

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sentences to those uttered by ‘scientists of our cultural circle’. This is how Hempel defended Carnap against the charge that Carnap had offered a coherence theory of truth which failed to distinguish the truth from any elaborately detailed, coherent piece of fiction (HER, 56–7). Van Fraassen recognises that highlighting philosophical stances invites the objection that stances lie beyond rational assessment, because they are stances rather than propositions. He insists that stances can be evaluated, and that it does in fact happen – ‘welcome to the real world’ (ES 61–2). This casual observation misses the point of the objection. Here van Fraassen is in a bind: the individualist, Bayesian resources central to his view of epistemic rationality and justification are incapable of addressing this problem (ES 67), simply because his Bayesian principles concern estimating the evidence bearing upon propositions, they do not at all bear upon the merit of expressly non-propositional stances! The closest Carnap came to resolving this problem lay in his pragmatic approach to choosing between linguistic frameworks. However, Carnap’s pragmatic approach to such choices is inconsistent with his own cardinal distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ questions. Carnap’s semantics cannot address issues of assessing or recommending linguistic frameworks (Wick 1951; HER 60–67, Westphal 2015b). Like Carnap, van Fraassen proudly hails the (alleged) fact that the most telling criticisms of empiricism have come from empiricists themselves (ES 38). This pride is symptomatic of a key problem. In fact, the most telling criticisms of empiricism which were acknowledged by empiricists all came from empiricists, because those criticisms were all within the empiricist camp, and were cast in terms of whether various empiricist principles sufficed for meeting various empiricist goals. The devastating criticisms of empiricism developed by non- or anti-empiricists – Kant or Hegel, or more recently those of Blanchard, Weinberg, Tuschling and Rischmüller, or Frederick Will – were neglected, because they weren’t developed by philosophers of ‘our [logical empiricist] cultural circle’. This persistent refusal by empiricists to reflect upon their own philosophical stance is very much a manifestation of the voluntarist underpinnings of the empiricist stance, as Teller (2001, 123–5) rightly emphasises. (Recall, e.g., Quine’s (1969, 134) ‘preference’ for ontological desert landscapes.) Such ‘preferences’ entered analytic philosophy as ungrounded Carnapian decisions to adopt a linguistic framework. Yet preferences didn’t then, don’t now, and simply cannot provide justifying reasons. Instead, such ‘preferences’, like the adoption of a wholly non-propositional ‘stance’, are expressions of allegiance to a certain philosophical cultural circle; historical perspective reveals that the empiricist stance is highly partisan. Once again, this is why philosophers, to philosophise adequately, must attend to philoso-

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phical history, within its historical context. It is almost the only way for us to gain a critical vantage point upon our own present perspective. Van Fraassen hopes to show that stances can be assessed in part by identifying assumptions, commitments or principles shared by competing philosophical stances (or so he said in response to questions at the Pasadena meeting of the American Philosophical Association, March 2004). Surely these are important, but ex hypothesi they cannot suffice for assessing competing stances. Unless at least one stance is just flat inconsistent with those shared views, the shared basis does not suffice to determine the controversial claims or substances at issue between competing stances. The underlying problem here, not yet recognised in van Fraassen’s book, though once he nearly verges upon it (ES 40), is the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion (above, §12). Competing stances disagree about relevant standards and methods of justification. Most briefly, the Dilemma of the Criterion poses the problem, How can basic criteria of justification be established, if those criteria themselves are subject to fundamental dispute, without vicious circularity, dogmatism, infinite regress, or arbitrary (and hence disputable) assumption (petitio principii)? The currency of this ancient problem was renewed in the Modern period by Bayle; Descartes sought to answer it, though unsuccessfully. This Dilemma was included in Nagel and Brandt’s (1965) classic anthology, Meaning and Knowledge. It then largely vanished from sight until Moser and vander Nat (1995) again anthologised it. Pyrrhonian scepticism was given a hearing by Fogelin (1994), though he omitted the Dilemma and greatly softened the Pyrrhonist challenge to knowledge by restricting it to issues of certainty.5 Although some analytic epistemologists have tried to address the problem, none have succeeded (above, §61). Sextus’ Dilemma of the Criterion puts paid to the foundationalist model of deriving justification from some ultimate starting point, regardless of whether it consists in principles or data. It likewise puts paid to the individualist model of rationality. The trope of circularity can be resolved, along with the Dilemma of the Criterion, only by recognising the centrality of constructive self- and mutual criticism in rational justification and by rejecting justificatory infallibilism. Rational justification consists in assessing the merits of any claim in view of its adequacy for its intended domain, its superiority to prior and contemporaneous alternatives, and its continued adequacy for its domain in view of renewed occasions of its use, often in changed circumstances. 5 Pyrrhonian equipollence arguments do not merely undermine certainty; they undermine knowledge altogether by (purportedly) showing that no view is any more justified than its alternatives. Fogelin, who urges us to take Pyrrhonian scepticism seriously, does not himself take Pyrrhonian scepticism seriously enough. Ultimately, van Fraassen’s ‘Constructive Empiricism’ is covertly a l0w-profile Pyrrhonian scepticism (Westphal forthcoming b).

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Fallibilism is a fact of our empirical inquiry – and of our ‘a priori’ philosophical inquiries, too! Trying to eliminate human fallibility by forcing our empirical knowledge into the axiomatic-deductive model of infallibilist deductivism has failed every time. The proper response to human cognitive fallibility is constructive self- and mutual criticism. Mutual constructive criticism has, of course, been a mainstay of empiricist (and, more broadly, analytic) practice, which empiricist philosophers fail properly to appreciate due to their individualist views of rational justification. Cognitive justification is in part social because any moderately interesting claim has implications that reach far beyond what any one of us could ever work out, much less evaluate. Others who use our apparently justified statements, whether in similar or quite different circumstances, can generate and assess information which can bear upon the formulation, use, or justificatory status of our original statement. Only rarely have analytic philosophers noted the importance of self-criticism; none have inquired into its possibility. Whoever believes that nothing rationally compels us to attend to informed criticism from others is committed, far too deeply committed, to one side of an old and long-since discredited Enlightenment dichotomy, central to the Cartesian epistemological package, according to which reason simply must be an individual phenomenon, if it is to have any critical purchase on tradition, which manifestly is a social phenomenon. This dichotomy either denies or ignores the crucial importance of mutual critical assessment in rational justification, and is deeply at odds with rational practice within the natural sciences. Accepting this dichotomy, whether implicitly or explicitly, whether in theory or in practice, is not a proper stance for philosophers who claim to admire science as the very epitome of empirical knowledge. 120

HEGEL’S TRANSCENDENTAL, PRAGMATIC REALISM IN EPISTEMOLOGY.

The sound approach to these issues comes from the Kantian tradition rejected by Russell and Moore, and by analytic philosophers ever after (analytic Kant studies not withstanding), including van Fraassen (ES 2). Indeed, the sound approach to addressing these issues was developed by Kant’s greatest student, Hegel. Right in the middle of the Introduction to The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel paraphrased Sextus’ Dilemma. Unrecognised by friends and foes alike, this key to Hegel’s epistemology lay dormant, and Hegel’s acute epistemology lay unrecognised, until very recently. In his Introduction, Hegel provides a subtle and powerful analysis of the self-critical structure of our cognitive awareness of ourselves and of objects apparent to us in our surroundings. Amidst a plethora of other issues, Hegel devotes the whole of the

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Phenomenology to resolving Sextus’ Dilemma and the epistemological conundrums recounted above. Hegel was the first philosopher to recognise that Kant’s own accounts of causal judgments, and of the requisite degree of regularity and variety among the contents of our sensory manifold, in fact provide genuinely transcendental proofs of what we now call mental content externalism, of anti-individualism in Burge’s (1992, 46–7) sense. Moreover, Hegel recognised that these transcendental proofs refute Kant’s own transcendental idealism, that they also show the main fallacy in Kant’s direct arguments for his idealism, and that these criticisms are based squarely on Kant’s own analyses and principles in the Transcendental Analytic! Demonstrably, the Cartesian/Humean predicament is not the human predicament. Hegel expressly developed the pragmatic and social dimensions of cognitive justification, and recognised that these historical, social and pragmatic dimensions of human empirical knowledge are consistent with, indeed they require and justify, realism about the objects of our empirical knowledge. In defending our possession and legitimate use of some basic a priori concepts, Hegel recognised the key insight of Kant’s cognitive semantics, that these concepts and principles can only be used in legitimate cognitive judgments about localised spatio-temporal phenomena. Hegel’s infamous ‘idealism’ is in fact a realist form of (moderate) causal holism.6 More surprising yet, Hegel’s philosophy is rooted in empirical scientific enquiry: Not only must philosophy accord with the experience nature gives rise to; in its formation and in its development, philosophic science presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics. (Enz. §246R)

Hegel’s metaphysics was derided by analytic philosophers who failed to recognise Hegel’s acute epistemology and his equally acute cognitive semantics. This twin failure resulted directly from analytic philosophers’ anachronistic return to the eighteenth century metaphysics and epistemology of Hume’s first Enquiry. Hegel is, of course, the original and past master of philosophical stances and their internal critical assessment: this is the central point of his phenomenological examination of forms of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Finally, Hegel, building upon Kant’s achievements, is the fountainhead of pragmatic realism, the one tradition in epistemology that put paid to Descartes’ epistemological predicament (above, §109.1).

6 Two key principles of Hegel’s causal holism are that the causal characteristics of things are central to their identity conditions; because causal dispositions are relational, the identity conditions of things are mutually inter-defined (HER 140–5).

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121 CONCLUDING UNSCIENTISTIC POSTSCRIPT. Concern with the empirical basis of commonsense and natural-scientific knowledge is no monopoly of empiricists! It behoves epistemologists and philosophers of science to become much more careful and articulate about what counts as ‘empirical’ and what counts as ‘empiricist’. It behoves epistemologists and philosophers of science to become much more reflective and sophisticated about their own philosophical stances, as well as those of others. It behoves empiricists to consider much more carefully the wide range of presuppositions required even to have, to recognise, or to consider their favourite forms of ‘empirical evidence’. ‘Empiricism’ in philosophy of science simply cannot be assimilated to ‘empiricism’ in epistemology! More generally, philosophical understanding, appreciation, and above all critical assessment of natural science and its findings cannot be gained by assimilating naturalscientific knowledge to pre-conceived philosophical models of natural science. Instead, a genuinely ‘naturalised’ philosophy of science must examine scientific knowledge as it is developed and embodied in the natural sciences themselves, both historically and currently. In these regards, careful and discerning history of science is crucial for the philosophy of science – at the very least, because scientists have shown a far greater understanding and mastery of scientific methods and scientific knowledge than have philosophers, whose track record in this domain is often unimpressive.7 For examining these issues philosophically, the history of philosophy is utterly invaluable, especially that chapter of the history of philosophy occupied by the reputed prince of philosophical darkness, Hegel. The siren song of science has been too long distorted by philosophers with tin Cartesian ears. Excessive specialisation in the field has only exacerbated these problems. We epistemologists are long overdue to lift a methodological page from Nietzsche, who observed: … to see differently in this [vedantic or Kantian] way for once, to want to see differently, is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its future ‘objectivity’ – the latter understood not as ‘disinterested contemplation’ (which is a non-concept and absurdity), but rather as the capacity to have one’s pro and contra in one’s power, and to shift them in and out: so that one knows how to make precisely the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge. … There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our ‘concept’ of this matter, our ‘objectivity’ be. (GM III, §12, cf. FW §295, EH I, §§1, 9) 7

Though certainly not always: see, e.g., the exemplary research of Howard Stein (2002; cf. Shimony 2002a, b), Malament (2002), Brock (2003), Wimsatt (2007), Harper (2011).

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To recognise that philosophers take stances is an important first step towards understanding them and their roles in the development and assessment of express philosophical views and theses. But we must avoid the error all too frequently found among philosophical schools in the twentieth century, including logical positivism, of ‘acknowledging’ as worthy interlocutors only those who subscribe to the same philosophical stance. Above all, this thwarts the identification and assessment of one’s underlying philosophical stance. Descartes, at least, recognised that his epistemological inquiry was only possible under the special conditions of being able to set aside all of his everyday, moral, and religious concerns, involvements and beliefs. Descartes’ epistemological package, most of which became the epistemological stance, failed to understand even Galilean kinematics or Newtonian mechanics. Due to its atomistic tendencies, it has fared even worse with quantum theory, which is deeply holistic (Teller 1986, 1989). I close on a note of emphatic agreement with van Fraassen, who observes: Philosophy itself is a value and attitude-driven enterprise; philosophy is in false consciousness when it sees itself otherwise. To me, philosophy is of overriding importance, to our culture, to our civilization, to us individually. For it is the enterprise in which we, in every century, interpret ourselves anew. But unless it so understands itself, it degenerates into an arid play of mere forms. (ES 17)

Indeed! Yet if we are to get our philosophical stances in order, if we are to achieve genuine philosophical self-understanding and if we are to account philosophically for natural scientific knowledge, we must fundamentally transform our contemporary philosophical stances. Many requisite methods and materials lie waiting in the unfamiliar and largely uncharted scope and depths of the Kantian-Hegelian tradition. Routes into this philosophical gold mine have been cleared; now it is high time to reconsider their achievements.

CHAPTER 18

Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: Its Aims, Scope and Significance 122

INTRODUCTION.

Though initiated by Pythagoras, expanded in Plato’s Timeaus, comprehensively developed by Aristotle and healthy throughout the Mediaeval, Renaissance and Modern periods well into the Nineteenth Century,1 in the Twentieth Century among analytic and scientifically-minded philosophers, ‘philosophy of nature’ apparently vanished. Fortunately, the increasing calibre of recent research in history, methodology and philosophy of science has once again revealed fascinating issues at the intersections among the natural sciences, scientific methodology, history of science and philosophy of science which today – precisely because no discipline can plausibly monopolise them – are rightly designated philosophy of nature. Placing Hegel’s notorious Philosophy of Nature within this interdisciplinary grey area is not illuminating. Hegel classifies his philosophy of nature as rational physics.2 ‘Rational physics’ may sound quaint, outdated, even presumptuous. Yet Newton (1999, 381, cf. 11) identified the genre of his Principia as ‘rational mechanics’ (a proper part of rational physics), and rational physics remains a serious discipline today, with professional journals and recent textbooks to show for it.3 ‘Rational physics’ is physical theory which emphasises the conceptual foundations and basic principles of physics and how these can be used to explain particular physical phenomena, rendering them comprehensible. This is the key aim of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, because sufficient explication of the conceptual foundations of natural sciences requires philosophical resources which complement the resources found within scientific theories and methods, which alone, he argues, are insufficient to the task. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is fascinating in its own right and also sheds important light on the character of Hegel’s philosophy as a whole, because as Henry Harris notes, the Baconian applied science of this world is the solid foundation upon which Hegel’s ladder of spiritual experience rests. (HL 2:355) 1 2 3

See, e.g., Cassirer (1999), Meixner and Newen (2004), McKeon (1994), Malament (2002). Enz. II, Intro.; MM 9:10–11/Hegel (1970c), 2. E.g., Kilmister and Reeve (1966).

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Indeed, Hegel’s study of gravitational theory played a central role in the development of his ‘dialectic’ from merely a destructive set of sceptical equipollence arguments directed against contemporaneous physics and astronomy into a constructive set of philosophical principles based upon gravity exhibiting the essential interrelatedness of physical bodies.4 Though it has been easy to condemn Hegel’s alleged errors – the supposed debacle regarding Bode’s Law of interplanetary distances and the discovery of the asteroid, Ceres; his apparently scandalous attack on Newton’s Principia – such criticisms generally redound upon their sources, once Hegel’s sources are properly identified and assessed.5 Hegel’s post-graduate instruction in physics was excellent, and he had sufficient background in mathematics to understand it thoroughly.6 Michael John Petry’s three volume edition of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature shows conclusively that Hegel was broadly and deeply versed in the natural sciences of his day, as well as any non-specialist possibly could be and far more than his vociferous critics ever were, that Hegel made very few outright errors about contemporaneous science and that those errors usually stem from credible sources.7 Though not a professional mathematician, Hegel taught calculus and understood mathematics sufficiently to have informed reasons to favour French schools of analysis, particularly LaGrange’s (§267R2).8 Indeed, he was sufficiently well informed about problems in the foundations of (mathematical) analysis to critically assess Cauchy’s ground-breaking ‘first reform’ of analysis (Wolff 1986). Indeed, Hegel was rare amongst philosophers, because he was also directly engaged in natural science, specifically geology and mineralogy.9 Hegel is not the charlatan whose image still arises in connection with his philosophy of nature. Understanding the philosophical character of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature requires considering some basic legitimate philosophical issues embedded in the development of physics from Galileo to Newton (§123). These illuminate the character of Hegel’s analysis of philosophical issues regarding nature 4

Ferrini (1999); cp. De Orbitis Planetarum, GW 5:247.29; Hegel (1987), 295. And once corruptions in the Latin of Hegel’s Dissertatio are corrected; see Ferrini (1995) and the critical edition in GW 5:231–53. Regarding Bode’s Law, see Neuser (1986, 50–60) and Ferrini (1998). Regarding Newton, see Halper (2008), Ferrini (1995 &c), Ziche (1996, 133–99), Petry (1993) and Westphal (2014, 2015a). 6 See Pfleiderer (1994); for discussion see below, §114, and Westphal (2015a). 7 Petry (1970), 1:49–59. Petry’s edition (Hegel 1970b) indicates the original date of publication of the various passages included in Hegel’s final edition (1830). A somewhat better translation is provided by Miller (Hegel 1970c); see Buchdahl (1972). Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is the second of three parts of his Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, comprising §§245–375. 8 The second edition of LaGrange’s Théorie des fonctiones analytiques (1811) is available in English translation (LaGrange 1997). Hegel used the first edition, LaGrange (1797). 9 Ferrini (2009a, b); Ziche (1997), (1998), (2002). 5

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(§124) and the central aims and purposes of his philosophy of nature (§125). 123

GALILEO, NEWTON AND PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE.

123.1 Galileo’s Methodology. Galileo directly disputed authority as a criterion of truth in scientific matters. He also knew that sensory evidence could not serve as this criterion; he recognised that motion is relative and that illusions and appearances can infect observation. Galileo held that mathematical formulation of laws of nature can afford demonstrations of genuine regularities in natural phenomena. This requires that mathematical formulae be fitted to careful observation, whilst the joint satisfaction of these two demands must also be rationally intelligible. The crucial methodological point is that giving mathematical expression to natural regularities guides the physical analysis and explanation of the phenomena. The factors in the mathematical formula must be plausibly interpretable as factors within the physical situation. Galileo explicitly disavowed metaphysics as a guide to determining the plausibility of those factors, at the beginning of Day 3 of his Discourses Concerning the Two New Sciences. This incensed Descartes and the same attitude in Newton worried Kant, though it was decisive for the development of modern science and became even more pronounced in Newton’s Principia.10 Newton’s mathematical theory of orbital motion forged an important kind of independence of physical theory from metaphysical and physical questions about the ultimate nature of space, time or gravity: For Newton’s work it sufficed to regard gravity as a centrally directed force, where that centre is specified only by its mass and location (De Gandt 1995, 265–72). The relevance of this point to Hegel can be seen by considering Gerd Buchdahl’s (1980) account of how scientific theories are developed, evaluated and revised within a methodological framework comprising three kinds of considerations, a ‘probative component’ regarding proper standards and techniques for collecting and assessing observational and experimental data, a ‘systemic component’ regarding the internal unity of a theory and its integration with other scientific theories and an ‘explicative component’ concerning the intelligibility or plausibility of the basic concepts or factors involved in a scientific theory, including heuristic principles and basic principles of explanation. In a phrase, Hegel’s philosophy of nature is dedicated to showing that, when properly explicated, the basic concepts involved in an adequate scientific theory are mutually contrastive and interdefined in such a way that no genuine further questions about explanatory causes remain. The questions set aside by Galileo and Newton, the very questions Descartes and 10

Descartes to Mersenne, 11 Oct., 1638; Kant, MAdN, 4:472–3.

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Kant sought to answer, are not, in the final Hegelian explication, genuine questions at all. This point can be illustrated and specified by considering part of Hegel’s critique of Newton. 123.2 Newton’s Two Questions. Newton sought to answer two questions: Given an orbiting body’s trajectory, find the law of force; and more importantly: Given a law of force, find the trajectory of an orbiting body (De Gandt 1995, 8). Newton’s theory involves generalising Galileo’s law of free fall to regard the deviation of an orbit from its tangent as an indicator of centrally directed force, where the extent of deviation is proportional to the square of the time. Since the motion in question is an elliptical orbit, the direction of deviation from a tangent is directed towards a focal centre, and so is not constant. Since the orbit is elliptical, the force which produces the deviation also varies with the distance from the centre (by an inverse square proportionality). These facts require incorporating time into the geometrical calculations. Newton included time by generalising Kepler’s law of areas; the time elapsed when traversing a given arc of its orbit is proportional to the area of the sector swept out by a radius from the centre point to the orbiting body. Because the direction of motion changes continuously, the geometrical calculations must be restricted to very small or nascent motions. Combining these factors required sophisticated mathematical analysis which eluded Newton’s predecessors, although they perceived many of the relevant physical factors. Because one of the two central problems was to derive the law of force from a given orbit, it is significant though unsurprising that Newton’s inverse square law of gravitational attraction can be derived from Kepler’s orbits. Hegel contends, however, that Newton’s purely mathematical demonstration of Kepler’s laws is inadequate because Newton’s mathematical analysis alone cannot establish the reality of Kepler’s physical laws (§270R; see below, §123.3; and Ferrini 1994). Yet Newton’s second problem is more important and more acute: to derive a body’s orbit from the law of attraction. Newton developed a bevy of ingenious geometrical techniques to solve this problem, but it ultimately is beyond those means to handle. In principle, Newton’s expanded geometrical methods can only determine, one point at a time, the trajectory of a body which begins motion with any initial velocity under the influence of any central force depending on distance. However, only with integral calculus can the curve of the trajectory be completely described and can the geometrical species of the curve (if it has one) be determined, in part because Newton’s own geometrical methods presuppose but cannot prove there is a limit to his limit-taking operations. The problem and the solution were first dem-

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onstrated by Jean Bernoulli using integral calculus.11 Though I have found no reference by Hegel to Bernoulli’s works, Hegel refers directly to the weaknesses of Newton’s proof that the planets move in ellipses; in particular, his remarks suggest the problem of the uniqueness of the ellipse as a solution to the problem of determining the orbit on the basis of the law of force. The problem of the uniqueness of the solution was taken up from Bernoulli by subsequent analyses using integral calculus, including Francoeur’s Traité élémentair de Mécanique (1801) to which Hegel refers in this connection (§270R). Hegel cites (in 1827 and 1830) Laplace’s Exposition du Systèm du Monde (1796) to the same effect in his lectures (§270Z). Yet Hegel learned of this problem much earlier from Castel (1724), a rare work widely publicised by Montucla (1758), which Hegel likely studied when visiting the university library in Geneva from Bern and which he implicitly used both in his dissertation, De Orbitis Planetarum,12 and in his Science of Logic.13 Castel argued that Newton’s demonstration of Kepler’s areal law entails the absurd conclusion that all central orbits are circular. The data available to Newton were not sufficiently precise to distinguish between circular and elliptic orbits. Instead of deriving elliptical orbits as a theoretical result, Newton used the absence of orbital precession to measure precisely the inversesquare power of attraction. With this power law established, then the elliptic figure of the orbits can be derived (Smith 2002). 123.3 Some Limits of Newton’s Methods. Newton’s point-by-point calculation of an orbit illustrates Hegel’s complaint about the ‘unspeakable metaphysics’ unleashed by Newton’s Principia (§270R). Newton’s point-by-point calculations require dividing up a continuous motion and dividing up the various factors which constitute that motion and treating them as if they were mutually independent quantities governing mutually independent entities. The point of Hegel’s critique is that no sensible physical interpretation can be given to the mathematical factors involved in Newton’s calculations: The presuppositions, the course, and the results which analysis requires and provides, remain quite beside the [present] point, which concerns the physical value and the physical significance (Bedeutung) of those determinations and that course [of Newton’s geometrical demonstration]. (§270R)

Hegel objects to Newton’s reifying his analytical factors into apparently mutually independent realities; he contends that Newton’s geometrical methods cannot but encourage this misleading tendency by carving up a continuous 11 DeGandt (1995), 248–9, 263–4; see further Pourciau (1992) and Nasti De Vincentis (1995, 1998), who correctly identifies the Newtonian problem Hegel highlights. 12 Hegel (1801, 1987); see Ferrini (1994, 1995, 1997a). 13 WL I, 21:378.29-379.4, 379.6-379.9; see Ferrini (1997b), 413–4.

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mutual causal interaction into fictitious discrete impulses (cf. §266n.). Indeed, this contrast illuminates Hegel’s repeated stress on how ‘modern analysis’ (i.e., calculus) has dispensed with Newton’s methods of proof (e.g., §270R). 123.4 Hegel’s Causal Realism. Hegel’s criticism of Newton’s intricate geometrical methods illuminates Hegel’s account of causal dispositions and causal laws. Consider three standard views of scientific laws and explanations. It is often supposed that genuinely explanatory laws refer to ‘sub-observable’ theoretical entities, whose properties and interaction produce an observed macroscopic phenomenon. In sharp contrast to this, instrumentalism regards theoretical entities as mere fictions for calculating predictions and retrodictions of observable phenomena.14 A third view is that scientific laws should be ‘phenomenological’ in the sense that they merely describe regularities in manifest, observed phenomena. All kinematic laws are of this type, including Copernicus’, Galileo’s and Keplper’s; this view of natural laws is also found, e.g., in the theories of Joseph Black, W.J.M. Rankine and Gustav Kirchhoff, or in phenomenological thermodynamics.15 Of these standard options, the third is closest to Hegel’s. However, Hegel’s logical cum philosophical explication seeks the insight or comprehension promised by explanatory laws whilst avoiding a potentially sceptical gap between observed phenomena and theoretical posits. The clue lies in Hegel’s supposed ‘Aristotelianism’, that is, his opposition to corpuscularism. 123.5 Corpuscularism and Dynamic Forces. Corpuscular theories of matter rejected Aristotelian accounts of ‘natures’ to account for change. According to corpuscularism, matter is discrete, inert and consists solely of extension and impenetrability. Because matter is inert, all changes of matter must result from some non-material cause, either directly or indirectly; no forces are inherent in matter. The postulation of inert matter fared ill as science developed. Newton ascribed the power of inertia to matter. Eighteenth-century physicists lost their Cartesian and corpuscular aversions to ascribing gravity as a physical force to matter as such, and the development of chemistry, beginning with Newton himself, though especially as developed by Black, Priestly and Lavoisier, ascribed other active forces to matter.16 The alternative theory of matter is dynamic; it ascribes active forces or causal dispositions directly to matter. First unambiguously advocated in chemistry, the dynamic theory of matter lent itself directly to Newtonian dynamics because it affords a way to understand gravitational force as inherent in matter and thus removes one prop supporting mechanical explanations of gravity. The other 14

Cf. Hume En §7.1, final n. (on vis inertiae and gravity). See HER, 160, 273 n. 29. This third view is ascribed to Hegel by Buchdahl (1984, 20) and by Falkenburg (1998, 132 n. 3). 16 On the chemical revolution in connection with Kant, see Friedman (1992), 264–90. 15

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was the problem of action at a distance, which is only a problem for those narrowly mechanical conceptions of matter which in principle require contact for one body to change the motion of another body. This problem, too, is alleviated by a dynamic concept of matter. I say that the dynamic concept of matter was first unambiguously advocated in chemistry, although Newtonian mechanics ultimately ascribes gravitational force to matter. Throughout his life, out of deference to the Cartesian tradition he opposed and in accord with the corpuscular tradition to which he adhered, he formulated his Quaeries in the Opticks in 1717 very cautiously. When pressed, Newton denied that ‘gravity’ is an essential or constitutive characteristic of matter, and allowed that matter may be ‘endued’ with gravity by the Creator. Nevertheless, he affirmed the reality of gravitational attraction, having measured it very precisely by several independent measures, providing increasingly precise and precisely agreeing measures of the inversesquare power of gravitational attraction (Harper 2011). Yet it remained for later Eighteenth Century physicists to rescind their corpuscular and Cartesian qualms about active forces in matter and to take Newton’s Quaery 31 at face value. (Newton regarded impenetrability as a fundamental characteristic of body, while Descartes held that it derives from the primary characteristic of extension.)17 A central objection to Newton’s theory of gravity from both the Cartesian and the corpuscular traditions was that it appeared to reinstate discredited Aristotelian forms or active powers. Newton sought neutrality about the causes of gravitational attraction. Yet his official agnosticism about the nature and status of gravity ultimately compromises the natural-scientific credentials of Newton’s physical system of the world because it required Newton to insert a transcendent, theological postulate into his erstwhile physical theory, namely that the Creator endues matter with gravitational force, set the astronomical clockwork going and occasionally intervenes to prevent the whole system from running down. As Hegel recognised in his Dissertatio, Newton’s natural theology rescinds the key scientific aim to offer an entirely natural and thus genuinely scientific explanation of natural phenomena.18 Hegel further recognised that Newtonian physical theory in fact provides sufficient grounds for ascribing gravitational attraction directly to matter; matter is ‘essentially heavy’ in the sense that material bodies inherently tend – they gravitate – towards one another (Enz. §§262, 269).19 Indeed, Hegel held 17

Newton (1952), 389, 400, (1962), 106. Descartes (1991), 3:361, 372. On Newton’s corpuscularism, see Mandelbaum (1964), 66–88. 18 GW 5:247.12–23; Hegel (1987), 294. For discussion of Newton’s view, see Carrier (1999). 19 See Buchdahl (1984, 18–25). Buchdahl (1972, 260–61) recognises Hegel’s ‘Aristotelianism’, but never reconciles it with Hegel’s alleged preference for ‘phenomenological’ laws

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that adequate scientific explanation provides the only possible grounds for ascribing active characteristics – causal dispositions – to material phenomena. Comprehending constitutive characteristics of things provides explanatory insight, provided we rescind the traditional and Early Modern preoccupation with purportedly ‘essential’ or ‘necessary’ properties! Hegel capitalises upon the connotations of the German term ‘Wesen’ as the counterpart to the Latin essentia, which concerns beings; in German, ‘Finanzwesen’ designates the financial conditions of some actual institution. In his logical explication of ‘Wesen’, Hegel strives to recover the pre-Rationalist and post-Scientific Revolution connotations the term, which concern constitutive characteristics of something (such as matter, or a specific material or structure), and to disabuse us of our Cartesian tendency to seek conceptually necessary and sufficient conditions for classifying things or their features. This shift away from a priorist conceptual terminology and modalities (‘essence’/‘accident’, ‘necessary’/‘contingent’) to scientifically credible grounds for identifying logically contingent yet nevertheless constitutive features of things can be found explicitly in Newton’s exchange with Huygens about light (Westphal 2009b, §5.2). This is Hegel’s view beginning already in the Phenomenology of Spirit, developed there in nuce, expressly postponing its proper explication for his system of ‘science’ (PhdG, 9:101.17–27/¶164),20 which came to comprise his Science of Logic, and also his Encyclopaedia, including centrally Philosophy of Nature. 123.6 Hegel’s Causal Realism (again). In ‘Force and Understanding’ (PhdG, chapt. III) Hegel repeatedly criticises attempts to reify aspects or moments of force into supposed distinct or independent entities (Westphal 2015a). For example, he criticised the reification of ‘expressed’ and ‘repressed’ force (e.g., the contrast between kinetic and potential energy) or ‘solicited’ and ‘soliciting’ force (below, §129.5). Kant used the term ‘solicitation’ to refer to the effect of a moving force on a body in a given moment, which gives the moment of acceleration. Kant used this to try to prove the law of continuity (MAdN, 4:551–3). Hegel’s point is that thinking of forces in terms of ‘moments’ of solicitation encourages misleading division of a continuously effective force into a series of (quasi-mechanical) impulses of just the sort found in Newton’s geometrical analysis of gravitational force (above, §123.4). Hegel described a set of theoretical causal laws, such as Newton’s Principia, Book One, as a ‘quiet supersensible realm of law’ because abstract formulations of laws of nature don’t account for actual phenomena precisely because they are abstract ideof nature because he doesn’t grasp Hegel’s enriched account of ‘phenomenological’ laws highlighted here. This important point is already central to Hegel’s Dissertatio (GW 5: 247.29/1987, 295). 20 Natural science is also fundamental to Hegel’s analysis of ‘The Certainty and Truth of Reason’ and ‘Reason Observing Nature’ (Ferrini 2009a, b).

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alisations. Accounting for actual phenomena additionally requires providing their specific parameters, initial conditions and the theoretical links between the abstract formulae of general laws of nature and the specific versions of those laws pertaining to the specific physical system in question (PhdG, 9: 91.31–37/¶150). Likewise, subsuming particular laws of phenomena under more general laws requires tremendous abstraction – from particular phenomena and their complex, fully determinate conditions (PhdG, 9:92.10–19/ ¶150). Thus explaining particular phenomena requires re-introducing their specific parameters. Nevertheless, the fact that various specific phenomena can be brought under a common general law, and not merely a common mathematical function, shows that these phenomena are in fact interrelated; they are not mutually independent, self-sufficient objects or events.21 The very concept of law-like relations, and likewise the very concept of force, requires interdefined factors into which the phenomena can be analysed (PhdG 9:93.7–94.28/¶¶152–4). Thus ‘the force is constituted exactly like the law’.22 Hegel thus aims to show that adequate scientific explanation provides the sole and sufficient grounds for determining the constitutive characteristics of the objects, events and processes in nature. Why ascribe forces to material phenomena? Because so far as logical, epistemic or metaphysical necessities may be concerned, natural phenomena may instantiate any mathematical function, different functions at different times or in different regions – or no such function at all. Hegel realised that Kant’s Foundations fails utterly to account for this (above, §§25–29).23 The fact that a natural phenomenon exhibits a mathematical function indicates, as nothing else can, that something in that phenomenon is structured in accord with the relevant mathematical function exhibited in its behaviour. That ‘something’ is the causal structure of the phenomenon, its causal disposition(s). Hegel’s claim must be taken literally: the force is constituted exactly like the law (Westphal 2015a). Hegel’s account 21 PhdG, 9:92.23–26/¶150. Pfleiderer (1994) repeatedly drew his students’ attention to mathematical functions exhibited in natural phenomena and their underlying causal laws, and stressed that distinct causal laws may exhibit common kinds of mathematical functions. A key error of Schelling’s philosophy of nature is his persistent tendency to mistake analogies for identities, thus disregarding Pfleiderer’s crucial point. This error is one object of Hegel’s condemnation of relying on mere analogies, especially on the basis of intuition (Enz. Intro., MM 9:9, Hegel 1970c, 1; Enz. §246R). Schelling’s apologists have yet to address Hegel’s devastating observation (cf. Houlgate 1999). 22 PhdG 95.12–13/¶154; original emphasis. Hegel’s claim is consistent with recognising various kinds of idealisations typically involved in stating causal laws, but these niceties cannot be discussed here. 23 Radical empiricists like van Fraassen hold that insisting on having an ‘account’ is already to beg the question in favour of an illicit realism about explanations and explananda. Radical empiricism of this sort, however, is an unwarranted hold-over of misguided, early eighteenth-century philosophical preconceptions about science; cf. above, §§116– 121; Hüttemann (1997), Westphal (forthcoming b).

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of causation has great significance for his ontology in general and especially for his Philosophy of Nature. 123.7 Hegel’s Debts to Newtonian Physics. Despite his penetrating critique of Newton’s flawed geometrical methods, it is crucial to recognise that Hegel’s central account of concepts – of Begriffe as internally complex, systematically integrated and instantiated conceptual structures – owes its foundation, both for its meaning and for its justification, to Newtonian theory of universal gravitation (Ferrini 1999). Hegel himself insists that: Gravitation is the true and determinate concept of material corporeality, which is realised as idea (zur Idee realisiert ist). (§269) Universal gravitation as such must be recognised as a profound thought; it has already acquired attention and confidence, above all through its associated quantitative determination and has been vindicated by experience from the solar system right down to the phenomenon of the capillary tube …. (§269R)

Hegel’s profound admiration for the enormous scope and integrative power of the theory of universal gravitation, expressed briefly here, is something he learned from his physics instructor Pfleiderer, who use this lesson to explain an extremely important kind of scientific explanation. Pfleiderer’s account serves as the best commentary on Hegel’s own brief remark: Physics is concerned with the most exact knowledge of natural phenomena possible. From what we observe in nature we make certain rules according to which bodies interrelate under certain conditions. … In the previous [example; omitted] natural laws were expressed merely as general occurrent (eintretender) consequences; but one also speaks of properties and capacities of bodies because it lies in the nature of our way of representing things (unseres Vorstellens) to regard whatever we consistently remark in something as its property or power. In this way we of course gain brevity and richness of expression, but one must not thereby mislead oneself into believing that the cause of the phenomenon has thus been found. If we say, for example, the body falls because it is heavy, no cause is thus adduced; rather, heaviness is a mere designation of the very same phenomenon. However if such a law is now found, e.g., that an unsupported body moves toward the earth until it again finds support, in that way we still don’t know the phenomenon sufficiently; what matters instead are other circumstances, in this case the direction and speed of the motion and the relations among various different bodies in this regard. To inform ourselves about these requires experiments. For example, one places bodies in a space from which as much air as possible is expelled and finds that now all bodies fall with almost equal speed. The rules constructed from compiling and comparing individual phenomena are then applied again to explain other particular complex phenomena, indeed ones which often at first seem to contradict them, e.g., the swinging of the pendulum, the rising of light bodies, water spouts, suction pumps, etc. These latter phenomena one used to believe were explained by the so-called horror vacui; however this was basically no more than an ill-suited expression for the phe-

405 nomenon itself. Afterwards one found that the matter could be fully explained by the pressure of air on the water, and that in this way it could be traced back to the law of gravity, of which it first seemed to make an exception. If one then wants to go further and adduce actual causes of phenomena, then one must admittedly be satisfied with probabilities and hypotheses. (Pfleiderer 1994, 59–60)

Pfleiderer’s dismissive closing remark about ‘probabilities and hypotheses’ pretty clearly alludes to Newton’s hypothesi non fingo.24 Pfleiderer’s point is that mathematical description of natural regularities enables us to find common regularities underlying diverse and apparently opposed or conflicting phenomena and that this is centrally a matter of exact mathematical description combined with comprehensive classification of natural phenomena under common mathematical functions. Pfleiderer thus espoused the standard ‘phenomenological’ account of scientific laws and explanations, which Hegel significantly refashioned when he realised that this kind of empirical evidence coupled with exact mathematical description provides the sole and sufficient basis for ascribing causal dispositions to natural phenomena (above, §123.5). Yet Hegel retained Pfleiderer’s lessons about the inadequacy of the covering-law model of scientific explanation and the enormous importance of seeking scientific explanation in systematic integration, a view only recently considered by analytic philosophers of science.25 With these basic points about Hegel’s view of Newtonian physics in hand, consider now the basic philosophical character of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, before considering its central systematic aims (below, §125).26 124

HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE: ONTOLOGY, METAPHYSICS OR SEMANTICS?

124.1 Natural Science and Hegel’s Naturalism. Interpretations of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature tend to bifurcate: According to some, Hegel’s development or derivation of the various concepts treated in his Philosophy of Nature is purely conceptual and a priori, and merely draws illustrative, corrigible examples from the empirical domains of the natural sciences. Others contend that the very basis of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is the entirety of natural science, so that the conceptual network developed in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is as corrigible as natural science itself, which has changed radically 24

About what Newton counted and rejected as mere hypotheses, see Harper (2011). E.g., Friedman (1974), Morrison (2000). 26 Further features of Hegel’s critical reconsideration of Newton’s Principia are discussed by Halper (2008). For detailed discussion of Hegel’s rational physics, and his acute account of the role of mathematics in it, see Ihmig (1989), Moretto (2004) and Wandschneider (1982). 25

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since 1830.27 The holistic character of Hegel’s philosophy together with his epistemology renders suspect the dichotomy formed by these two approaches, which presumes, in effect, the supposedly exclusive and exhaustive traditional distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘historical’ knowledge. Both kinds of knowledge adhere to a foundationalist model of justification. ‘Historical’ knowledge (historia) is based squarely and solely on perception or empirical evidence; it is inevitably partial and unsystematic, or at least cannot be known to be otherwise. ‘Rational’ knowledge (scientia) is the only rigorous form of knowledge, for it justifies conclusions solely by deducing them from original ‘first’ principles. This distinction held sway throughout the Modern period, was central to Kant’s epistemology and is still detectable today in deductivist assumptions often made, if implicitly, about empirical justification.28 Hegel was deeply suspicious of this standard dichotomy. This is indicated by his rejection, by 1802, of distinctions in kind between both the a priori and the a posteriori and between the analytic and the synthetic (G&W 4:335.2–6). Hegel’s critique of Kant’s Critical philosophy and his solution to the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion reject the traditional dichotomy between scientia and historia, along with the foundationalist model of justification they embody (above, §§60–64, 83–91). More careful recent research suggests more sophisticated lines of interpretation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature which avoid the ultimately untenable dichotomy between ‘rational’ and ‘historical’ knowledge.29 Hegel insists that, whilst the two disciplines are distinct (Enz. §§7–9), natural science is fundamental to philosophy: Not only must philosophy accord with the experience nature gives rise to; in its formation and in its development, philosophic science presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics. (Enz. §246R; cf. Hegel 2000, 72)

This remark, made very early in Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of Na27

Houlgate (1998), xiii–xiv. Petry (2001) reviews research on Hegel’s philosophy of nature. Descartes (1984, 1:13) uses this distinction in passing in the Third of his Rules for Directing the Mind. This distinction gives the point to Locke’s (Es 1.1.2) claim to use the ‘historical, plain method’ and to Hume’s (En §8, ¶64.2) contrast between ‘inference and reasoning’ versus ‘memory and senses’ as sources of knowledge. Kant uses it in the same sense as Descartes in a parallel context (KdrV A835–7/B863–5). 29 My account owes much, though likely not yet enough, to Falkenburg (1987, 1998), Ferrini (1995, 1999), Moretto (2004) and Houlgate (2005), 106–80, though I present a distinctive interpretation anchored in Hegel’s epistemology and semantics. Houlgate’s comprehensive introduction is highly recommended, especially for its detailed synopsis of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. Also see Ferrarin (2001), 201–33. A good synopsis of Hegel’s organicism is provided by Beiser (2005), 80–109. However, pace Beiser (2005, 107), amongst many others, Hegel’s serious and independent engagement with natural science began long before his arrival in Jena; it began by his time in Bern (Ferrini 1994, 1997). 28

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ture, concerns not only the second part of his Encyclopaedia. Nor does it concern only the development of spirit out of nature in part three. It also and fundamentally concerns Hegel’s Logic. Just quoted was the second sentence of Hegel’s Remark; the first sentence refers to Hegel’s discussion of the relation between philosophy and the empirical sciences in the Introduction to the Encyclopaedia as a whole. There Hegel states directly that philosophy is stimulated by and grows out of experience, including natural-scientific experience, and that the natural sciences develop conceptual determinations in the form of generalisations, laws and classifications which must be reconsidered philosophically (Enz. §12). Thus Hegel insists that his Logic cannot be properly understood apart from his Philosophy of Nature, nor can his philosophy of nature be understood apart from Hegel’s knowledge and understanding of the methods and content of natural science. Hegel’s Logic examines the ontological and cognitive roles of ontological categories (e.g., being, existence, quantity, essence, appearance, relation, thing, cause) and principles of logic (e.g., identity, excluded middle, non-contradiction. His Logic also analyses syllogistic inference, cognitive judgment and principles of scientific explanation (force, matter, measure, cognition; mechanical, chemical, organic and teleological functions), all of which are required to know the world. This brief list casts grave doubt upon the suggestion that Hegel’s Logic can be a purely a priori investigation, for it involves too many quite specific concepts and principles, at least some of which obviously derive from historical science (e.g., ‘chemism’). Much less so, then, can Hegel’s attempt in his Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, to show that and how these concepts and principles are specified and exhibited within nature and human life, be purely a priori.30 Yet the fact that Hegel expressly avows the empirical and scientific sources of many of the key concepts and principles examined in his Logic and especially in his Philosophy of Nature does not make his philosophical project merely empirical nor merely explicative. In the Remark just quoted Hegel distinguishes sharply between the basis and development of his philosophy out of reconsideration of the natural sciences and his philosophical science proper, for which the natural sciences are not foundational. Instead, the foundation or basis of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is something he calls ‘the necessity of the concept’ (Enz. §246+R), which philosophy elucidates in part with some of its own conceptual resources (Enz. §9). In what can this conceptual necessity consist, if it cannot be pure a priori and if many of the concepts and principles it examines derive from natural science? Calling the relevant necessity ‘metaphysical’ doesn’t help, though it recalls Hegel’s observation that metaphysics is nothing other than ‘the full range 30

On Hegel’s views on chemistry, cf. Engelhardt (1976, 1984), Burbidge (1996), Renault (2002).

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(Umfang) of universal determinations of thought (Denkbestimmungen); as it were, the diamond net in which we bring everything and thus first make it intelligible’ (Enz. §246Z). Hegel’s concern is that basic concepts and principles used in natural science are either assumed to be familiar – as Newton assumed our familiarity with space and time – or they are introduced independently of one another in ways obscuring their conceptual significance, which is a function of how each concept is both distinguished from and also integrated with other concepts within its domain and their proper ontological interpretation (Enz. §246Z). Hegel advocated moderate holism about conceptual content or meaning (intension): concepts can only be properly defined and understood by integrating them with their proper counterparts within any specific domain, and likewise integrating specific domains under higherorder concepts or principles, whilst also integrating specific concepts with their proper instances. Hegel’s moderate semantic holism invokes his ‘Co-Determination Thesis’ (above, §43). 124.2 Hegel’s Philosophical Semantics. If ‘semantics’ is philosophical theory of conceptual content (intension, classification) and of cognitive or linguistic reference, then ‘metaphysics’, as the study of our ‘diamond [conceptual] net’ with which Hegel identifies his Logic, is fundamentally semantic. Hegel’s philosophical analyses of issues in philosophy of nature exhibit great sensitivity to the ontological implications of conceptual content (classifications and connotations) and to the importance of the ontological interpretation of metaphysical and scientific principles (above, §123). This may sound anachronistic, but is not: Kant’s semantics are far richer and more sophisticated than has generally been recognised31 and Hegel adopted the core points of Kant’s semantics. Thus I agree with Pirmin Stekeler that Hegel’s Logic is fundamentally a critical theory of meaning.32 If this is surprising, this is only due to the pre-Kantian, Cartesian character of so much recent philosophy (and the neglect of semantics and epistemology by most of Hegel’s expositors). Kant was the first great anti-Cartesian in philosophy, and Hegel learned Kant’s lessons well. The Denkbestimmungen analysed in Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Nature are, Hegel argues, fundamental structures of the extant world itself (Denkbestimmungen des Seins).33 One cardinal Denkbestimmung, Hegel argues, is ‘force’, especially as introduced and justified by Newton. Hegel already understood the central role of natural scientific investigation, 31

See Melnick (1989), Hanna (2001), KTPR, Bird (2006). Stekeler’s (1992) semantic interpretation of Hegel’s Logic dove-tails perfectly with Hegel’s transcendental-pragmatic epistemology, as explicated here. This is a strong consideration favouring Stekeler’s interpretation. The excellent conspectus of Hegel’s Logic by Burbidge (2004) also corroborates these points. 33 Enz. §24Z; Hegel (1808), §164/Hegel (1986), 158. 32

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on the one hand, and conceptual and semantic explication on the other, for determining whether and to what extent alleged Denkbestimmungen are indeed genuine structures of nature. Hegel’s cognitive semantics is equally fundamental both to his Logic and to his Philosophy of Nature. Only by pursuing both investigations together can we identify Denkbestimmungen which are indeed basic structures of what is (des Seins) and in particular of nature.34 125

CENTRAL SYSTEMATIC AIMS OF HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE.

Hegel’s lead question in the Philosophy of Nature is simple to state, though puzzling to understand: ‘What is nature?’35 Is this a philosophical question? Why? The Modern corpuscular answer: nature is nothing but bodies in motion, only generates more questions: What bodies and what kinds of bodies? What motions and what kinds of motions? What, exactly, is ruled out – and ruled in – by the clause, ‘nothing but’? Yet the seventeenth-century materialist view of nature has proven amazingly durable amongst philosophers, even those who profess a marked interest in philosophy of science, or who proclaim that philosophy is nothing but an extension of or appendage to natural science (see above, §§116–121). The corpuscular answer echos throughout the narrowly reductionist, eliminativist or causal conceptions of ‘naturalism’ prevalent in contemporary analytic philosophy.36 The mind-body problem was unknown to the Greeks and Mediaevals.37 In a world comprising various kinds of enmattered forms, where the behaviour of each particular is a function of its Aristotelian essence or soul, and where each casts off its perceptual ‘species’ (literally ‘shapes’) by which we can grasp its essence, the now-obvious mind-body problem was profoundly unfamiliar. One source of its development was the newly quantified science of nature, physics. Central to scientific investigation of natural phenomena, whether terrestrial or celestial, are the size, shape, location, motion, number and material constitution of objects. These ‘primary’ qualities were regarded as the only fundamental or ‘real’ qualities of bodies. All the others qualities which make life so colourful, tasty and delightful are thus ‘secondary’ qualities, derivative from the effects of the primary qualities of bodies on our sensory receptors. With the mechanisation of nature inevitably came the mechanisation of the human body. Descartes’ innovation was less the mind than the body as machina: it too is exhaustively describable in purely quantitative 34

WdL I, 21:11–12, Hegel (2001), 153.584–593, 155.644–659; cf. HER, 140–5. Enz. II, Intro., MM 9:12/Hegel (1970c), 3. 36 See the excellent discussion in Rouse (2002); cf. Westphal (2016b). 37 Matson (1966), King (2005). 35

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terms of bodies in motion; hence it too is open to purely scientific, mechanical explanation. Thus even our sensory organs cannot themselves be qualified by the ‘secondary’ qualities – colours, odours, tastes, or auditory tones – we experience so abundantly. This is the key shift away from Aristotelian and Mediaeval notions of the human body. Since we do experience such qualities, they must ‘be somewhere’ or inhere in ‘something’; since we experience them, they must inhere in our minds. This line of reasoning gave strong impetus to regard sensed qualities as ‘modes’ of the mind, caused by physical objects in our surroundings and transmitted to us mechanically via our bodies and sensory physiology. From here it was but a short step, or rather a short leap to representationalist theories of perception, according to which all we are ‘directly’ aware of are our mental representations or ‘ideas’, which are caused by objects in our surroundings, and which (in favourable circumstances) enable us to perceive objects in our surroundings. Yet if ‘mind’ consists solely in nonextended, active, thinking substance, and if ‘body’ consists solely in nonthinking, inert, extended substance, how can mind and body interact? If all we are directly aware of is our own mental representations, how can we know anything about our surroundings? Can we determine whether we know anything about our surroundings? If Copernicus, as it were, dislodged the earth from the centre of our universe, Galileo’s distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities ultimately dislodged us from our natural surroundings, from what had been thought and profoundly believed to be our natural home and habitat. The Cartesian predicament of modern epistemology is borne of profound alienation from nature, not only from our physical and biological environment, but also from our own physiological embodiment. Philosophy became ‘Modern’ with a profoundly changed world view, a view of the world to which quantitative natural science was fundamental. Yet if this modern world view dispenses with Aristotelian forms and perceptual species, one of Kant’s central questions looms: How is natural-scientific, or even commonsense knowledge of the world possible? (KdrV B20; Prol. §§15, 23, 24). Since it is actual, it must be possible, but how? Hegel’s transcendental proofs of mental content externalism show that we have some empirical knowledge, if we’re self-conscious enough even to wonder about whether we do (above, §§25–29, 65–70). Yet knowing that we have at least some empirical knowledge of nature around us doesn’t yet tell us how extensive is our knowledge of nature, nor how extensive it can be. Part of the answer to the broad question of how empirical knowledge is possible belongs to epistemology and cognitive psychology, which Hegel treated accordingly (cf. below, §§ 127–131). General epistemology does not answer questions about the character and possibility of specifically natural-scientific knowledge. Answering these

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questions requires, inter alia, examining specific scientific concepts, principles of reasoning, methods and their actual use in observational and experimental science. Hegel examines key concepts and principles of reasoning central to natural science in his Logic, including causal dispositions and laws, and the core principles of mechanical, chemical and biological explanation. He reexamines these concepts and principles in connection with theories and examples drawn from natural science throughout his Philosophy of Nature.38 One reason for Hegel’s so doing is to show that the concepts and principles analysed in his Logic are in fact instantiated in nature and are reflected (if often only obliquely) in natural scientific knowledge (§246R). A second reason for his so doing is to show that the concepts, principles and forms of classification and explanation used in natural science in fact capture genuine features of nature and so are not merely conventional expressions convenient for non-cognitive reasons or purposes (§§229R, 246Z, 367Z). A third aim in his so doing is to show the great extent to which the world, nature, is knowable. Hegel undertakes this examination in order to justify his rationalist aspiration to show that all the fundamental features of the world are knowable and are knowable by us – even if philosophy only makes a limited contribution to this knowledge (§270Z). How must we reconceive our minds and cognition in order to understand the new phenomenon of natural science and the new knowledge of nature it affords? One strategy for avoiding Descartes’ dualism was to consider whether matter might not have the power, if properly configured, to think (Yolton 1983). Perhaps materialism does not require eliminating mental phenomena, even if it banishes ‘the mind’ as a distinct kind of substance; this is the ‘hylozoism’ Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and Critical foundations for natural science (MAdN) cannot rule out. Kant’s cognitive psychology and Critical theory of knowledge deployed another strategy: Rather than asking what the mind is made of, ask what does it do?. What are our key cognitive functions and how can or do they provide us genuine empirical knowledge? Kant’s answers to these questions are ultimately functionalist (Brook 1994, 2016); Kant used the term ‘Gemüt’ to render animus, in order to avoid opting for one pole of Cartesian dualism (by using ‘mens’). However, Kant refused to develop his functionalist insights explicitly and to bring them to bear upon the natural sciences, and insisted on a dualist account of biological phenomena (MAdN, 4:544.7–19, KdU §§61, 66, 64, 73, 80, 81). Kant argued that principles involving purposes of any kind can have only a heuristic, regulative role in natural science (KdU §§74, 75). 38

On the centrality of scientific experiments to Hegel’s philosophy of nature see Renault (2001), 159–290.

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Schelling dispensed with Kant’s Critical restrictions on the use of teleological principles and boldly ascribed intrinsic purposes to biological organisms. His doing so gave crucial impetus to the development of biological science (Richards 2002), though Schelling can hardly be credited with any careful analysis of functionalist and teleological principles of explanation, nor the basis of their legitimate (justifiable) ascription to various organisms. Hegel did so, carefully articulating key ways in which teleological organisation involving conscious purposes requires and can only build upon more basic levels of functional organisation involved, e.g., in biological organisms (deVries 1991). Hegel’s analysis of the distinctions between (merely) functional and teleological principles of organisation is one stage of a broad and ambitious program: Hegel sought to avoid both substance dualism and eliminative reductionism by developing a sophisticated and subtle emergentism. Long derided by reductionist philosophers, emergentism has recently regained philosophical credibility amongst analytical philosophers both in philosophy of biology and in philosophy of mind.39 To say that Hegel is an emergentist is to reject strongly holistic interpretations of Hegel’s views, according to which ‘the whole’ has ontological priority over its parts and determines their characteristics, or at least, more so than vice versa. Hegel’s holism is moderate because he insists, inter alia, that any ‘substance’ and its ‘accidents’ are mutually interdependent for their existence and characteristics (HER, 141–5; Westphal 2003a, §§32, 34). Hegel inverts philosophical tradition by insisting that there is nothing more to any ‘substance’ than the totality of its ‘accidents’,40 a view Hegel developed by 1805, which he uses both in social ontology and ontology of nature. As Harris (1983, 364–5, 367–8, 370) notes, Hegel’s moderate holism counters ‘totalitarian’ interpretations of Hegel’s philosophy.41 ‘Emergence’ refers to properties or behaviour of a complex system which are not aggregative functions of the properties or behaviour of the individual parts of that system. Emergence thus highlights the importance of the organisation of parts within a complex system to enable or to produce properties or behaviours which may be ‘realised’ (or instantiated) in various different kinds of component parts, or are ‘autonomous’ from the dynamic properties of the individual components, or which display regularities that are ‘anomalous’ with respect to regularities exhibited by the system’s individual components. Emergentism thus opposes eliminative reductionism, though not (necessar39

See Simon (1962), Beckermann, et al (1992), Wimsatt (1994), (2000). Hegel (1810/11), §§62, 63, 68/Hegel 1968, 87–8; WdL I, GW 11:394.33–35, 395.3–5, 395.39– 396.26; Enz. §151. 41 On Hegel’s views on biology, see Engelhardt (1986), Dahlstrom (1998), E. Harris (1998), Ferrini (2009c), (2010), (2011a). 40

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ily) materialism.42 There are various kinds and aspects of emergent behaviour of complex systems and there are complex issues about which of these kinds are exhibited in any particular case. These important questions cannot be considered here; here it suffices to note that the core principles of emergentism are philosophically legitimate and that they have regained philosophical legitimacy in large part because they are so important to understanding so many kinds of natural phenomena. One of Hegel’s aims in his Philosophy of Nature is to systematically order our most basic ontological and natural-scientific concepts and principles (Enz. §§246Z, 247Z, 249+Z), beginning with the most abstract, undifferentiated and universal: space and time (Enz. §§254–7), and working through a finely-grained series of steps (Enz. §249) towards the most complex, the organic life of animal species (Enz. §§367–76). The third part of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia then continues this series of levels, no longer merely in nature, but in the human or moral sciences (‘spirit’, Geist, §§377–87), from anthropology (Enz. §388) through cognition, action and freedom at the individual level (Enz. §§445–482), and then through social, moral, political and legal philosophy (Enz. §§483–552), examined in detail in Hegel’s Philosophical Outlines of Justice (Rph) – up to a brief sketch of ‘absolute spirit’ in its three forms, art, manifest religion and philosophy (Enz. §§553–77), topics treated in extenso in Hegel’s Berlin lectures. Why does Hegel undertake this ambitious project? Hegel’s question can be put in a Kantian formula: All of these natural and social phenomena are actual. How are they possible and how is our knowledge of them possible? Hegel’s philosophical contribution to answering this broad question is to identify, clarify and integrate, as accurately and thoroughly as possible, the specific concepts and principles required at each level and at each relevant sub-level, in order to understand each kind of phenomenon and its proper species. This involves identifying both the preconditions of each kind of phenomenon and identifying what is unique and new to it vis à vis preceding levels. For each basis level, Hegel seeks to determine why it alone affords the necessary basis for its emergent successor level. For each emergent level, Hegel seeks to determine what is unique in it, and through a similar analysis of a series of sub-levels within that new level, how it provides the necessary basis for enabling in turn the emergence of its successor (Enz. §252Z). Hegel insists that this conceptual sequence of stages and sub-stages does not concern the natural development (historical genesis) of ever more sophisticated organisational complexity (Enz. §249). 42

Harris (1983, 238–98) contends that by 1803/04 Hegel’s philosophy of nature became materialist and is properly characterised as a kind of neutral monism.

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What kind of ‘necessity of the concept’ (Enz. §246+R, cf. §249) guides this development? Hegel’s phrase may appear to mean either of two things, both misleading. It may seem that the relevant necessity lies in a preordained rationalist telos of a completely self-developing and self-explicating system. Hegel does have some such telos in view, but the notion that it is preordained relies upon transferring conscious purposes from their proper domain (human behaviour) to a transcendent, theistic domain which can be nothing but idle speculation. If there is a first rule of Hegel’s metaphysics, it is: Posit no transcendent entities! This is a direct corollary to his Semantics of Singular Cognitive Reference. The other notion stems from purely a priori views of Hegel’s Logic and Encyclopaedia, which require that Hegel’s logic uses some special successor notion to formal-logical deduction.43 It must be a successor notion, because formal-logical deduction does not permit inferring the more specific from the more general. Despite long favour amongst Hegel’s expositors, I fail to understand what any such successor notion could be, despite many attempts in the literature. Fortunately, there is a better alternative.44 Kant understood the ‘deduction’ of a concept or principle in a legal sense, of showing that we are entitled to use it in genuine, justifiable judgments, whether cognitive or practical (KdrV, B117). Though Hegel’s strategy for justifying concepts and principles in his Philosophy of Nature is not transcendental, it does share this general Kantian sense of ‘deduction’ (Enz. §88). Hegel seeks to determine the extent to which, and the ways in which, we are justified in using various concepts and principles in genuine cognition of natural phenomena. This is built into his emergentist agenda of showing why nothing less than a certain set of concepts and principles suffices to comprehend natural phenomena of a certain level of systematic complexity, and how these concepts and principles provide the necessary basis for understanding the successor level. The upper end-point or telos of this series of levels is provided, not by antecedent divine preordination, but by the facts of human cognition and action, on the one hand, and their – that is, our – remarkable productions in the natural and social sciences and more generally in society, history, art, religion and philosophy on the other. Carefully demarcating in the Philosophy of Nature the natural preconditions of these human phenomena 43 An excellent, highly informative presentation of this kind of interpretation is Houlgate (2005), 106–80. I am indebted to Stephen for many years of discussion of these and related issues, despite our divergence on this central point. 44 Another problem with the ‘top down’ approach, beginning with Hegel’s Logic and examining its instantiation in nature (in Enz. II), is that this approach cannot avoid the charge Hegel hurled at Schelling of ‘schematising formalism’. Hegel can avoid schematising formalism only by showing, on the basis of an internal examination of natural phenomena for their own sake, that those phenomena exhibit the kinds of conceptual structures and principles explicated in Hegel’s Logic.

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shows in broad outline how nature makes our human form of mindedness and agency possible, both by providing for humanly-minded individuals and by providing for humanly comprehensible objects of knowledge (taken as a whole, nature) and a humanly manipulable context of action (nature). This is Hegel’s emergentist strategy for avoiding both (Cartesian) substance dualism and eliminative materialism. Obviously there is a rich historical and metaphysical background to Hegel’s emergentist and moderately holistic world view. It is important both to recognise and yet not to over-estimate the significance of that background. Hegel certainly aims to identify and defend a rich, systematic orderliness in nature, and indeed in all phenomena. In this context it is important to recall Hegel’s standard approach to the grand aspirations of theology. Hegel consistently argues that the theistic, metaphysical ascription of such aspirations to a transcendent creator who tends to them from beyond the cosmos is in every case a human projection of human needs onto the fabric of the universe. Yet unlike Feuerbach, Marx or Freud, Hegel interprets such projections as reflecting, if figuratively, genuine and legitimate human aspirations and achievements.45 Hegel seeks to exhibit and to integrate the ways in which and the extent to which the actual world (natural, social and historical) in fact satisfies these aspirations, to a much greater extent than is typically appreciated.46 This is part of Hegel’s on-going effort to overcome our modern alienation from the world, including our epistemological alienation wrought by Descartes’ mechanical and eliminativist account of the body (cf. Enz. §246Z). In the present case, Hegel thinks that the pre-Modern ‘great chain of being’ expressed, metaphorically and inadequately, a legitimate aspiration and anticipated, if obliquely, a correct idea: Nature does form a systematically ordered hierarchy (Enz. §246Z) within which human beings have a particular, quite special place: Through our knowledge of the world-whole, the world-whole gains knowledge of itself. In performing this role within the world-whole, we determine through a properly conceived and executed philosophy of nature – despite modern forms of alienation, including the cognitive alienation wrought by Galileo’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities and by Descartes’ dualism – that nature is our proper environment, both as cognitive and as active agents.47

45 HER, 163–4; Harris, HL, 1:64 112, 192–3, 409–10, 417–18; 2:125–30, 252–3, 344–6, 367, 448, 533–4, 537–40, 678, 681–2, 691, 738, 746; Chiereghin (2009); di Giovanni (2009), (2018). 46 Westphal (1991), §4. 47 I conclude with Hegel’s philosophy of nature, without taking up philosophy of religion.

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CONCLUSION.

When considering the aims, character and merits of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, it is important to consider carefully an observation by Henry Harris: The balance of social influence has shifted so drastically between Hegel’s time and ours … from the religious to the scientific establishment, that Hegel’s own contribution to this shift has itself become an obstacle to the right understanding of what he said. He wanted to swing religious consciousness into full support of a scientific interpretation of human life …. His own choice of language was conditioned by the Christian teaching, but also by the knowledge that the Christian doctrine of spirit was derived from Stoic sources. (Harris 1983, 302)

The Stoics were, as Hegel knew, thoroughgoing materialists and naturalists. These broad Stoic themes are important to Hegel – though also more specific themes, such as the attention Stoic logicians paid to deictic (demonstrative) reference, because their naturalism required them to recognise that utterances are passing events, and that even what is said (lekta) ‘perishes’ if its truth-value perishes, because its proper referent perishes. Constitutively, persons are ensouled, living bodies. When a person dies, the corpse no longer rightly bears the person’s name (cf. Nasti de Vincentis, 2018). Sextus Empiricus may have had fun with the paradoxes of Diodorus’ use of deixis (cf. VGP 1, MM19:274/B 2:270–1;Vor.8:108), but Hegel knew to capitalise upon those basic Stoic points about singular reference in his internal critique of aconceptual knowledge by acquaintance, and his use of that critique to justify his Kantian semantics of singular cognitive reference (cf. VGP 2, MM19:270–3/H&S 2: 250–3). Harris is right about the fundamental importance of cultural and historical figures within Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, but also important are details of technical philosophy, including epistemology. Neglecting Hegel’s philosophy of nature leaves two central members of his philosophical system, Logic and Philosophy of Spirit, precariously imbalanced because they lack their third supporting member, Philosophy of Nature. This neglect inevitably generates serious misunderstandings of Hegel’s philosophy, both in part and in whole. Fortunately recent, mainly European research has begun rectifying this neglect. Certainly Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature has grand, if not grandiose aspirations; Hegel himself would eagerly, thoroughly revise much of it in view of subsequent developments in the natural sciences. Nevertheless, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is a landmark in the philosophical assessment of nature and the natural sciences which deserves careful consideration, for its central aims and issues, for its methods, for its staggering erudition and for its bold attempt to make philosophical sense of nature as a whole whilst appreciating its profuse diversity.

CHAPTER 19

Cognitive Psychology, Intelligence and the Realisation of the Concept in Hegel’s Encyclopaedic Epistemology 127

INTRODUCTION.

Hegel’s comprehensive, systematic, highly original philosophy remains an enormous expository and critical challenge. One strategy is to compartmentalise Hegel’s views, treating the main sections of Hegel’s philosophical Encyclopaedia as a series of mutually separable philosophical tracts, each of which poses considerable challenges. This pronounced tendency obscures both Hegel’s division of philosophical tasks and their equally important interconnections. The scope, character and relations amongst the various aspects of Hegel’s philosophy have been further obscured by tendencies to dismiss the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit as an immature first work, to regard The Science of Logic as the master premiss from which all else is to follow, and either to neglect Hegel’s epistemology or to assume he avowed intellectual intuitionism. This chapter counters these tendencies and compartmentalisations by examining some crucial, illuminating links between Hegel’s Science of Logic, his philosophical psychology and his Philosophy of Nature. So doing shows how Hegel preserved and augmented Kant’s insightful cognitive psychology whilst dispensing with Transcendental Idealism. So doing provides another vantage point on the central themes of this study, and provides further important corroboration. Hegel’s philosophical psychology, or ‘philosophy of subjective spirit’, is broadly, non-reductively naturalistic. His main source is not Descartes, but Aristotle (deVries 1988; Ferrarin 2001, 234–325). Recognising its difficulties, Hegel expressly aims to use Aristotle’s broadly natural account of the various forms and activities of ‘soul’ (animus) to account for our capacities to instantiate and exercise the cognitive functions central to Kant’s Critical theory of rational judgment and action. Four key features of Hegel’s account of Intelligenz are these: 1. Human cognition is active, and forges genuine cognitive relations to objects which exist and have their own characteristics, regardless of what we may think, believe or say about them. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_0�0

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2. The Denkbestimmungen (‘determinations of thought’ or: ‘thought-structures’) which structure and thus characterise worldly objects and events can only be grasped by intelligence (not merely by consciousness). 3. Intelligence obtains genuine objectivity by correctly identifying characteristics of a known object. 4. Central to our intelligent comprehension of Denkbestimmungen is natural science. These four points further underscore the importance of Hegel’s adopting one use of the verb ‘realisieren’ from Tetens via Kant, according to which to ‘realise’ a concept is to demonstrate that an extant object corresponding to it can be located and identified by us. These findings show that Hegel’s Logic is mutually interdependent with Naturphilosophie, with natural science and with cognitive psychology, especially with cognitive judgment. Recently published transcripts of Hegel’s Berlin lectures on Logic and on Philosophy of Spirit further illuminate and corroborate Hegel’s realism in epistemology.1 128

IS HEGEL A SUBJECTIVE IDEALIST?

I begin with a passage from Hegel’s Introduction to the Encyclopaedia Logic: Because it is equally the case that in reflection the truthful nature [of the object] shines forth (zum Vorschein kommt), and because this thinking is my activity, the truthful nature of the object is equally well the product of my spirit, indeed qua thinking subject; it is mine according to my simple universality, as the ‘I’ that simply is at home with itself, – or according to my freedom. (Enz. §23; Geraets, Suchting and Harris, trs.)

Statements like this (and there are many in Hegel’s texts) often lead commentators to ascribe some more or less standard form of subjective idealism to Hegel, according to which the world is mind-dependent, both for its existence and its characteristics. If in Hegel’s view the world may not depend for its existence or characteristics on individual human minds, nor even all human minds, this is only because the world depends for its existence and characteristics on Hegel’s candidate for the ultimate mind of all minds, Geist. Subjectivist interpretations of Hegel’s idealism comport with a long line of Hegel commentary which places Hegel’s philosophy in the ranks of historicist relativism (e.g., Haym 1927, 375–6; Meinecke 1959, 451–2), a movement inau-

1 The importance of Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit in these and other regards is highlighted by Stern (2013); see the review by J.B. Hoy (2014). The present analysis supplements these salutary findings. Also see Ferrini (2012).

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gurated by Herder.2 The broad movement of historicist relativism is a species of a yet broader movement which may be called ‘interpretationism’. The key idea of interpretationism is concisely formulated by Thelma Lavine: The distinguishing feature of interpretationism, from the German Enlightenment through American pragmatism to mid-twentieth century Wissenssoziologie is an affirmation of the activity of mind as a constituent element in the object of knowledge. Common to all of these philosophical movements … is the epistemological principle that mind does not apprehend an object which is given to it in completed form, but that through its activity of providing an interpretation or conferring meaning or imposing structure, mind in some measure constitutes or ‘creates’ the object known. (Lavine 1949–50, 526)

Traditionally, Hegel has been thought to advocate the interpretationist ‘epistemological principle’ Lavine here identifies. Classifying Hegel’s views in this way stems, at least in part, from neglecting the fact that ‘idealism’ is a broad label for a host of distinct views, many of which are epistemic rather than ontological (Rescher 1992), and only some ontological forms of idealism are subjective (Gersh and Moran 2006). This wide range of ‘idealisms’ already suggests that subjectivist interpretation of Hegel’s idealism rest on the fallacy of neglected alternatives. Ascribing any kind of subjective idealism to Hegel is profoundly mistaken (above, Part I; HER, 140–5). Hegel argued in line with later-day pragmatic realists, such as Peirce, Dewey, C.I. Lewis (MWO), and more recently F.L. Will, by contending that empirical knowledge must be interpretive in order to reconstruct, not to create or (somehow) to ‘complete’ (as Lavine indicates) the object known. Indeed, one of Hegel’s key insights in epistemology is that cognitive activity on our part is consistent with realism about the objects of human knowledge, where ‘realism’ in epistemology is the conjoint ontological and epistemic thesis that 1. Some things exist and have at least some characteristics unto themselves, regardless of what we say, think or believe about them. (Realism) 2. We can know at least something about some such things. (Cognitivism) Hegel was the first to respond to the sceptical threat of historicist relativism by acknowledging some very fundamental social and historical aspects of human knowledge, whilst also arguing that the social and historical aspects of human knowledge are cognitive enabling conditions, they are necessary conditions for our knowing anything at all. Since the social and historical as2

Herder aspired to an ultimate universalism which he called ‘humanity’. The critical issue is whether his universalist aspirations are consistent with his critique of Kant and his sceptical philosophy of language. Like Hegel, I don’t think Herder’s views are consistent on this crucial issue; see below, §129.2.

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pects of human knowledge concern our cognitive skills and abilities, recognising them requires recognising that human cognition is active. Thus Hegel argued that an active model of human cognition is consistent with realism about the objects of human knowledge.3 One key to properly understand Hegel’s idealism is his clarificatory Remark on his distinctive use of this term, added to the second edition of the Science of Logic. There he indicates that to be ‘ideal’ is to be dependent on something – anything – else (WdL I, 21:142–3). Thus causal relations, or more accurately: causal interrelations, show that their relata (i.e., whatever things or events stand in causal relations) are ‘ideal’ because they are interdependent for their existence and characteristics. Causal dependence upon human minds is, in Hegel’s ontology, only a sub-species of causal dependence, although (apart from theory of action) not at all a central ontological instance of such dependence. Hence Hegel’s idealism is a form of ontological holism that is, and is intended to be, consistent with realism about the objects of human knowledge. Hegel’s ontological holism is moderate, because he contends that the whole and its members are mutually interdependent for their existence and characteristics. Hegel is thus the original pragmatic realist. One striking feature of Hegel’s account of ‘intelligence’ in his analysis of ‘theoretical spirit’ is his central stress on the key feature of human knowledge just noted: Human intelligence is cognitively active, and only through its cognitive activity can any human subject know the genuine features, the ‘true nature’, of any object known.4 Hegel’s Encyclopaedia is a lecture syllabus, intended for explication and elaboration in the lecture hall; it is terse and compact in the extreme. Fortunately, Hegel’s key epistemological theme about intelligence, namely that it forges a genuine and veridical cognitive link between worldly objects or events and human knowers, is even plainer in his lectures. Indeed, in his lectures Hegel identifies Herder as one of his epistemological opponents, precisely because Herder inferred, fallaciously, from the active character of human knowledge, and especially from the creative character of human linguistic usage, to the sceptical conclusion that we cannot and do not know things as they are.

3

Hegel’s rejection of historicist relativism is established by Beiser (1993). Cf. Enz. §§20, 21; Hegel (2001), 9.207–209, 10.237–239, 11.275–276, 14.363–367, 16.426– 444, 16.445–451; (1994), 178.626–639, 226.214–231. Hegel’s lectures (Hegel 1994, 2001) are cited by page:line numbers. Only the page on which the cited passage begins is indicated, because the ending line number univocally indicates the close of the relevant passage. 4

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CORROBORATIONS FROM HEGEL’S LECTURES ON LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY.

The passage quoted above (§128) from Hegel’s Encyclopaedia Logic (§23) is a test case for any realist interpretation of Hegel’s epistemology. To appreciate the significance of the issues it addresses – and those it raises – requires putting them into their systematic and their historical context, which is precisely what Hegel does in the adjacent sections of the Encyclopaedia Logic (§§22– 25). The central problem underlying the debate between realism and nonrealism, both in the Nineteenth Century and from early Logical Positivism to the present day, is that of reconciling a realist correspondence conception of truth with a complex philosophy of mind (cf. Will 1997, 1–19). Hegel was the first philosopher to recognise this crucial problem, and the first to solve it. Hegel expressed both of these points explicitly whilst lecturing on the Introduction to the Encyclopaedia: What results from reflection is a product of our thinking. On the other hand, we view the universal, the laws [of nature], as the opposite of something merely subjective and in them [we know] what is essential, truthful, and objective about things. Mere attention does not suffice to experience the truth of things, rather it requires our subjective activity, which reforms the immediately given. At first glance this seems perverse and to go against the aim of knowing. But one can just as well say that it has been the conviction of all ages, that the substantial is first reached through reflection’s reworking of the immediate. The business of philosophy consists only in expressly recalling to consciousness what has always been held concerning thought. (Enz. §22Z)

The reason why the confidence of earlier times in our powers of reflection needs to be recalled is that in recent times – that is, in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries (C.E.), though again in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries – severe doubts were raised about the fitness of the ‘products of reflection’, that is, about our conceptions, language and theories, for grasping the nature of things as such. Within the rationalist tradition, the paradigm source of these doubts was Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (Enz. §28Z, cf. §62R), with its idealist distinction between how things are in themselves and how they necessarily appear to us due to our forms of intuition, though Hegel well knew that Kant’s assessment of the complexity of our cognitive abilities had been exceeded and exacerbated by Herder’s socio-historical, linguistic account of human thought. Thus the Twentieth Century was not the first to see epistemological realism threatened by a holistic and social theory of language.5 Pre-critical philosophers, Hegel noted (Enz. §28), faced 5

For an excellent overview of Herder’s thought and its impact on his contemporaries, see Beiser (1987), 127–64; for concise discussion of Herder’s linguistic metacritique and its

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no such problem, and neither did nor do working natural scientists (PhdG, 9: 54.8–9/¶74). Furthermore, Hegel excoriated Kant for dismissing the correspondence conception of truth as a mere verbal definition. Against Kant, Hegel insisted that the correspondence conception of truth is crucial (WdL II, 12:25–6; cf. HER, 111–4). The task of Hegel’s epistemology is precisely to reconcile a realist epistemology, including a correspondence conception of the nature of truth, with a very complex social and historical philosophy of mind and theory of knowledge. The corrective to subjective idealist interpretations of Hegel already appears in Enz. §§24, 25, where Hegel distinguishes between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ thoughts, where the latter are actual structures of worldly things and events. In his published Remark to §24 Hegel states: … since thought seeks to form a concept of things, this concept … cannot consist in determinations and relations that are alien and external to the things. (Enz. §24R)

Note that it’s only possible for the ‘determinations and relationships’ we specify to be ‘alien and external to the things’ if those things have their own characteristics unto themselves, regardless of what we say, think, or believe about them. This is realism, in the sense specified above (§128). Whilst clearly suggested in his published remarks, the key issue here is most clearly identified in Hegel’s lectures on Logic from 1831, where, commenting upon Enz. §25, Hegel states: … furthermore we have the prejudice (Vorurteil), that through thought we learn what is the truth of things (was das Wahre der Sache ist). The first way to philosophise was this innocent one …. which never thought about the opposition (Gegensatz) of thought to objectivity; this is the way of the ancient philosophers, they had not worked out that thought is distinct from the thing, the object. The second position is the relation, according to which thought and object are regarded as distinct from each other, so that one does not reach the thing through thought; instead one either takes the object as it is, without thinking, the subject must simply consider the object – this is empiricism – or thought is the development of forms, which however belong to thought, and the thing remains outside: Thus is constituted the cleft (Trennung) between thought and objectivity. The third [approach] is the return to the first, though with the consciousness that thought in general or the subject is of course immediately connected with the object, that the subject is not without knowledge of the object, and that its knowledge of the object is true. …. The interest of our times turns on these relations. (Hegel 2001, 23.657–681)

Hegel here limns the three ‘Attitudes of Thought toward Objectivity’ detailed next in the conceptual preliminaries of the Encyclopaedia Logic (§§19–83), importance to Hegel, see Surber (2013).

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those of pre-modern metaphysics, modern empiricism, Kant’s Critical philosophy, and Jacobi’s – though also Schelling’s – intuitionism. Important here are two points. First, Hegel repeatedly insists that his aim is to restore our philosophical confidence in the pre-modern presumption that through thinking we can and do know the true nature of things.6 For example, in his lectures on theoretical spirit (1827–28), Hegel emphasised the following: That which is truthful, the truthful, the eternal is only for thoughts; comprehending thought is thinking in its totality, thought in its total determinateness. But even when I thus take being and thinking in their true sense, the phrase ‘unity of being and thinking’ expresses them as if they were not distinct. However, thinking judges, it distinguishes itself, and thinking is at first true thinking only through this process of distinguishing itself and concluding together with itself. The true sense of the phrase, thinking is the thing itself (Sache), is something completely ancient, it’s nothing eccentric, paradoxical or mad. … Reason just is the achieved consciousness of what truthfully is. (Hegel 1994, 228.247–258, cf. 154.794–842)

Hegel can hardly state his ontological realism, nor the typical misunderstanding of it, more plainly! His closing statement about reason accords entirely with his account of reason observing nature in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (Ferrini 2009b). The centrality of these issues to Hegel’s philosophical agenda, to ‘the interest of our times’, shows how central is epistemology to Hegel’s philosophy, despite its neglect (until recently) by Hegel’s expositors. Hegel here expressly distinguishes between thought and its objects of knowledge by rejecting any subjectivist assimilation of the objects of our knowledge to our thoughts about them, and does so by stressing the cognitive activities involved in distinguishing ourselves from our objects of knowledge and in cognitive judgment. These cognitive activities are further examined below. There is much more of interest about these two key issues in Hegel’s 1831 lectures on Logic, but these passages make plain a central point important here: Hegel’s Logic concerns ‘objective thoughts’ or Denkbestimmungen which are actual structures of worldly phenomena. Hegel expressly uses the term ‘Denkbestimmung’ to avoid misleading subjectivist connotations of the phrase ‘objective thought’ (Enz. §24Z). For this reason, Hegel’s Logic only discusses en passant the deep and complex issues involving epistemology and philosophical psychology concerning whether or how we human beings are able to think in ways which enable us to comprehend the Denkbestimmungen which structure the world we inhabit and investigate. Hegel’s treatment of these issues appears where it belongs, in his Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, and in particular, in his account of ‘theoretical spirit’, including ‘intelligence’. 6

Cf. Enz. §§5, 21R, 24Z, Hegel (1994), 227.235–242, Hegel (2001), 15.412–417.

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Before examining these materials, note an important exegetical advantage they have. Before Hegel explicates his philosophical psychology, he considers himself already to have shown – through a concise phenomenology of spirit (Enz. §§413–439)7 – that we can and do have conceptually articulated knowledge of worldly phenomena (Enz. §§438, 439). Hegel’s division of his exposition into a ‘phenomenology of spirit’ and a philosophical ‘psychology’ wisely exploits a distinction like Kant’s between an ‘objective’ and a ‘subjective’ deduction. Like Kant, Hegel shows first that we are capable of knowing (some of) the world, and only then addresses the issue of how we are capable of such knowledge. In this way, Hegel avoids a profound confusion pervading epistemology from Descartes to the present day, of trying first to understand how we have knowledge, only to conclude in utter perplexity that we don’t and can’t have any after all. (This is the key defect of what Hegel in his Jena essays calls ‘philosophies of reflection’.) Because he takes himself to have settled favourably the quid juris, question whether we can know the world, Hegel can adopt a largely descriptive approach to philosophical psychology (Enz. §442R8). This allows Hegel to develop his philosophical psychology directly, without encumbering it with epistemological analyses or arguments. This allows us to see much more plainly than is often otherwise possible, just what views about human knowledge and in particular about cognitive psychology Hegel espouses. Helpful as this feature of Hegel’s discussion is, it remains the case that the published Encyclopaedia sections and remarks on cognitive psychology (Enz. §§440–468) are compressed in ways which indeed require lectures for their explication and elaboration. In the remainder I highlight some very revealing remarks pertaining to human knowledge and intelligence from Hegel’s Lectures on Philosophy of Spirit from Berlin 1827–28 (Hegel 1994). 129.1 Psychology, Reason and Spirit. Hegel begins his discussion of Psychology by remarking, quite in line with the views rehearsed above, that: Spirit is essentially infinite, since the opposition is sublated, it no longer has a limit in the object, it knows the object as rational …. (Hegel 1994, 178.626–628)

7 I indicate ‘a’ phenomenology of spirit advisedly. This section of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia has very different aims within a very different context than his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. Assimilating the latter to the former results from and further compounds confusion. 8 ‘Likewise, if the activities of spirit are considered only as expressions or powers in general, in view of their usefulness, that is, as purposive for any other interest of the intellect or of the mind, then no final end (Endzweck) is at issue. This final end can only be the concept itself and the activity of the concept can only have itself for its end, to sublate the form of immediacy or of subjectivity, to reach and grasp itself, to liberate itself for its own sake. Only in this way are the various so-called capacities of spirit to be considered as stages in this liberation. Only this counts as the rational way of considering [sic] spirit and its diverse activities’ (Enz. §442R).

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Spirit knows the object as rational because rationality structures both the object and us as subjects; more specifically, rationality structures our intelligent thinking. The world of objects and events has a rational structure (consisting in Denkbestimmungen, i.e., comprehensible kinds, regularities and structures) which we can comprehend rationally, insofar as we are intelligent: Reason is the unity of subject and object; such one-sidedness as ‘only subject, only object’ is not true. Instead the truth is that the pure subject, the inwardly subjective, thought, this inwardness, the being with itself of intelligence, is, intrinsically, the most objective. Intelligence as reason goes to the world, in order to posit as subjective what initially is external. Spirit trusts itself to be capable of knowing this …. (Hegel 1994, 221.80–86;9 cf. 178.628–639)

Much of Hegel’s account of human intelligence and its psychological preconditions is taken up describing, in ways which cannot be summarised here (see deVries 1988), how intuition (Enz. §§446–450), which incorporates and transforms sensation and feeling; and representation (Enz. §§451–464), which incorporates and transforms memory, imagery, imagination, and psychological association; function together to enable us to identify and to name universal features of things which recur manifestly within our experience. All of these capacities and abilities, and their active exercise, are required to enable us to think, which is to say, to enable us to be intelligent (Enz. §§465–468).10 We exercise and exhibit our intelligence first and foremost by identifying (even if approximately) universal features of things, including the natural kinds and species to which things around us belong (Enz. §467). If indeed, as quoted at the outset, ‘the truthful nature of the object is equally well the product of my spirit’ (Enz. §23), the remark just quoted cautions us to pay attention – as subjectivist interpretations of Hegel’s idealism do not – to Hegel’s inclusion of the phrase ‘equally well’ (ebensosehr) in this statement, which I quote again: … in reflection the truthful nature [of the object] shines forth (zum Vorschein kommt), and because this thinking is my activity, the truthful nature of the object is equally well (ebensosehr) the product of my spirit, indeed qua thinking subject …. (Enz. §23)

To say that ‘the truthful nature of the object’ is ‘equally well the product of my spirit’ is also to say, the truthful nature of the object is not only, not merely, not solely the product of my spirit: ‘such one-sidedness as “only subject, only object” is not true’ – certainly not according to Hegel (1994, 221.80–81)! What 9

Tuschling (1994, ix–xxxviii, §VI) highlights this passage in his Introduction. DeVries (2013) provides a good conspectus of Hegel’s cognitive psychology; its philosophical significance is underscored by Eason (2007–08), deVries (1988), Stern (2013), Herrmann-Sinai and Ziglioli (2016). 10

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our thinking contributes to producing the true nature of the object is considered below (this §, §130). First it is important to continue following out Hegel’s stress on the objectivity of our properly informed thinking and the realism this involves. As Hegel stresses, especially in his lectures (quoted just above), we must ‘posit’ what is initially external as internal. Hegel elaborates: That objectivity is within intelligence at all, is [contained] in the intuition, that whatever is immediately given I also posit within myself. The other side is that intelligence itself posits itself as the objective; in this way intelligence is in memory in a mechanical manner, which is however at once also the force of this mechanical manner, this holding together, this senselessness itself. The position of memory is this moment, that the unity of the subject and object is not only in itself in intelligence, but also this unity is posited within intelligence, such that this externality obtains. Thus within intelligence exists that which is also [sic] something external, objectivity is not divorced from it, but rather is identical with it. (Hegel 1994, 222.104–115) Thought contains the determination, that what I think, is the thing itself (Sache), what is in it, what it is – to do this I must reflect on it (darüber nachdenken). The thing itself comes to me first through thought, and now, so far as it is thought, noumen, is it the thing itself. The other [i.e., what is not thought but is only appearance] is only existence, opinion, nothing objective; first in thought does it have its objectivity, thus thought is objective. (Hegel 1994, 224. 164–170)

Hegel uses the terms ‘noumen’ and ‘thing itself’, not Kant’s terms ‘noumenon’ or ‘thing in itself’. Hegel thus stresses his rejection of Kant’s Transcendental Idealist view that we cannot know things as they really are, but merely as they appear to us. If the ‘true nature’ of the thing itself is ‘equally well’ the product of my spirit, what I produce is truly the nature of the thing itself only insofar as the thing is inherently and dynamically structured unto itself by its fundamental characteristics (Denkbestimmungen). If we produce the true nature of the object, we do so by investing ourselves in our conceptually articulated comprehension of it. Intelligence achieves objectivity by identifying the specific features of the known object. This is epistemological realism (per above, §128). 129.2 Hegel contra the ‘Metacritiques’. Hegel pointedly contrasts his confidence in our powers of cognition to Herder’s (1784–1791, 1799) linguistically based scepticism: Herder makes many declamations of this kind, that philosophising is a coining and combining of words, by which one believes to have the thing itself (Sache) by using words in this way, although this movement through words is merely a deception, in which we falsely believe that in this way we have the thing itself before us; cf. Ideas for a History of Humanity, then his Metacritiques, where he attacks the Kantian philosophy in his way. (Hegel 1994, 219.2–32)

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Herder’s highlighting the (alleged) subjectivism of our linguistic categories is one version of a common concern about our systems of classification, Hegel contends: The universal is nothing other than what is contained in the object. The universal is only in the subject, and it has been asked, whether genera are in nature or are only in the subject. The universal has this convenience for the subject, that one more easily retains it, the manifold is thus reduced to one, yet the aim of this retention, what is compendious for the subject, this subjective aim is merely relative. However, the universal is the truthful in objects. ‘To provide marks, differentia, in a definition’, one says, ‘is necessary though only for the subject’. However, the mark by which one kind of species is distinct from another kind must be an essential mark, which is the root of its other characteristics. (Hegel 1994, 230.308–318; cf. PhdG, 9:140.14–31/¶246)

Whether or how Hegel can prove that things have such ‘essential’ (or constitutive) differentia, and that we can identify them correctly, is a much larger, crucial issue, central to the present study, to which I return shortly. Note first Hegel’s view that there are natural kinds with constitutive differentia, and that we can identify them in and through their instances (cf. Düsing 1987). Intelligence obtains genuine objectivity by correctly identifying characteristics of a known object. This is fundamentally an anti-sceptical, realist contention. This point is corroborated by recalling that Hegel’s German term, rendered as ‘essence’, is ‘Wesen’, which unlike its English counterpart, though like the Latin essentia, connotes beings with whatever characteristics they have; e.g., in German ‘Finanzwesen’ names a company’s finances, ‘Schulwesen’ denotes a region’s educational system. It is vital not to import Anglophone Cartesian notions of abstract, uninstantiated essences into our (mis-)readings of Hegel’s writings. 129.3 Thinking and Experience. This realism is underscored by Hegel’s repeated, emphatic stress on the role of our experiential intake in our developing and specifying genuine thoughts of the kind just indicated: Thinking applying itself to this stuff as it comes to it from without is what we call thinking cognition, when thinking as such transforms a stuff into thoughts. However we do not have to consider thinking as applying itself; instead [we consider it] as its form, generally speaking, as explicating itself, determining itself, particularising itself, positing particularity, judging and thus concluding with itself. However, thinking cognition is initially applying thinking and its form to its stuff at hand. Thus the course of cognition is this, that we begin with intuition, perception and we make these perceptions into something universal, we transform this particular, this individual into the universal. (Hegel 1994, 229.284–295)11 11

Hegel’s contrast here between the genesis of cognition and his own consideration of thinking as self-developing through its self-particularisation, etc., is as important as his

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Part of why Hegel insists that we ‘transform’ the particulars we sense, intuit and perceive into ‘the universal’ is that he denies that universals as such exist; universals only exist in their particular manifestations or instances (Enz. §246Z). Universals qua universal exist, on Hegel’s view, only insofar as we identify and articulate them correctly. One crucial point is that, whilst in Enz. §23 Hegel stresses our production of the true nature of the object, these further remarks make plain that this production is only one aspect of the cognitive process, the proper complement to which involves our investing ourselves in objects themselves as we come to know them as such, as we come to identify and correctly articulate their features, whereby alone we cognitively internalise the stuff we gather in and through our experience of them. The brief remarks about this process quoted and summarised here may sound like standard empiricist doctrine, though in fact Hegel’s Encyclopaedia develops a very sophisticated cognitive psychology.12 Because empiricism remains the default presumption within Anglophone philosophy, it is important to note that Hegel’s dissent from empiricism, like Kant’s, is marked by his appreciation of the key shortcoming of concept empiricism. In principle, Hume’s copy theory of ideas and three laws of psychological association can account only for determinate concepts, classifications of particular features of particular things or events, as fine-grained as one can distinguish. However, Hume recognised that we also have, use and understand merely determinable concepts such as those of ‘time’, ‘space’, ‘identity’, ‘thing’ or ‘word’. For these, only Hume’s imagination can provide, but for these capacities of our imagination Hume provides and can provide no empiricist account whatsoever, because his empiricist resources consist in the copy principle and the three official laws of psychological association (Westphal 2013a). Hegel’s strictly internal critique of Hume’s concept empiricism focuses directly upon these determinable concepts (Westphal 1998a, 2000, 2002–03), in which he justifies (with no appeal to Transcendental Idealism, nor to any such view) Kant’s view that periods of time or regions of space we can demarcate ad libitum, though only because we possess and can properly use a priori concepts of time, times, period of time, space and spatial region. These fundamental shortcomings of concept empiricism undermine later versions as well (Turnbull 1959, Westphal 2015b), and reinforce Hegel’s reasons for developing a new approach to philosophical psychology, to retain and support Kant’s Critical analysis of rational judgment and action whilst dispensing with Tranclear indication of how closely related they are. This passage thus corroborates my contention that Hegel’s Logic and his Philosophy of Nature are much more thoroughly integrated than is commonly recognised. 12 See DeVries (1988, 2013), Halbig (2002), Hespe and Tuschling (1991), Winfield (2007, 2010), Eason (2007), Stern (2013).

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scendental Idealism. 129.4 Cognition and Laws of Nature. The specifics of Hegel’s cognitive psychology cannot be examined here. What can and should be noted here is an important and surprising feature of Hegel’s account of what is required to identify and correctly articulate the universal features of things. The central cases of the relevant kinds of universals are, in Hegel’s view, laws of nature, and in particular, laws of force, which we can only identify through natural science. Regarding laws of nature, in his 1830 lectures on Logic Hegel states the following about essence and appearance: Once the world is brought to the system of laws it is known in its determinateness. These laws do not stand behind it, as if appearances were lawless. Instead, the law is there in the appearance. The form [sc. of law] contains connection to itself, though it also contains being externally dispersed (Außereinandersein). Thus the form is present twice over, in finite things the external form is distinguished, yet that externality in the motion of the planets is identical with the law. To know the world of appearance as a system of its laws is important, though it is not yet comprehension. (Hegel 2001, 153.584–593)

The ‘system of laws’ Hegel mentions here are natural-scientific laws. Hegel’s statement that ‘the form of law is present twice over’ underscores the realism involved in Hegel’s account of Denkbestimmungen as objective thoughts – as objective structures of and in natural phenomena – and our intelligent grasp of them in our observationally and experimentally, i.e. our natural-scientifically informed thinking. The centrality of natural-scientific experiment and investigation in Hegel’s account of concepts and cognition shows that Hegel’s aim to re-establish the ancient confidence in our human powers of rational cognition, that we can indeed know the world through reason, is no reactionary (and epistemologically hopeless) return to any sort of pre-scientific reflection, nor to any form of pre-Critical metaphysics. Hegel’s remarks here about genuine comprehension are discussed below (§129.6). First note that Hegel seeks to replace arm-chair reflection with reflection upon the results of natural science, because only through natural-scientific research can we correctly identify the laws of nature: One must show through experiments what the force is; the content the appearance has is also the content the force has; conversely, one derives the appearance from the force, that is, one has constructed (eingerichtet) the force according to the appearance: one makes it so easy for oneself, since one thus places in the force what one already had; true comprehension proceeds from the opposition. What is truthful in the former grasp is, that one has articulated what is essential in the appearance, that which remains identical within appearance. However, the opposition of force and expression is merely a fiction of the understanding. If one considers electricity in particular circumstances that concern its expression, one thus removes the accidental and

430 seizes upon what is essential, which is the simple: I reduce [the force] to its simple determination. Especially Newton introduced the determination of reflection, force, into the exploration of nature, although the determinateness, the appearance, alone is the content. (Hegel 2001, 155.644–659)

Hegel here states directly that only through natural-scientific examination can and do we distinguish between the accidental and the constitutive features of natural phenomena. This is why natural science is so fundamental to identifying genuine Denkbestimmungen, in part because one of the most important Denkbestimmungen is force (WdL I, 21:11; cf. above, §§120–126). To support this important thesis, Hegel argues here along lines already established in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (PhdG, 9:87.24–25/¶141), that force just is its manifestation: … force is just this, to sublate one-sidedness; it is only force by expressing itself. Each side [sc., force and expression] is itself this whole, the force itself is that which expresses itself, and the expression is thus already posited as this mediation, simply to have its connection to its other. (Hegel 2001, 155.638–643)

Only because force constitutively exists in and through its manifestations, only because force constitutively consists in relations amongst things and events, can forces and the laws which structure them be correctly identified and known. Only this knowledge enables us to distinguish in any particular case between what is constitutive and what is merely accidental in any natural phenomenon. Hegel’s stress on natural science in this connection shows clearly that his view of our cognitive investment in knowing the things around us – the proper complement to Enz. §23 – is no obscure, metaphorical transmigration of our souls into nature. Rather, our cognitive investment in knowing the things around us is our investigating physical objects and events by using the methods, techniques and resources of the natural sciences.13 Although the natural sciences do not suffice for philosophical comprehension,14 they are on Hegel’s view basic necessary conditions for genuine comprehension (above, §§122–126, Westphal 2015b). 129.5 Hegel’s Rejoinder to Herder’s Causal Scepticism. Hegel’s thesis that forces only exist in and through their manifestations affords his response to Herder (1787), who based sceptical conclusions on the supposed distinction between forces and their manifestations. As in ‘Force and Understanding’ (PhdG, 9:85.9–87.37/¶¶137–141), Hegel contends that: 13 Although here and below I stress the role of natural science in discovering the intelligible structure of nature, I do not discount the passages in which Hegel stresses the ‘otherness’ of nature to spirit; I do caution, however, that on Hegel’s view this ‘otherness’ cannot make nature unknowable. 14 Hegel (2001), 153.584–593, quoted just above (§123.4).

431 Herder’s essay, God, a brew of spinozistic ideas, especially uses the expression ‘force’. Force is finite, and thus also according to its content: Thus force is also the content in one-sided form, but in such a way that this form is also negated through the expression, though this is represented as if the force was self-sufficient unto itself: The force expresses itself, though this only counts as if it were accidental, as if the force could sleep, that it could be, though without any expression. The determination of expression, one says, is not yet immediately the force, which must be solicited; that force expresses itself is thus not yet immanent in the expression. Hence force is finite: it depends on something else; force is solicited by something else, but this other force must itself be solicited, etc. The mathematicians protest that the metaphysics of force doesn’t concern them at all; they only want to consider the expression; if they do this, they don’t need force at all, the entire content is present in the expression. Force is known completely according to its content; its form however is a surd, it is the same content, posited in connection with itself; what is in the force as form, is something utterly familiar, the form of reflection-into-itself. Of course the content is finite; thus one suspects that electricity, magnetism derive from something else, this is the proper unknown. The systematisation of such content with others is what’s interesting. The important point is that the single force is not self-sufficient unto itself. (Hegel 2001, 155.660–685, re: Enz. §136R)

The ‘mathematicians’ Hegel mentions here are mathematical students of nature; primary amongst them is Newton, though Hegel also has in mind Newton’s successors, such as John Keill (HER, 160, 279 n. 29), though the claim about their ‘mathematical’ approach to nature – as Hegel knew (Westphal 2015a) – is a chronic empiricist mis-reading of Newtonian dynamic explanation which reduces it to mere kinematics of motion, i.e., to mathematically described trajectories. Once again in a phrase that recalls a key theme from ‘Force and Understanding’, Hegel stresses the crucial cognitive insight gained through systematically integrating various forces and kinds of forces through experiment and observation-driven natural scientific theory. The centrality of natural science in Hegel’s account of our development of genuine concepts and cognition shows that, not Hegel, but rather too many of his expositors have suffered from a romantic disdain for natural science – much to the detriment of the understanding and reception of Hegel’s philosophy. 129.6 Causal Laws and Concrete Universals. Considering these features of Hegel’s account of force and of laws of nature enables us to characterise briefly an important feature of Hegel’s account of genuine comprehension and the so-called ‘concrete’ universals it involves. Hegel’s view that forces are essentially manifest in their expressions, and that their expressions consist in causal interactions amongst particular things or events, entails that particulars and the universals which characterise them, and conversely, universals and the particulars which instantiate them, are throughly, ‘concretely’ integrated. Hegel states this point concisely in his 1831 Lectures on Logic:

432 The individual and the universal are so inseparable from each other; this is just the nature of the concrete, the individual as such, just as the universal as such, are nothing true, but rather empty abstractions. (Hegel 2001, 15.401–404)

This concrete integration of universals and their particular instantiations concerns objective thoughts, Denkbestimmungen; it involves Hegel’s neo-Aristotelian response to Kant’s excessively abstract universals. As noted (§129.3), Hegel thinks that universals only exist in their universal form insofar as they are correctly identified and articulated conceptually by us. Hegel’s 1827/28 lectures on theoretical spirit develop this point in connection with Hegel’s account of thought. Here he states: The further relation, determinateness, is such that with it falls away the opposition that is present between immediacy, externality and inwardness, which is not only an opposition of immediacy, what is given, and of inwardness, of being by oneself, but is equally well a distinction between individuality and universality. Intelligence is the simple being by oneself of universality, which is such that, as what is opposed to the universal, to what in general is, has the determination of individuality, of manifoldness in general, of the particular. This opposition has sublated itself, and thus is intelligence determined essentially as thought. Intelligence, the simple being by itself and externality, this is the opposition; however, since intelligence within itself is this sensuous manner of externality, the difference from it, in the form of the universal against the individual, has fallen away. Insofar as difference in general is still present at hand, this difference in general is the individual; insofar as this difference has sublated itself, intelligence is a concrete universal that has posited the individual, particular within itself. Intelligence as the unity of both is the comprehending grasp over the other, the unity of the previously diverse. (Hegel 1994, 223.139–159)

The concrete universal central to Hegel’s ontology and epistemology thus consists in our conceptually articulated, comprehensive grasp of extant individuals in view of their universal features and natural laws which constitute, structure and also alter them, recognised expressly in their thorough mutual interdependence, through which these universal kinds and laws are expressly articulated in their universal form, and are recognised in their specific instances, which include their specific interrelations. The specific contribution Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature makes to this genuine comprehension is to re-analyse and to explicate the basic terms, conceptions, principles, laws and findings developed in the natural sciences, so that we can articulate, recognise, and thus appreciate the ways in which the fundamental terms, concepts and principles in scientific theories are interdefined by their contrasts (their ‘opposition’, Hegel says) in ways which prefigure the particular character of whatever natural laws they are used to formulate (above, §§122–126). If ‘the truthful nature of the object is equally well the

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product of my spirit’ (Enz. §23), this is because theoretical spirit comprehends and expresses the truthful nature of known objects in their express and genuinely universal form, in cognitive connection with its instances. This central text for subjectivist interpretations of Hegel’s idealism thus in fact expresses Hegel’s epistemological realism! 130

INTELLIGENCE AND OBJECTIVITY.

Richard Dien Winfield (2007–08; 2010, 79–81) rightly notes that Hegel ascribes our awareness and grasp of objectivity, not to consciousness as such, but specifically to intelligence. This point can be reinforced by two brief observations, which further develop the present interim conclusions. 130.1 Hegel’s Sensationism. Hegel held a ‘sensationist’ account of sensations.15 According to sensationism (about sensations), the mere fact that objects in our environs cause our sensations does not explain how our sensations can or do represent, or even refer to their supposed objects. Explaining how sensations acquire a representational function (both referential and informative) within human perception is the central task of sensationist theories. Sensationist theories of perception generally adopted the sensory atomism common to Modern theories of perception. A second key problem recognised by sophisticated sensationist theories is to explain what unites any plurality of sensations into a percept of any one object. This issue arises within each sensory modality, and also across our sensory modalities. This issue arises synchronically within any momentary perception of an object, and it arises diachronically as a problem of integrating successive percepts of the same object. These two sets of issues also arise at two levels. One is purely sensory, and concerns the generation of sensory appearances to each of us out of a plethora of sensations. A second level is intellectual, and concerns how we recognise the various bits of sensory information we receive through perception to be bits of information about one and the same object.16 The important point here is Hegel’s contention, following Kant, that sensations are integrated into percepts and acquire their objective purport, in the form of at least putative singular cognitive reference, only insofar as they are integrated, synthesised, in ways guided and effected by the intellect (Enz. 15

See deVries (1988), 164--175; Westphal (1998a), §6.5. DeVries does not use the term ‘sensationism’, yet this is precisely the account resulting from Hegel’s combing of ‘symbolist’ and ‘representationalist’ theories of thought, as deVries shows. Also see Wolff (1992, 35–6, 47–9, 51, 58, 62, 95, 143–7, 164, 168, 174–5, 177), who distinguishes ‘preintentional’ and ‘intentional’ sensations in Hegel’s analysis. Hegel’s espousal of sensationism regarding sensations is consistent with his sharp criticisms of Condillac’s original version of sensationism (Enz. §442). 16 These are issues central to Hegel’s analysis of ‘Perception’ (PhdG, chapt. II; Westphal 1998a).

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§§448Z, 449, 450; Hegel 1994, 190.90–102). Accordingly, Hegel stresses that feelings (Gefhühle) only exhibit both their subjective and their objective aspects through their role in theoretical spirit (Enz. §446+Z), and that theoretical spirit has direct cognitive reference to individual objects via sensory intuition (Enz. §445Z). In his Berlin lectures on theoretical spirit, Hegel expressly states that sensations provide the stuff, the content or matter, of sensory intuitions, both inner and outer (Hegel 1994, 190.28–37, 191.70–77), and they provide the basic content for feelings (Hegel 1994, 191.90–95). Nowhere in this regard does Hegel describe intuition as intellectual intuition, much less espouse any such view. To the contrary, his discussion confirms and elaborates his remark, that intuition is directed solely towards perceptible particulars (above, §§129.2, 129.3).17 In brief, sensations and feelings only acquire objective reference by being incorporated into sensory intuitions via acts of intelligent synthesis, and only thus become candidates for conversion into selfascribed representations. Self-ascription is the cardinal cognitive advance achieved by representations, according to Hegel (Enz. §451). Thus both selfconscious awareness of and cognitive reference to perceptible particulars are, on Hegel’s view, as Winfield rightly stresses, effected by intelligence, not by mere consciousness. Thus on Hegel’s account, intelligence is fundamental to objectivity, in these two crucial regards, both of which involve rational judgment, a topic reserved to Hegel’s Logic. 130.2 Intelligence and Natural Science. Awareness of and cognitive reference to spatio-temporal objects and events is, however, only a necessary, though not a sufficient condition for discerning what is objective within the objects and events which appear to us.18 To discern what is objective in spatio-temporal objects and events requires, as we have seen (§§129.4, 129.6), exacting natural-scientific observations and experiments. Such natural-scientific investigations, including their results and the assessment of these results, are quintessentially intelligent activities. Thus intelligence is crucial for achieving this kind and degree of objectivity, as Hegel stressed in his Berlin lectures on Logic and on Philosophy of Spirit, and in ‘Reason’ in the 1807 Phenomenology (Ferrini 2009b). This, too, confirms and reinforces Winfield’s central conten17

These passages are partially quoted by Franks (2005, 377–9), who claims they undermine my interpretation. Franks fundamentally misunderstands Hegel’s view (above, §42). 18 Objects and events ‘appearing’ to us must not be understood as anything qualified by subjective forms of intuition, à la Kant’s forms of intuition which (he contends) are space and time. Hegel expressly warns against this misinterpretation of his position: ‘However when we have said that the intuited receives the form of the spatial and the temporal from the intuiting spirit, this statement may not be understood to mean that space and time are only subjective forms. Kant wanted to make space and time out to be such forms. However things are in truth themselves spatial and temporal; that double form of externality is not done to them one-sidedly by our intuition …’ (Enz. §448Z).

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tion that according to Hegel, objectivity is achieved only by intelligence, and not merely by consciousness. This point also underscores how important are natural science and Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature to understanding Hegel’s idealism, because natural science discovers both natural kinds and genuine causal laws. These causal laws formulate kinds of causal interrelations amongst spatio-temporal objects and events – including those which generate the existence and characteristics of spatio-temporal particulars, of whatever kind or scale, and bring about their alterations or eventual disintegration. The causal generation and corruption of things and events shows, Hegel argues, that spatio-temporal particulars are ideal, precisely because they are interdependent, and so are not ontologically self-sufficient. All of this holds about the natural world as such, regardless of human minds and whatever we may or may not be cognizant of (HER, 140–5). 130.3 Objectivity, Logic and Denkbestimmungen. Devotés of Hegel’s Logic will rightly insist that Hegel also espouses yet a third kind of objectivity, one central to the Logic, consisting in logical identification and analysis of the fundamental Denkbestimmungen as worldly structures, along with the basic cognitive principles, etc., required for us to identify, analyse and ultimately comprehend these Denkbestimmungen. This third level of objectivity, too, is solely the prerogative of intelligence. In some sense, this third level of objectivity is philosophically fundamental in Hegel’s philosophy, and is (purportedly) more basic than the natural-scientific objectivity just mentioned (§130.2). Yet Hegel’s lectures clearly show that this third level of objectivity is much more closely connected with and based upon natural-scientific objectivity than is typically recognised. Consider again a passage quoted earlier (§129.3): Thinking applying itself to this stuff as it comes to it from without is what we call thinking cognition, when thinking as such transforms a stuff into thoughts. However we do not have to consider thinking as applying itself; instead [we consider it] as its form, generally speaking, as explicating itself, determining itself, particularising itself, positing particularity, judging and thus concluding with itself. However, thinking cognition is initially applying thinking and its form to its stuff at hand. Thus the course of cognition is this, that we begin with intuition, perception and we make these perceptions into something universal, we transform this particular, this individual into the universal. (Hegel 1994, 229.284–295)

This passage closely associates Hegel’s own philosophical activity, his way of explicating and assessing Denkbestimmungen, with identifying and articulating Denkbestimmugnen through those cognitive processes through which we ‘begin with intuition, perception and we make these perceptions into something universal, we transform this particular, this individual into the univer-

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sal’. Hegel’s own philosophical activity, he says here, consists in considering these same materials, these same processes and products, these same universals, in a different way: … we do not have to consider thinking as applying itself; instead [we consider it] as its form, generally speaking, as explicating itself, determining itself, particularising itself, positing particularity, judging and thus concluding with itself.

Certainly Hegel’s philosophical re-analysis of the Denkbestimmungen discovered by natural science provides a cognitively distinctive vantage-point on them (above §§129.4, 129.6). Important here are three points: 1. Hegel’s philosophical vantage-point can only (though not solely) be developed on the basis of the results of natural science; 2. Hegel’s philosophical vantage-point fundamentally involves a distinctive reconsideration of those very same natural-scientific results; 3. Hegel’s philosophical vantage-point centrally includes a distinctive reconsideration of those very same cognitive processes and involved in commonsense and natural-scientific knowledge. It should not be surprising that Hegel associates his own logical methods, insights and results so closely with natural science and its inquiries and results: Hegel’s study of gravitational theory played a central role in the development of his ‘dialectic’, from a merely destructive set of sceptical tropes to a constructive set of philosophical principles based on gravity exhibiting the essential interrelatedness of physical bodies.19 More generally, Harris notes, … the Baconian applied science of this world is the solid foundation upon which Hegel’s ladder of spiritual experience rests. (HL, 2:355)

If this remains surprising, that is due to expositors and critics having so long failed to identify Hegel’s intimate involvement with and use of contemporaneous natural sciences already in the 1807 Phenomenology, in both ‘The Certainty and Truth of Reason’ and in ‘Observing Reason’ (Ferrini 2009a, 2009b). Whilst Hegel’s Logic may have some important kind of philosophical priority to Philosophy of Nature, I submit that this priority has not been correctly identified in the literature, precisely because the close links between Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Nature have been disregarded, in part due to assimilating Hegel’s philosophical procedure to the deductivist (post-Tempier) model of scientia, according to which one begins with a priori rational principles (traditionally, self-evident ones), and systematically deduces from them various specific corollaries. This has been the standard view of the rela19

Ferrini (1999); cp. De Orbitis Planetarum, GW 5:247.29; Hegel (1987), 295.

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tion between Hegel’s Logic and Realphilosophie. Yet Hegel’s solution to the Dilemma of the Criterion puts paid to the deductivist model of rational justification in all its forms; Hegel’s epistemology replaces it with a very sophisticated transcendental-pragmatic, fallibilist account of rational justification, one which both allows and requires much closer connections between Hegel’s Logic and his Realphilosophie, including his Philosophy of Nature (Ferrini 2012). These close connections between Hegel’s Logic, Philosophy of Nature, and his sophisticated epistemology underscore how important and how central is epistemological realism to Hegel’s philosophy as a whole. The polymath Hegel mastered the full range of what C.P. Snow (1964) later described as two distinct cultures: one of the sciences, engineering and technology; the other of the humanities. Those who have understood Hegel’s philosophy of nature have been well-versed in both; unfortunately, most of Hegel’s expositors are versed only in one. 131 CONCLUSIONS. Hegel’s Encyclopaedia is indeed a lecture compendium, outlining his topics for his no doubt beleaguered students. Fortunately, some good transcripts have survived, which help to show that, and how, Hegel preserved and augmented Kant’s insightful cognitive psychology whilst dispensing with Transcendental Idealism. Four key features of Hegel’s account of Intelligenz these lectures reveal are: 1. Human cognition is active, and forges genuine cognitive relations to objects which exist and have their own characteristics, regardless of what we may think, believe or say about them. 2. The Denkbestimmungen which structure and thus characterise worldly objects and events can only be grasped by intelligence (not merely by consciousness). 3. Intelligence obtains genuine objectivity by correctly identifying characteristics of a known object. 4. Central to our intelligent comprehension of Denkbestimmungen is natural science. These closely linked points underscore the significance of Hegel’s adopting the distinctive use of the verb ‘realisieren’ from Tetens via Kant, according to which to ‘realise’ a concept is to demonstrate that an extant object corresponding to it can be located and identified by us. These findings further show that Hegel’s Logic is mutually interdependent with Naturphilosophie, with natural science and with cognitive psychology. The strictly ‘top down’

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model of explication and justification drove Kant’s Transcendental Idealism to the very end. The important links between Kant’s and Hegel’s views lie instead in Hegel’s recognition that Kant’s Transcendental Idealism can be refuted strictly internally, and that so doing reveals how Kant’s Critical account of rational judgment (both cognitive and moral) and his transcendental method of analysis and proof can be disentangled from Transcendental Idealism. So doing also requires reconstructing Kant’s cognitive psychology. This Hegel does in his philosophy of subjective spirit, including his account of Intelligenz. Attending to both the structure and the details of Hegel’s cognitive psychology is important, both for its intrinsic interest, and for correcting long-standing misconceptions of Hegel’s comprehensive, challenging philosophy. Like the other central texts across Hegel’s philosophical corpus re-examined in this study, Hegel’s philosophical psychology clearly exhibits Hegel’s commitment to developing and defending in all its facets a very robust pragmatic realism, which reconstructs and augments Kant’s critique of rational judgment whilst jettisoning Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Examining why and how Hegel does so has identified a host of shortcomings in many typical views of Hegel’s philosophy. I hope in these ways to have corroborated and augmented H.S. Harris’ deflating the Gnostic and Neo-Platonic fantasies (and their ilk) still so often ascribed to Hegel, and to have shown that Hegel, of all unexpected sources, has made enormously important contributions to epistemology, and more broadly to theoretical philosophy. Some important features of the character and significance of Hegel’s contributions to philosophical semantics are examined in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 20

Robust Pragmatic Realism in Hegel’s Critical Epistemology: Synthetic Necessary Truths 132

INTRODUCTION.

132.1 To Carnap’s ‘formal’ or ‘formalised’ semantics Wilfrid Sellars contrasts his own proposed ‘philosophical semantics’ (EAE 40, 67), without saying outright what constitutes, nor what justifies, some specifically philosophical semantics, nor what such a philosophical semantics is to achieve. Central to it, however, is Sellars’s successor notion to C.I. Lewis’s (MWO 227–9, 254–8) relativised pragmatic a priori, which Sellars designated ‘synthetic necessary truths’ (SM 2:53, 3:18–19). I shall argue that Sellars was right to highlight such ‘synthetic necessary truths’, that such truths require – and are required for – robust pragmatic realism; that why this is so highlights how Sellars’ and Hegel’s philosophical semantics converge in an important insight which undercuts conventionalist or merely meta-linguistic alternatives; and that the robust pragmatic realism undergirding the philosophical semantics of synthetic necessary truths links together two main themes in this study, specifically: Hegel’s Semantics of Singular Cognitive Reference and his account of the constitutive roles of constructive self-criticism and mutual critical assessment, by linking together several other themes highlighted herein: Hegel’s active, judgmental account of perceptual experience and knowledge, which underscores that objectivity of our thought or our ascriptions is achieved by intelligence, not merely by consciousness (§§129, 130), Hegel’s Co-determination Thesis (§43), our use of causal concepts and judgments in solving (subpersonally) the perceptual binding problems, by which alone we can selfconsciously identify any one perceptible thing with its many features and discriminate it from its and from our own surroundings (§§9.1, 57.4), the constitutive roles of Kant’s concepts of reflection (identity, difference; compatibility, incompatibility; inner, outer; form, matter) in identifying any one particular (§§55.2, 112.5). All of these converge in one simple point with profound ramifications for epistemology: there are simply no non-modal descriptive terms of any sort, no matter how putatively simple. Our perception and identification of any one perceptible thing is thoroughly modal, rooted in our perceptual behaviour – hence in our corporeal actions – and guided by our

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behavioural expectations, whether implicit or explicit. Both in the most elementary cases of simple perception of our surroundings, and in the most exacting cases of developing and assessing scientific measurement procedures, we must grasp the object itself for what it is, which requires our distinguishing within any object what is constitutive and what is incidental to it. That is the double aspect of Hegel’s account of our grasp of any truth: accuracy about the genuine features of anything we know. 132.2 In focussing on Sellars’s philosophical semantics, I set aside his commitment to a fundamentally atomistic ontology, a commitment devolving ultimately from commitment to first-order predicate logic. This is incompatible with the modal realism about causality central to many natural sciences, including centrally Newtonian Mechanics (Harper 2011) – an issue not mooted by General Relativity (Redhead 1998, Parrini 1983, 2009), nor by QM (Brock 2003). In rejecting the sufficiency of first-order predicate logic for epistemology I agree with Hintikka (2014) that first-order predicate logic cannot formulate the counter-factual (subjunctive) claims and inferences required by and used in even commonsense empirical knowledge (below, §138.4). Whilst sympathetic to the prospects of an ultimate process ontology, those processes will be causally structured; only as causal processes can they perdure through some period of time in some region of space, transform as they do, effect whatever they bring about and exclude other particulars or processes from the region they occupy (cf. above, §§122–126, Westphal 2015a). My explication and defence of ‘synthetic necessary truths’ begins with Paolo Parrini’s (1983, 1995, 2009, 2010) important point, following Reichenbach (1920), that the relativised synthetic a priori required by and used in fundamental physics cannot be merely linguistic (§134). To pose these issues properly, I first note four results of my examination of how Quine and Sellars respond in contrasting ways to some fundamental tensions in Carnap’s semantics (§133). After arguing (briefly) that the relevant, relativised synthetic a priori cannot be merely linguistic (§134), I then argue in detail that the relevant, relativised synthetic a priori cannot be merely meta-linguistic (§§135– 138). These considerations allow me to demonstrate four significant points: 1) The key distinction between empiricism and pragmatism; 2) The role of that distinction in the contrast between C.I. Lewis’s robust pragmatic realism in Mind and the World Order (1929) and his relapse into empiricism in An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (1946); 3) The key contrast between the robust pragmatic realism of Classical American pragmatism and meta-linguistically inclined neo-pragmatism;

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4) Sellars developed his philosophical semantics on behalf of robust pragmatic realism, of just the kind developed and defended by Hegel. One central theme in the ensuing analyses is that Sellars had made his way back to robustly realist classical pragmatism because he paid close attention to Carnap’s use of his formalised semantics and its methodological links to Carnap’s explication of conceptual ‘explication’. (Many of the texts and issues I examine are discussed by Brandom (2015); I shall take issue only with the most important points, see §§137, 138.) 133

SELLARS, KANT AND SEMIOTICS.

Three features of how Quine and Sellars respond in contrasting ways to fundamental tensions in Carnap’s semantics illuminate the features of Sellars’s philosophical semantics relevant here. 133.1 The central theme uniting all of Sellars’s comments on the ‘Myth of the Given’, all the forms this Myth takes and all of the items said by others to be simply ‘given’ is this: Simply being confronted by something does not suffice to recognise it as whatever it is, nor what is its kind nor what are its characteristics. Any recognition of anything whatever – whether a particular individual (of whatever scale), any particular universal as distinct to any other universal, any mark used as a symbol or any inscription, or the kind or features of any of these – requires classifying it, however approximately or fallibly, where any classification involves judgment (Westphal 2015b, §6.4).1 Sellars’s examinations of mythical givenness highlight Kant’s point about the inherently judgmental character of human thought and knowledge, even about the apparently simplest matters (or whatever may appear utterly simple), at a time and in a context where the animus against any possible residues of ‘psychologism’ led his colleagues to focus respectable philosophical attention exclusively upon propositions (cf. Carnap 1950a, §11), and thus to neglect the kinds of capacities required for us to form or to assess relevant propositions or their appropriate use in any actual context on any particular occasion. 133.2 For any classifying of anything whatever or any of its characteristic as falling under any classification to constitute, not merely differential response but judgment, whoever so classifies something must be able to consider whether S/he judges as S/he ought. This is Sellars’s insight into the fundamental, irreducibly normative character of rational judgment, constituted by assess1 ‘... there are various forms taken by the myth of the given in this connection [sic], depending on other philosophical commitments. But they all have in common the idea that the awareness of certain sorts—and by ‘sorts’ I have in mind, in the first instance [sic], determinate sense repeatables—is a primordial, non-problematic feature of “immediate experience”’ (EPM ¶79, cf. FMPP 1.44).

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ing which judgment (if any) is proper to make in view of available information and relevant considerations (Westphal 2015b, §6.3).2 This fundamental insight is Kant’s: In any judgment about objects, events, actions, principles or cognitions, we must consider whether the various factors we happen to consider are integrated by us into a candidate judgment as they ought best to be integrated (KdrV A262/B318, cf. B219). Such normatively structured judgment is required to guide our thought or action by evidence, reasons or principles (above, §2.2). 133.3 Carnap sought to supplant epistemology by logical explications of scientific languages, and the minimum necessary behaviourist psychology of observation. In this connection, Carnap (1963b, 923) denied his semantical rules did or should contain anything prescriptive. In ‘Truth by Convention’, Quine (1936) was rightly exercised about the character and status of the most elementary use of logical symbols, connectives and inferences required to first specify the basic signs and rules of any Carnapian linguistic framework, and indeed, for any formally defined logistic system (including, e.g., natural deduction). Carnap never mistook mere marks for meaningful symbols, but his repeated attempts to be as descriptive, non-normative and as behaviouristic as possible produced some unfortunate equivocations, confusions and misunderstandings (Westphal 2015b, §3). The corrective lies in Carnap’s (1931, 91; 1934 [1959], 175; 1956b, 49–52) view that inferential differences constitute differences in meaning: the meaning of a term or phrase can be specified by determining which inferences can, and which cannot, be drawn by using that term or phrase. This same point holds also of marks used as signs or symbols: Their meaning, too, can be specified only by specifying their proper inferential roles (cf. EAE 54). This is why Sellars stressed that understanding a sign, term or phrase involves recognising and being able to draw such inferences, together with recognising in what circumstances various of those inferences may or may not be relevant, permissible or obligatory, and behaving accordingly (verbally or corporeally).3 In this important regard, Sellars sides with Carnap’s colleague at Chicago, Charles Morris (1925, §20), who like Peirce stressed that semiotics concerns the intelligent use of signs, i.e., intelligent behaviour using signs, which is indeed behavioural, but cannot be explained merely causally or behaviouristic2

This rules out the rationalist form of mythical givenness, as alleged ‘immediate judgments’ – an oxymoron. In EPM (n. 10) Sellars indicates his debt to Linnell (1954), of which little was published (Linnell 1956, 1960). Directly comparable research appeared shortly thereafter by Sellars’s doctoral student, Robert Turnbull (1959), though it assesses Broad’s empiricist theory of ideas; on Hume’s, to much the same effect, though by different means, see Westphal (2013a). 3 Michael Williams’ presentation on Sellars (Rome 2012) helped me appreciate these two different considerations Sellars indicates; cf. Williams (2013), 67–71, (2015).

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ally (simply in terms of physical stimulus and physiological response). As fundamental as this point is to semiosis and to semiotics, it also indicates why the proposed science of semiotics did not deliver the expected riches: The signs don’t do the work, we who use signs in various (potentially) intelligent ways do the significant intellectual work; such work is already the subject matter of and within the various disciplines, professions, trades and practices – including games and typography. This is no surprise: behaviourist stimulusresponse relations cannot distinguish between what Descartes called the ‘formal’ and the ‘objective’ reality of ideas, a distinction which also holds of signs and their significance, in contrast to their physical characteristics, whether as sign design, (semantic) counter or mere mark. 133.4 A final preliminary is to recall the three main aspects of the study of language identified by Morris: syntax, semantics and pragmatics. These correspond roughly to grammar, meaning (intension) and use, i.e.: specific statements made by particular people on particular occasions. Carnap first developed formal studies of syntax in The Logical Syntax of Language (1934). He added formal semantics in his Introduction to Semantics (1942), which he extended to intensional semantics in Meaning and Necessity (1956). Both branches of Carnap’s formal studies expressly abstract from pragmatics, i.e., from what people actually say and do by speaking as, when-, wherever and about whatever they do. All of that belongs to pragmatics. Sellars early learned that pragmatics cannot be formalised (Olen 2012, 2015; Westphal 2015b, §6.2). The fact that the pragmatics of language use cannot be formalised is linked in significant ways to the fact that the relativised pragmatic a priori cannot be merely linguistic – nor merely meta-linguistic. 134

WHY THE RELATIVE SYNTHETIC A PRIORI CANNOT BE MERELY LINGUISTIC.

134.1 Carnap, Conceptual Explication and Linguistic Frameworks. Recall (above, §102) that only in 1950 did Carnap explicate his method of conceptual explication, which he had been using since the 1920s. The conceptual ‘explication’ of a term or principle provides a clarified, though partial specification of its meaning or significance, for certain purposes, and seeks to improve upon the original term or phrase within its original or proposed context(s) of use. Explications are thus both revisable and are rooted in actual usage and thus in prior linguistic practices, which are rooted within whatever practices use the terms or phrases in question. Successful explication aims to better facilitate the practice from which the explicandum derives. Carnap’s methodological and terminological contrast between conceptual analysis and conceptual explication matches Kant’s (KdrV A727–30/B755–8).

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Conceptual analysis requires semantic internalism, because only if we can identify by mere reflection upon our concepts or our meanings their exact content or significance (intension), can we also determine whether any purported ‘conceptual analysis’ is complete, and so provides necessary as well as sufficient conditions for its proper use. By contrast, conceptual explication requires semantic externalism, because only within the original context of the use of a term, phrase or principle (the explicandum) can its explication be assessed, as improving or failing to improve upon the original explicandum (in whatever significant regards) within its proper context of use. That usage will be, not merely a manner of speaking, but a manner of speaking developed to conduct and facilitate some activity, typically some form of inquiry, the context of which in part determines the content or significance (intension) of the original term or phrase, and likewise of the newly explicated concept(s) or principle(s) (explicata). Accordingly, conceptual explications are tied to the context in which the relevant speech-acts (usage) occur. In fact, Carnap’s ‘linguistic frameworks’ are conceptual explications writ large, as formalised fragments of a language fit for one or another form of empirical inquiry, investigation or experimentation. 134.2 Conceptual Explication and Semantic Externalism. Carnap’s semantic views in 1950 point in two opposite directions: In ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’ (1950b) his empiricist account of ‘ontology’ as always internal to one or another linguistic framework requires semantic internalism, because the linguistic framework alone is to specify the relevant ontology of the relevant context of linguistic use. However, Carnap’s (1950a, 1–18) account of conceptual explication requires semantic externalism, because only frameworkindependent facts – at an utter minimum: rates at which various mundane regularities occur – can provide any context for assessing whether, how or how well a new conceptual explication improves upon whatever term(s) or phrase(s) it explicates. Carnap never reconciled these two tendencies. His framework-internal ontology (1950b), however, is untenable for internal reasons, and also for a further reason, widely neglected by his successors. Carnap recognised – indeed insisted – that his formal syntax and his formal semantics were only two aspects of any complete semantics. The third aspect he called ‘descriptive semantics’; its task is to identify which observation statements are uttered by natural scientists. What Carnap calls ‘descriptive semantics’ belongs to Morris’s third class of linguistic studies: pragmatics. Without this pragmatic ‘descriptive semantics’, Carnap’s linguistic frameworks are – officially, expressly and inevitably – nothing but uninterpreted semi-axiomatic systems, altogether lacking empirical significance or use (Westphal 2015b, §2).

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Semantic externalism is fundamental to classical American pragmatism, according to which our pragma – what we do, how we do it, and what we do it with; in short: our practices and procedures – have philosophical priority over whatever we say about our practices, because they have (inter alia) semantic priority over what we say about our practices. In contrast, according to neo-pragmatism, what there is, what we do, what we can say, and what we can ascribe to one another as believing or claiming, are all hostage to one’s preferred, merely conventional meta-language (of whatever kind or level). Neo-pragmatism clings to Carnap’s (1950b) untenable view, according to which ‘ontology’ is hostage to one’s preferred linguistic framework. Neo-pragmatism only appeals to ‘pragmatics’ as the third, poor cousin to formalisable syntax and semantics, as a garbage category collecting whatever cannot be assimilated to formalisable techniques within syntax or semantics. To neo-pragmatists, ‘pragmatism’ only designates a rather chatty species doing its best to muddle through. The route back to genuine pragmatic realism is via Carnap’s account of conceptual explication and its semantic externalism. Sellars recognised and understood this important semantic and pragmatic aspect of Carnapian explication (Westphal 2015b, §6.5). 134.3 A Brief Example from Huw Price. A brief example drawn from Huw Price (2004) about linguistic reference nicely illustrates the contrast between semantic externalism and internalism, and between pragmatic realism and neo-pragmatism.4 Consider whether linguistic reference is a significant, substantial relation between any person and any particular(s) about which S/he makes a claim or statement. Presumably, such reference relations are proper topics for empirical linguistics, cognitive psychology, philosophy of language and epistemology. Accordingly, different theories of reference must be true of actual linguistic reference, however it occurs, yet only one can be true of actual linguistic reference, and different theories of reference must be able to conflict (disagree) with one another. Call actual linguistic reference ‘REFERENCE’. Price (2004, 82–3) asks us to consider two theories of REFERENCE, ‘T ’ and ‘Z’, where According to

Theory T: (1) REFERENCE = relation R.

However, according to Theory Z: (2) REFERENCE = relation R*. 4 For discussion of Price’s (2004) views, see Knowles (2014). Here I only discuss this one sample argument because it illustrates a wide-spread pattern of thought and argument. I do not purport to assess Price’s ‘subject naturalism’ here; although I have doubts about that view, I join his opposition to ill-founded metaphysics, especially that which purports to argue on semantic grounds; see Westphal (2014).

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Hence these two theories of reference appear to conflict about what REFERENCE is, or how REFERENCE occurs, or how we secure REFERENCE to whatever we discuss. Price argues, however, that according to theories T and Z what actually holds is, respectively, the following: According to

Theory T: (3) ‘Reference’ stands in relation R to R.

Whereas, according to Theory Z: (4) ‘Reference’ stands in relation R* to R*. These claims ((3) and (4)) do not conflict. Therefore, Price concludes, REFERENCE is not a substantial, empirically specifiable relation; there is no such phenomenon as REFERENCE, there are no facts about what actual linguistic REFERENCE is. This is Price’s ‘deflationary’ view of REFERENCE, or rather: of ‘reference’. This argument cannot be sound; I do not believe it can be valid. By this line of reasoning, how can any deflationist about REFERENCE formulate statements (3) or (4)? How can the advocates of Theory T or Theory Z affirm either statement (1) or (2)? These statements, and anyone’s capacity to formulate, to assert or to deny them, require that theorists of REFERENCE can refer meta-linguistically to linguistic formulations of theories of linguistic REFERENCE. Now if actual linguistic REFERENCE is supposed to be problematic, why is meta-linguistic ‘reference’ to any theory of REFERENCE – or any theory of ‘reference’ – less problematic? What, exactly, enables the deflationist about ‘reference’ to refer to anyone else’s theory of REFERENCE or of ‘reference’, without using the very resources of linguistic REFERENCE s/he purports to deflate? I pose this challenge to the deflationist advocate of this argument: to explain cogently how s/he can refer meta-linguistically to anyone’s theory of REFERENCE, or to anyone’s theory of ‘reference’, without invoking referential resources officially denied by her or his deflationary view of ‘reference’ or of REFERENCE. Indirect discourse, referring to anyone’s statement (first-, second- or third-person), requires referring to that statement, even if it also embeds it within quotation (whether marked or implicitly) so as to mention yet not to use it (cf. Bertolet 1990). Here we have a meta-linguistic situation exactly parallel to an important point of Carnap’s semantic practice that Quine never understood, for which Carnap’s own semantic theory could not account (Westphal 2015b, §§5.7–5.9, 6.5–6.6, 6.12). Carnap always used natural languages as informal meta-languages in which to formulate his formal syntax and his formal semantics. That is no problem, so long as one understands what one is doing. Carnap himself did not always adequately understand what he was doing in this regard, insofar as he often sought to treat mere marks as meaningful symbols. For example, ‘v’ by itself is just an angle, but has no meaning. Within some logical

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notations, ‘v’ is used to indicate exclusive disjunction; in others, ‘v’ is used to indicate addition; rotated, it is used otherwise in arithmetic and in geometry to indicate, respectively, ‘greater than’, ‘less than’ or ‘angle’; in other contexts, the same mark can be used to indicate a direction. It might instead be the beginning of a small cartoon hat. The reason why semiotics was not the boon to philosophy and to the sciences that Peirce, Saussure, Morris and Apel expected is that by themselves marks do no semiotic work, we use marks as signs or symbols. Their intelligent use by us makes signs or symbols out of mere marks, as Sellars rightly pointed out in criticism of Carnap’s formal semantics (Westphal 2015b, §6.4). To bring this point to bear upon the above deflationary argument about REFERENCE (or ‘reference’): If linguistic REFERENCE is only what one or another theory happens to say ‘reference’ is – this is the only sense to be made of statements (3) and (4), then no one can or does refer to anything without first formulating and affirming a theory of reference! And this is paradoxical in the extreme, because affirming (or denying, disputing, doubting) any theory of ‘reference’ requires referring to that ‘theory’, which requires being able to refer to that ‘theory’! By the above reasoning, no one can refer to one’s own preferred ‘theory of “reference”’ without first formulating and affirming one’s own preferred ‘meta-meta-theory of “meta-reference”’ – a meta-theoretical ‘theory of “reference”’ used to refer to any ‘theory of “reference”’, etc. This anti-realist, allegedly deflationary regress is infinite, vicious and absurd: a reductio of deflationism about reference.5 This point parallels Quine’s (1936) about the inevitable, necessary use of principles of inference in any explicit statement or definition of rules of inference – or likewise formation rules, etc. It also parallels Carroll’s (1895) point that demonstrating any conclusion by deductive reasoning requires using principles of inference which cannot themselves occur in and as explicitly stated premisses within that deduction. This argument drawn from Price recalls its progenitor, Kuhn’s (1976, 101–2) argument for the ‘incommensurability’ of Classical Newtonian Mechanics (‘CM’) and Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (‘GR’), which cannot conflict (Kuhn argued) because the term ‘mass’ is not used the same way in both theories. Instead, according to CM, mass is constant regardless of velocity, whereas according to GR, mass varies with velocity. Both Kuhn’s argument about ‘mass’ and the above argument about ‘reference’ require a strong semantic internalism, together with a ‘descriptions’ theory of reference, according to which any term, phrase or proposition refers only and exactly to 5

This reductio does not license the ‘metaphysical’ claims some have tried to draw from mere semantic (referential) resources; on this count I concur with Huw Price – though I appeal instead to the conditions of singular cognitive reference. (Too much semantic ascent leads to oxygen deprivation.)

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whatever is described when the content (intension) of that term, phrase or proposition is completely analysed into an explicit description. In fact, both Kuhn’s argument about ‘mass’ and Price’s about ‘reference’ descend directly from Carnap’s (1950b) account of framework-internal truth and ontology. Indeed, Carnap’s (1956a) semantics directly prefigures Kuhn’s account of theoretical change and consequent theoretical incommensurability in the natural sciences.6 In contrast to that kind of anti-realist, constructivist internalism about semantic meaning and reference, Sellars rightly observed: It is essential ... to note that the resources introduced (i.e. the variables and the term ‘proposition’) can do their job only because the language already contains the sentential connectives with their characteristic syntax by virtue of which such sentences as ‘Either Chicago is large or Chicago is not large’ are analytic. In other words, the introduced nominal resources mobilize existing syntactical resources of the language to make possible the statement ‘There are propositions’. (EAE ¶3, cf. ¶28)

In this important regard, Sellars rightly focussed on Carnap’s (1950a, 1–18) formalised explication of terms or phrases in use, to improve their functioning within those contexts of actual usage. The significance of Sellars’s semantic externalism is amplified by the following considerations. 135

MEASUREMENT PROCEDURES, CONVENTIONS AND THE RELATIVE SYNTHETIC A PRIORI.

A common theme – or at least, a common denomination – running through neo-Kantianism, pragmatism, logical empiricism and neo-pragmatism is the appeal to synthetic principles which are ‘relatively’ a priori, rather than absolutely a priori like Kant’s. The point of designating a ‘relative’ a priori is that the synthetic principles in question are revisable; the point of designating these revisable synthetic principles ‘a priori ’ is that they cannot be established empirically, because they constitute basic definitory conditions for empirical inquiry, analysis and justification. Most logical empiricist and neo6

These forms of argument are also central to Putnam’s ‘internal realism’; see Westphal (2003b). In traditional terminology, the ‘extension’ of a term or concept (classification) is whatever individuals or features of individuals would properly fall within the scope of that classification or ‘intension’. Carnap’s ‘descriptive semantics’ acknowledges that semantic extension (in this sense) neither constitutes nor suffices for linguistic reference by anyone to any specific individual. Additionally, any linguistic reference to actual particulars only becomes a candidate for cognitive standing or evaluation when the Speaker locates and individuates the relevant individuals within space and time (above, §§2.3, 66). These points are central to Sellars’ ‘non-relational’ account of meaning (intension and extension), and its distinction to the truth-aptness of specific judgments or statements Someone refers to designated specific individuals or circumstances.

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pragmatist versions of the relative a priori are merely linguistic, as in the Land P-rules of Carnap’s (1950b, 1956) linguistic frameworks; such are the views of, e.g., Goodman (1978), Rorty (1979), Putnam (1981, 1983), Caruthers (1987) and Friedman (2001). A more robust, pragmatic account of the relative a priori begins with a point made by C.I. Lewis (MWO 172–80): relativity requires relata which have their own characteristics; else they cannot even be relata: Utterly characterless individuals – if there could be any such bare particulars – can bear no relations whatever to anything – nor to anyone – else. This point holds, too, Lewis emphasised, for human experience and empirical knowledge: Only because the world we inhabit has its contents, characteristics and structures can we at all inhabit, experience, know and act in or upon it – and it upon us and our behaviour. This point is significant, yet consistent with a merely linguistic version of the relative a priori, insofar as it is consistent with the point Quine and Rorty never tire of stressing, that we could alter our linguistic classifications or designations ad libitum, and get our most cherished sentences to be assigned the value ‘true’, or preserve the (purported) truth value of any particular sentence we wish. Toulmin’s (1949) defence of ‘synthetic necessary truth’ makes a good case against that kind of conventionalist fiat regarding redefining our terms: Many of our key terms and many of the kinds of statements we make in those terms are neither logically necessary nor merely conventional truths – they are logically synthetic statements – although they are necessarily true because they are constitutive of (or with regard to) a kind of activity or procedure to which they are fundamental. Change the assigned meanings of those key terms by stipulation obviates their relevance to that original activity or procedure and simply changes the subject matter at issue (if there be any after such re-assignment); such stipulative alteration shows nothing about the meaning, justification or truth-value of the original statements. A further significant point in this connection was made by Lewis (1923, MWO 230–74), though developed more carefully by Reichenbach (1920) and highlighted by Parrini (1983, 1995, 2009, 2010); it concerns the character and status of measurement procedures in Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (‘GR’). With antecedents in Mach’s (1908, 303–33/1919, 256–72) treatment of mass determinations, Einstein stressed that certain measurement procedures must be established regarding what is to count as simultaneity – or as equal periods of time or as equal lengths or distances. These procedures themselves can be established neither by experiment alone nor by theory alone, nor solely by theory and experiment together, because they are required to conduct any relevant experiments, to make any relevant measurements and to

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construct (and assess) any relevant theory; where establishing them presupposes though cannot demonstrate that no other phenomena interferes with their establishment or use! Mach neglected and misrepresented this latter point (Laymon 1991, 173–7). So far, this much is consistent with a merely linguistic relative a priori. The key point is that these measurement procedures cannot be set arbitrarily! These measurement procedures can be set by theory plus procedure together only if nature coöperates through sufficient, relevant, calculable stability. Establishing measurement procedures is tightly constrained by physical phenomena and by any attempts to investigate, measure or explain those phenomena. That is why the relative a priori, synthetic and revisable though it be, cannot be merely linguistic, merely conventional nor merely stipulative. This point about measurement procedures requires a robustly realist pragmatic a priori, albeit a ‘relative’ rather than an ‘absolute’ a priori. Neo-pragmatists – including in this significant regard Quine, Kuhn, Putnam, Rorty, Friedman, Brandom and Price – are committed by their use of neo-Carnapian linguistic frameworks to a merely linguistic account of any relative a priori. The relativised a priori cannot be merely linguistic, because our relatively a priori principles must be such that they can be used to make sound and proper sense of natural phenomena within the exact sciences – centrally including those regular natural phenomena by which various processes or events can be measured. As Toulmin (1949) stressed, neither his case nor this stronger case for ‘synthetic necessary truths’ requires the empiricist’s bogey of special mental powers of intuiting reality an sich. Though he did not make this point specifically regarding measurement procedures, William James (1907, 216–7; above, §58) understood very well this general point about our formulation of quantified natural laws. Not only as a theoretical but also as a practising metrologist, a consulting chemical engineer and as Head of the US Office of Weights and Measures (Oct. 1884–Feb. 1885), Peirce understood the importance and the difficulties involved in detecting and eliminating sources of systematic error from precise measurement procedures. Peirce was the first to devise a procedure to use the wavelength of light as a standard unit of measure, and use it to determine the standard length of the metre.7 Why would Peirce believe in the existence of real generals? Inter alia because he measured some of them with unprecedented precision by constructing his innovative procedures and apparatus! Similar kinds of measurement considerations led Newton to affirm the universal gravitational force of attraction (Harper 2011). This similarity is not superficial. Harper shows that central to Newton’s analysis and causal expla7 Many of the relevant primary sources are contained in volume 4 of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition (Peirce 1982–); his contributions to metrology are summarised in Nathan Houser’s Introduction to this volume.

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nation of periodic motions, both celestial and terrestrial, is the use of various independent procedures to obtain converging, very precise measurements of a causal parameter which satisfy (inter alia) these two explanatory ideals: i) Systematic dependencies identified by a theory make the phenomenon to be explained measure the value of the theoretical parameter which explains it. ii) Alternatives to the phenomenon would carry information about alternative values of the parameter which explains it. As Harper shows, Newton’s own methods and explanatory ideals are far more adequate and stringent than anything devised by philosophers of science, including Glymour’s ‘boot-strap’ methodology. Newton’s methodological analysis, measurement and use of such systematic dependencies is found in many other measurement procedures for causal and for statistical (whether stochastic or ergodic) regularities, including GR. The use of successive approximations to regulate the development of both measurement and exact phenomenological description are also evident throughout Galileo’s and Kepler’s terrestrial and celestial kinematics. Harper (2011) shows – contra Kuhn – that Einstein’s theory of relativity better satisfies Newton’s ideals of explanatory adequacy than does Classical Mechanics (‘CM’), even in its highly refined, late 19th-century form: When provided the relevant data and analysis, Newton’s ideals of explanatory adequacy favour GR over CM.8 The interrelations of practice, classification, measurement, experiment and theoretical explanation were succinctly stated by C.I. Lewis: The determination of reality, the classification of phenomena, and the discovery of law, all grow up together. I will not repeat what has already been said ... about the logical priority of criteria; but it should be observed that this is entirely compatible with the shift of categories and classifications with the widening of human experience. If the criteria of the real are a priori, that is not to say that no conceivable character or experience would lead to alteration of them. (MWO 263)

This interdependence and mutual regulation appears to many philosophers – rather too glibly – to be either utterly arbitrary, merely conventional, or else viciously circular. However, as both Peirce (1902, ch. 3 §11) and Alston (1989, 319–49) recognised – and long before them both: Hegel (1807) – not all forms of epistemic circularity are vicious.9 As Reichenbach (1920), Laymon, Parrini 8

For concise entré into Harper’s landmark book, see Huggett et al (2013), Westphal (2014). Peirce states: ‘In studying logic, you hope to correct your present ideas of what reasoning is good, what bad. This, of course, must be done by reasoning; and you cannot imagine that it is to be done by your accepting reasonings of mine which do not seem to you to be rational. It must, therefore, be done by means of the bad system of logic which 9

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and Brock (2003) rightly stress, the relativised synthetic a priori cannot be merely linguistic, it cannot be merely conventional, because the effective use of relatively a priori synthetic principles requires sufficient, relevant, identifiable natural regularities. These considerations can now be extended to show that the relativised synthetic a priori also cannot be merely meta-linguistic. 136

WHY THE RELATIVE SYNTHETIC A PRIORI CANNOT BE MERELY METALINGUISTIC.

136.1 Some Preliminaries. To avoid potential misunderstandings, I speak of ‘causal modalities’ when discussing physical causality, in the forms of causal processes, causal structures or causal laws of nature. Physical processes and their causal structures, together with empirical inquiries and physical sciences are my topic, not ‘metaphysics’. I shall also avoid the common terminological contrast between logical modalities and ‘alethic’ modalities, because the latter is a misnomer. ‘Alethia’ concerns truth and knowledge, literally unconcealedness, not ‘truth makers’, i.e., actual objects or events or processes (whether causal or otherwise). Kant’s account of modality as merely epistemic would much more rightly be designated ‘alethic’ modality, but it is better to avoid the designation rather than to risk the misunderstandings it invites. 136.2 Brandom’s Metalinguistic ‘Kant-Sellars Modal Thesis’. In opposition to empiricism and its semantic atomism, Brandom identifies and seeks to articulate and to justify the following idea: Sellars’s idea is that what one is describing something as is a matter of what follows from the classification – what consequences falling in one group or another has. (Brandom 2015, 180–1; cf. idem. 2008, 79–80)

Anyone familiar with Classical American Pragmatism knows that the idea Brandom here attributes to Sellars is common stock amongst Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead and C.I. Lewis (MWO). The core pragmatist idea is that description and classification as we actually make and use them are subjunctively, counter-factually, causally structured by what we expect we can, shall or you at present use. Some writers fancy that they see some absurdity in this. They say, “Logic is to determine what is good reasoning. Until this is determined reasoning must not be ventured upon. (They say it would be a “petitio principii” ...) Therefore, the principles of logic must be determined without reasoning, by simple instinctive feeling.” All this is fallacious. ... Let us rather state the case thus. At present, you are in possession of a logica utens which seems to be unsatisfactory. The question is whether, using that somewhat unsatisfactory logica utens, you can make out wherein it must be modified, and can attain to a better system. This is a truer way of stating the question; and so stated, it appears to present no such insuperable difficulty as is pretended’ (Peirce 1902, CP 2:191). My attention to this passage and its significance I owe to F.L. Will (1981 [1997, 89 n.])

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could DO with anything so described or classified: how it would respond and how our actions and their results would develop as we execute whatever actions we consider or actually conduct. This core pragmatist idea is, I believe, correct. The relevant semantic point, about the meaning of our descriptive terms or the content of our descriptive concepts, is both basic and very strong: Even our most ordinary descriptive terms are modally rich, as is our use of them. Predicating any characteristic of any observed particular involves expectations of how it can and shall behave in the short, medium or perhaps also long term, and how it can be observed to behave as we – or others – continue (however intermittently) interacting with it. 136.3 Empiricism and Basic Empirical Descriptive Terms. Carnap rejected Quine’s extensionalism and developed sophisticated accounts of meaning in terms of ‘intension’ or classificatory content, including ‘semantic postulates’. There remained a role, however, for non-modal elementary observation predicates in Carnap’s empiricist semantics, because all confirmation was ultimately to be based upon the use of observation terms, instances of which could be completely verified by relevant, proper observations reported in simple protocol sentences. Though Carnap wisely eschewed epistemological concerns about infallibility, indubitability and incorrigibility, his empiricist requirement of complete verification of basic observation statements requires that those statements can be made and confirmed independently of any other statements or terms. This strand of semantic atomism is constitutive of empiricist semantics. Although Carnap did not discuss whether basic observation predicates are (not) modally laden, for statements containing them to be confirmed completely, and hence independently of other statements or terms, requires that these basic empirical descriptive terms only describe occurrent characteristics of whatever is observed. Counter-factual relations cannot be completely confirmed by any individual, self-standing observation (or observation statement) simply because counter-factual relations are counter-factual, because they constitutively involve non-occurrent conditions which (purportedly) would trigger other manifestations of the (supposed) disposition purportedly reported in observation reports (protocol statements). This is why Carnap (1936–37) required ‘reduction sentences’ to partially explicate dispositional concepts, such as solubility in water. The mutual independence of the meaning, and likewise of the confirmable use, of basic observation predicates to report fully confirmable observations, which is constitutive of empiricism, is untenable for three main reasons internal to Carnap’s semantics (HER, 50–62). One reason is that, according to Carnap (following Frege), the semantic meaning of an expression is in part specified by which inferences can, and which cannot, be drawn using that

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expression. Which inferences these are, however, is set not only by the predicate(s) in question, but also by the syntactic form of the observation statement(s) in which those predicates occur, and this syntactic form is set by the formation rules of the linguistic framework to which those statements belong, as Sellars notes (ITSA 49, 57). A second reason is that simple observation(s) alone cannot determine whether an observed, occurrent characteristic is or is not affected by (and so dependent upon) further, non-observed physical circumstances and causal laws. For example, whether something appears to be red is in fact – whether known or not – dependent upon the relative velocity of the observer to the observed. This is a version at the level of observation terms of the problem noted in previously (§134) about why the relative synthetic a priori cannot be merely linguistic. A third reason is that any actual observations are always conditional upon the circumstances of observation, so that the confirmation or disconfirmation of any observation statement, however apparently simple, is cognitively interdependent with observation conditions and the observer’s assessment of those conditions. For all three reasons, there simply are no non-modal descriptive predicates (see further below, §138.2). 137

MATERIAL INFERENCES SANS ‘INFERENTIALISM’.

137.1 Brandom’s ‘Inferentialism’. Brandom’s ‘Modal Expressivism’ is designed to articulate or make explicit the modality he says is ‘implicit’ in ordinary, allegedly non-modal descriptive terms or ‘vocabulary’. He claims to explicate the material incompatibilities amongst various empirical properties: Square and circular are exclusively different properties, since possession by a plane figure of the one excludes, rules out, or is materially incompatible with possession of the other. Square and green are merely or indifferently different, in that though they are distinct properties, possession of the one does not preclude possession of the other. An essential part of the determinate content of a property – what makes it the property it is, and not some other one – is the relations of material (nonlogical) incompatibility it stands in to other determinate properties (for instance, shapes to other shapes, and colors to other colors). (Brandom 2015, 200)

These observations are correct, so far as they go. However, they neither require nor do they justify any specifically expressivist, inferentialist semantics (regardless of whether, or to what extent it may be either ‘metalinguistic’ or ‘pragmatist’). Brandom seeks to articulate these sorts of material incompatibilities by using sentential negations. Sentential negations, however, only provide bivalent distinctions between any predicate term and its negation; bivalent sentential negation does not express the kinds of material incompat-

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ibilities Brandom highlights, which are supposed to include disjunctive families of characteristics (shapes, colours, flavours, species). Yes, such material incompatibilities can be stated in complex sentences in first-order predicate logic, but such statements are no more than logical exercises in ‘translation’: They neither explicate nor clarify, they merely restate those material incompatibilities which we must understand and identify prior to and independently of any such logical translations, in order to make or to assess any such ‘translation’ into logical notation. To properly grasp and formulate the disjunctive relations amongst families of characteristics Kant did not treat negation truth-functionally, and insisted upon the logical distinctness of the ‘infinite negative judgment’ (KdrV A71–3/B97–8; see Wolff 2017). 137.2 Subjunctive Conditionality and the Failure of Monotonicity. Brandom (2015, 72–7, 160–6, 192–4, 225) stresses that inferences involving dispositional properties and most material inferences are nonmonotonic: ... the subjunctive conditionals associated with dispositional properties codify inferences that, like almost all material inferences, are nonmonotonic. That is, they are not robust under arbitrary addition of auxiliary premises. (Brandom 2015, 72)

Brandom is correct that material inferences and especially those involving causal dispositions are non-monotonic, and he (2015, 164–5) is correct that this feature is not repaired or removed, but only acknowledged, by explicitly adding a ceteris paribus clause, which typically is understood implicitly in causal reasoning, whether commonsense, diagnostic, forensic or scientific. The non-monotonic character of causal reasoning, however, only underscores the irrelevance of sentential negation to explicating the kinds of material incompatibilities and causal dispositions central to Rylean ‘material inference tickets’ (which are Brandom’s model of material inferences). The defeasibility of all empirical classifications, even the most ordinary – and hence the non-monotonicity of all inferences based upon empirical classifications – was already highlighted by Waismann’s (1945) criticism of verifiability theories of meaning and the consequent ‘open texture’ or ‘porosity’ of all our empirical concepts – a point underscored also by Austin’s (1946) inexplicably loquacious or exploding goldfinch. Their points about the ‘open texture’ of empirical concepts and the defeasibility of our use of them corroborate the point made above about conceptual explication supplanting conceptual ‘analysis’ (§134.2). Goodman (1946) made the general case about counterfactuals, which van Fraassen (1980) used to support his ‘Constructive Empiricism’. The general case about counterfactuals was re-affirmed by Hempel (1988) when announcing the demise of logical empiricist philosophy of science – well after these points had been developed by Frederick Will (1969) to

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argue for semantic and mental content externalism, and for robust pragmatic realism. Perhaps Brandom (2015, 72–3) is correct that a substantial body of literature on dispositional causality neglects the nonmonotonic character of any actual, empirical statements about dispositions, but apparently both he and those (unnamed) authors neglect long-standing achievements within philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of science. 137.3 Brandom’s Lingering Logicism. Although Brandom (2015, 175–6) repudiates ‘the anachronistic extensional quantificational reading’ of Frege’s notation in Begriffschrift, he inherits from his reading of Frege the ideas that ‘modal force’ lies in ‘relations between concepts expressed by generalized conditionals’, insofar as ... [Frege’s] generality locutions ... codify relations we think of as intensional. Fregean logical concepts are indeed second- and higher-order concepts, but more than that, the universality they express is rulish. ... Frege’s logical vocabulary permits us to assert necessary connections among empirical concepts that themselves can only be discovered empirically: physically or causally necessary connections. (Brandom 2015, 176).

Whether Brandom uses or misuses Frege’s Schriften I shall not examine; important here is Brandom’s neo-Fregean, neo-pragmatist meta-linguistic inferentialist account of physical modality, which he calls his ‘Modal Expressivism’. Its key ideas Brandom extracts from Frege’s Begriffschrift in these terms: The necessity (whether natural or rational) of the connections between empirical concepts is already contained as part of what is expressed by the logical vocabulary, even when it is used to make claims that are not logically, but only empirically true. The capacity to express modal connections of necessitation between concepts is essential to Frege’s overall purpose in constructing his Begriffschrift. Its aim is to make explicit the contents of concepts. Frege understands that content as articulated by the inferential relations between concepts, and so crafted his notation to make those inferential connections explicit. (Brandom 2015, 177).

Can logical notation(s) be used to explicate causal modalities? Yes. Are they useful for such explication? Not particularly. Are they required for such explication? Not at all (see below, §138). Brandom thinks otherwise due to an unacknowledged relic of empiricist semantics. Brandom observes: We philosophers and logicians do not have very good conceptual tools for dealing with the nonmonotonicity of inferences and of the conditionals that codify those inferences. Improving those tools is a central philosophical challenge, particularly, but not exclusively, for semantic inferentialists. The cur-

457 rent primitive state of our thought about the phenomenon of nonmonotonicity is, however, no reason for ignoring it. The literature that addresses the relations between dispositional properties and subjunctive conditionals would be very different if those conditionals were thought of as nonmonotonic, as I think we ought. (Brandom 2015, 72–3)

There is simply no reason whatever to expect illumination about robust subjunctive conditionals used in causal contexts from philosophers’ (logicist) semantics! As Alan Chalmers (2009) has made abundantly clear, there are excellent reasons why scientists, rather than philosophers, gained knowledge of atoms. As Bill Harper (2011) has made abundantly clear, there are excellent reasons why scientists, rather than philosophers, devised robust methods for the development, refinement and justification of dynamic causal theories which precisely measure the forces in question. There are two related points here. First: scientific disciplines have developed many diverse reliable methods of empirical research for examining, identifying and by many methods measuring natural causal phenomena. Second, there is no reason to expect specifically logical procedures to illuminate scientific methods or findings, because no strictly logical procedures are sufficiently subtle to capture the semantically and quantitatively refined, fine-grained analytical and quantitative methods of the sciences – much less to clarify them. Logic in any of its rigorously defined forms – which is to say, in any of its forms – requires monotonicity; waiving monotonicity is to waive provability, which is to waive strictly demonstrative (deductive) reasoning. Yes, there is plenty of non-formal reasoning in the sciences, arts, trades and every-day life, but all such nonformal reasoning requires semantic and existence postulates, none of which can be formulated, assessed or justified by the formal techniques of logic alone.10 There is no reason to expect philosophical logicians or philosophers of language to make any better headway with suitably robust, non-monotonic subjunctive conditionality, such as pertains to physical causality (cf. above, §119). Sellars looked to the sciences, not to philosophy, for the required developments (§138.6). 137.4 Brandom’s Explanatory Aspiration. Brandom proudly pronounces:

10

Wolff (2009) has demonstrated that the one strictly formal domain consists in a precise reconstruction of the Aristotelian square of opposition (sans conversion); beyond that domain, richer forms of deductive reasoning require semantic and existence postulates which are, in principle, non-formal and cannot be stated, assessed or justified by strictly formal reasoning alone. Yes, much richer formalised logistic systems can be developed (Lewis 1930, rpt. 1970, 10), but their use within any domain requires substantive semantic and existence postulates to link them to that domain, and their use within any such domain can be neither established nor assessed by strictly formal techniques alone (Lewis MWO 298; cf. Carnap 1950b).

458 Modal realism claims that there are objective modal facts. One important species of modal facts is laws of nature. Modal realism makes essential use of the concepts of fact and law, but does not by itself explain those concepts. Modal expressivism does. (Brandom 2015, 207–8)

What sort of ‘modal realism’ fails to explain the concepts of (modal) ‘fact’ and (causal) ‘law’? Perhaps mere philosophical avowals of modal realism – such as Brandom’s own avowal – do not explain those concepts, but Brandom’s inferentialist ‘Modal Expressivism’ fares no better in this regard. At most Brandom’s logistic explications can restate quasi-formally causal laws and causal relations identified, examined, formulated – and in many sciences: measured – empirically. To explain the basic concepts involved in causal explanations requires empirical investigations and causally informed history and philosophy of science. Brandom’s inferentialism is predicated on the presumption that semantics is first philosophy.11 Semantics may contribute to philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of science, but it does not suffice for these domains, nor can it supplant them (Westphal 2014). More and better attention to actual scientific explanations would be salutary within philosophy, insofar as it could lead to greater caution on the part of philosophers who claim to ‘explain’ anything.12 Through empirical inquiry alone can we discover whatever factors we may have heretofore unwittingly covered by one or another implicit ceteris paribus clause. Only empirical inquiry can relieve us of our ignorance of whatever phenomena Brandom underscores by the ‘nonmonotonicity’ of our claims and reasoning about those causal phenomena – namely: whatever we may discover which specifies something previously shrouded under a ceteris paribus clause and the insufficiently discriminating theory or explanation to which that clause pertains. That Brandom stresses the point using the term ‘monotonic’ underscores his lingering logicist predilections: viz., that he expects philosophical analysis to illuminate the special class of statements containing all and only subjunctively robust counterfactual statements. Consider in this regard Brandom’s claim about the deductive-nomological (DN) model of causal explanation. 137.5 Brandom on DN Explanation. Regarding explanation, Brandom states: The kind of generalization implicit in the use of subjunctive or modal vocabulary is what is invoked in explanation, which exhibits some conclusion as the result from an inference that is good as an instance of a kind, or in virtue of a 11 This is evident in his aim to devise a form of pragmatism suitable for ‘the linguistic turn’ (Brandom 2015, 8), and his (2015, 91–8) likening his own ‘modal expressivism’ to Huw Price’s ‘subject naturalism’ (above, §134.4). 12 I examine this issue in connection with contemporary internalist and naturalist theories of mind and of action in Westphal (2016b). For related issues, see Wimsatt (2007).

459 pattern of good inferences. This is what was intuitively right about the deductive-nomological understanding of explanation. What was wrong about it is that subjunctive robustness need not be underwritten by laws: modally qualified conditionals whose quantifiers are wide open. (Brandom 2015, 194)

Nothing right about the DN model of explanation is ‘intuitive’, and Brandom’s claim about the DN model is vacuous. Establishing laws of nature requires exacting physical analysis; explanatory laws require (ultimately, if not proximately) measuring the relevant, constitutive forces. Constitutive forces underwrite all mechanical explanations, insofar as such explanations appeal directly or indirectly to the material structure of the mechanisms or components involved (Westphal 2015a). Using any law of nature to explain an event, process or structure requires determining the actual boundary conditions of that event or process. Brandom is correct that subjunctively robust causal explanations need not be underwritten by causal laws, but by its very designation the Deductive-Nomological model concerns the use of causal laws in explanations. Recall Carnap’s statement of the point: Notice here that the if-then translation is well suited to the universal conditional, even though it is not always adequate for the simple conditional ‘A e B ’ (cf. 3b). Another reading for ‘(x)(Px e Qx)’ is: “All P is Q”. Most of the laws of science – physics, biology, even psychology and social science – can be phrased as conditionals. E.g. a physical law that runs something like “if suchand-such a condition obtains or such-and-such a process occurs, then so-andso follows” can be rephrased as “for every physical system, if such-and-such conditions obtain, then so-and-so obtains”. (Carnap 1958, 3613)

Brandom’s purported error of the DN model, quoted just above, merely indicates that some causal explanations are particular, under-specified and invoke no causal laws. Such explanations merely invoke causal conditions and causal conditionality; Brandom’s claim about ‘explanation’ merely reiterates the conditional modality involved in any causal relation. 137.6 There is, however, an important epistemological point regarding the lack of monotonicity concerning statements reporting empirical classifications, causal dispositions and empirical justifications: This characteristic lack of monotonicity entails that infallibilist standards of justification are, in principle, irrelevant to all non-formal domains, including the entirety of morals and the entirety of empirical knowledge (above, §§2.1, 52, 85, 107). Strict logical deduction may contribute to empirical justification (in some domains, in some contexts), though it does not constitute, nor does it suffice for, empirical justification. Consequently, the long-standing, multifarious efforts to bring deductive logic to bear upon the analysis of the empirical phenomena 13

Note that the final formulation matches the syntax of Carnap’s reduction sentences.

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of semantic meaning, mental content, empirical knowledge and cognitive justification are in principle insufficient. The key reason why not was already noted by Kant: deductive logic is a canon of judgment, but no organon of knowledge (KdrV A60–1, 795/B85–6, 823)! The sole competence of deductive logic is to avoid inferring false conclusions from true premises. In principle, Brandom’s attempt to use sentential negations to articulate material incompatibilities is misguided. Only to empiricists is it news that our minds work by differentiation rather than by abstraction and generalisation. Regarding abstraction, Gombrich (1963, 2) laconically observed: ‘Our mind, of course, works by differentiation rather than by generalization ...’. Gombrich’s observation has been elaborated and confirmed by recent psychological investigations (e.g., Gardner & Schoen 1962, Vygotsky 1978, Toomela 1996, Wertsch 1985, Martin & Caramazza 2003). 137.7 Brandom’s Mistaking of Carnap’s Semantics. Brandom ascribes the following semantic view to Carnap: first, by one sort of procedure one has privileged, nonempirical access to, one fixes meanings (concepts, the language) and then subsequently, by another sort of procedure, which is empirical, determines the facts (what to believe, one’s theory) as expressed in those meanings (concepts, language). (Brandom 2015, 186; cf. 213–5)

Brandom’s attribution mistakes four important features of Carnap’s semantics. First, Brandom neglects altogether Carnap’s ‘descriptive semantics’ – the empirical inquiry (belonging to Morris’s domain of pragmatics) into what observation protocols are reported by scientists of our cultural circle. Brandom also neglects a feature of Carnap’s semantics which Quine never understood, namely Carnap’s willingness to use natural language as an informal metalanguage for (re)constructing any linguistic framework. Third, Brandom neglects Carnap’s urging us to revise or replace such linguistic frameworks to improve our scientific efforts and successes. These three points indicate the fourth, most important point: Brandom neglects how Carnap’s linguistic frameworks are conceptual explications, which are rooted in their use – both the original context of use of whatever terms or phrases we explicate, and the new, now altered context of use of the newly explicated linguistic framework. These features of Carnap’s semantics lend themselves to what Friedman (2001) calls The Dynamics of Reason; these features of Carnap’s semantics are central to Sellars’s appropriation of them (Westphal 2015b, §6). Redding (2015) distinguishes ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ inferentialism. Strong inferentialism holds that inferential incompatibility is constitutive, not merely explicative, of material characteristics and their differences and incompatibilities. By contrast, ‘weak’ inferentialism rescinds the constitutive and holds on-

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ly the explicative thesis. Redding shows that Brandom holds the strong thesis. However, ‘strong’ inferentialism is incompatible with the semantic externalism and fundamental (pragmatic) realism required by, and for, conceptual explication (as distinct to conceptual analysis).14 138

SELLARS ON THE MODALITY OF ORDINARY EMPIRICAL DESCRIPTION.

138.1 In contrast to Brandom’s lingering logicist predilections, Sellars’s use of Carnapian explication verges upon hermeneutics: It is essential ... to note that the resources introduced (i.e. the variables and the term ‘proposition’) can do their job only because the language already contains the sentential connectives with their characteristic syntax by virtue of which such sentences as ‘Either Chicago is large or Chicago is not large’ are analytic. In other words, the introduced nominal resources mobilize existing syntactical resources of the language to make possible the statement ‘There are propositions’. (EAE ¶3, cf. ¶28)

Sellars clearly recognised that we are able to state explicit definitions only because we are already competent speakers and thinkers. This point holds regarding ordinary language and also regarding any explicit meta-language. This circumstance appears to be a predicament – as it did to Quine – only if one denigrates ordinary (or any lower-order) language, by insisting that these can only be fit for use if, when and insofar as they are specified by an explicitly defined metalanguage. Sellars is committed to the semantic externalism required by Kant’s, Hegel’s and Carnap’s methods and practices of conceptual explication, which is characteristic also of Classical pragmatic realism from Peirce to C.I. Lewis (MWO) and F.L. Will (1997). 138.2 Like the Classical American Pragmatists, Sellars knew that there is no problem about how to relate modal vocabulary to some basic non-modal, merely descriptive vocabulary. Recall Sellars’s discussion of our typical, commonsense ways of distinguishing between how things look and how they happen to appear, keyed as they are to our commonsense understanding of lighting conditions (EPM 37–58). Sellars’s example of the apparent colour of the tie, inside the shop under artificial light, or outside in daylight, is a direct counterpart to Carnap’s (1949) protocols regarding the presence of his keys on his desk. Sellars’s example makes plain that even the simplest observation report is not made in isolation from other considerations regarding one’s observational circumstances, nor from one’s (corrigible) understanding of the character and characteristics of whatever one observes. Sellars’s point is at 14

This problem in Brandom’s inferentialism persists uncorrected from Making it Explicit (1994) into his most recent work; see Redding (2015), and above, §113.5.

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once semantic, epistemic and ontological – just as one should expect of a robustly realist classical pragmatist. Consider first the epistemic point. 138.3 As noted above (§136.5), Carnap’s empiricist semantics must maintain that basic observable predicates can be used in protocol statements, each of which can be fully confirmed (or disconfirmed) independently of any others. This cognitive, justificatory independence is the Achilles heel of empiricism. In 1946, C.I. Lewis formulated this point in these terms: If anything is to be probable, then something must be certain. The data which eventually support a genuine probability, must themselves be certainties. We do have such absolute certainties, in the sense data initiating belief and in those passages of experience which later may confirm it. But neither such initial data nor such later verifying passages of experience can be phrased in the language of objective statement – because what can be so phrased is never more than probable. Our sense certainties can only be formulated by the expressive use of language, in which what is signified is a content of experience and what is asserted is the givenness of this content. (Lewis AKV, 186; cf. 180–92)

We may set aside the initial allegation about how any probability requires some certainty, and further note that the relevant certainty does not require sense data or any special forms of mind-dependence. The key point is that these alleged empiricist ‘certainties’ are obtained exactly as Descartes (2 Med., AT 7:29) did: by defining ‘sensing strictly speaking’ as whatever he seems to sense, seems to see, seems to hear, seems to feel: nothing more, nothing less and nothing other than exactly that.15 This is to assimilate the alleged object of perception to the propositional form of whatever one takes oneself to perceive – at that moment!16 Such ‘certainties’ must be momentary and they must be indicative. They must be momentary because whatever now appears to one may change unexpectedly at any moment in some apparent if aberrant way; and they must be indicative – they must concern only manifest, occurrent qualities and merely apparent quantities, expanses or shapes – because any dispositional characteristic may manifest itself differently in different circumstances or on different occasions, none of which can be apprehended presently in or by apparent experience. These alleged claims about mere appearances are ‘certain’ and ‘infallible’ only because they are by definition stripped of any and all implications for anything not presently apparent 15

‘... I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called “sensing” [lat.: ‘sentire’, fr.: ‘sentir’] is strictly just this, and in this restricted sense of the term it is simply thinking’ (Med. 2, AT 7:29; tr. emended). 16 This is part of why Sellars (e.g., SM I:11–16; SK I:48–50, 55, II:5, III:32–4), following Kant, stressed the importance of the distinction between ‘this red cube’ and ‘this cube is red’: concept empiricism requires their conflation; cf. Westphal (2013a). This same distinction is Dretske’s between simple (non-epistemic) seeing (e.g. a tire, which happens to be flat) and epistemic seeing that the tire is flat.

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now within that same appearance, to whomever it so appears. This cognitivejustificatory point, and it alone, requires any empiricist supposition regarding mutually independent observation predicates and individually completely (dis)confirmable protocol sentences. The cognitive (epistemological, justificatory) problem is that once such claims are stripped of any and all further implications (to insure their infallible, incorrigible certainty), they can provide no cognitive justification whatsoever regarding any other or further empirical circumstance, not even in the next moments, nor within appearances to oneself! This epistemic point holds independently of semantic issues about the language purportedly used in formulating any ‘looks talk’.17 138.4 The complementary semantic or conceptual point is the following. Our ordinary descriptive vocabulary is modally rich, insofar as ascribing any characteristic to any individual uses the material mode of speech, the ‘thing language’ as Carnap called it, in which we discuss perduring objects and their features. Any merely momentary, fleeting appearance of something we do not ordinarily regard as any perception of one of its features. The relevant ‘is of identification’ is distinct to the ‘is of identity’, to the ‘is of predication’ and to the ‘is of existence’; this ‘is of identification’ is linked to the perhaps modally stronger ‘is of identification’ which Hintikka (2005, 2014) argues is required for epistemology, insofar as knowledge of any individual requires discriminating that actual individual from counter-factual impostors and requires being able to identify or re-identify that individual counterfactually across ‘possible world’ scenarios in which that individual recurs though in different circumstances than it actually inhabits. (Such discrimination of individuals involves their individuation.) The ‘is of identification’ used in attributing any observed characteristic to any observed particular is modally rich, insofar as it constitutively – if fallibly, corrigibly and indefinitely (indeterminately regarding duration) – attributes that characteristic to that particular as one of its perduring, if perhaps transitory characteristics. As Sellars was fond of stressing (Bill deVries tells me): to be is to have power, which involves persisting over some period of time within some region of space, and effecting results – including observable effects – all the while; this is how and why ‘to be is to make a difference’.18 138.5 Accordingly, not only are our ordinary descriptive terms modally rich, 17 For detailed discussion of Descartes’ infallibilist sensory states, see HER 18–34. Lewis’s discussion of ‘the given’ in MWO (36–66) is a bit delicate, but does not constitute knowledge in any form: ‘This given element is never, presumably, to be discovered in isolation’ (MWO 66); ‘There is no knowledge merely by direct awareness’ (MWO 37); instead the sensory ‘given’ is a theoretical postulate within Lewis’s account of empirical knowledge (MWO 39, 52, 54); see Westphal (2017c). 18 CE 6, emphasis added; cf. CDCM §§36, 41/¶¶65–6, 74; PHM 58; cf. Lewis MWO 44, 261.

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so is our use of them in any actual knowledge of any actual individual. Everyone’s favourite example of a sensum: an after image, is modally structured insofar as we expect it to fade within minutes. If ‘it’ doesn’t, we seek medical attention, or perhaps await the dissipation of intoxicants. Even ‘looks’ talk about colours – or ‘sounds’ talk about audition – is materially modally rich because it connotes that if we change our perceptual circumstances by changing the lighting (or, e.g., our velocity or angle of perception relative to the source) we anticipate a corresponding changes in its sensory appearance. Our perceptual behaviour is fundamental to distinguishing – and to cognitively exploiting the distinction – between the subjective order in which appearances happen to occur to us and the objective order in which worldly (natural or social) objects and events transpire. Hume (T 1.4.2.20–21) stumbled over this distinction when a porter delivered to him a letter in his upperstorey apartment. Kant exploited this distinction in his appeal to our bodily comportment in his examples of perceiving a house, a sailing ship, or the earth and the moon (in the Third Analogy of Experience; KdrV A190–3/B235– 8, 257, 277–8).19 Pragmatic realists appeal to our behavioural expectations in determining what ‘things’ are, and our adapting our behaviour, our expectations and our classifications to how ‘things’ respond to our dealings with them, including our classifications and mis-classifications of them. Underlying all of these epistemological appeals to the cognitive significance of the modally rich structure of human perception, of its typical objects and of our use of descriptive classifications and predicative attributions, is a basic point regarding sensory reafference. Through sensory reafference organisms distinguish between changes in their sensory intake due to their surroundings, and those due to their own behaviour or comportment. Neurobiologist Björn Brembs (2011) reports on the fundamental role of sensory reafference identified by recent research on the behaviour of invertebrates such as snails, worms and Drosophila. This research reveals: ... a general organization of brain function that incorporates flexible decisionmaking on the basis of complex computations negotiating internal and external processing. The adaptive value of such an organization consists of being unpredictable for competitors, prey or predators, as well as being able to explore the hidden resources deterministic automats would never find. At the same time, this organization allows all animals to respond efficiently with tried-and-tested behaviours to predictable and reliable stimuli. (Brembs 2011, 930)

The results examined by Brembs make evident forms of behaviour which cannot be reduced to merely stochastic sequences, because they reveal goal19

For concise discussion of Kant’s account of the discriminatory character (identification through individuation) of perceptual and of causal judgment, see Westphal (2017a).

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directed processes of learning based upon the following principle of sensory reafference: Through sensory reafference an organism distinguishes those sensations which result from its own bodily motions from those sensations occasioned by the organism’s surroundings (Brembs 2011, 936). This feedback loop of sensory reafference is also fundamental to human actions, because executing any action requires monitoring how the world responds to our actions (ibid.).20 138.6 Here we have THE key distinction between empiricism and pragmatism. Empiricism seeks to identify descriptive terms which can be used in protocol sentences which can be conclusively (dis)confirmed individually by simple perception. This cognitive requirement dictates a fundamental role for semantic atomism, specifically requiring non-modal basic descriptive terms. To both empiricists and to neo-pragmatists, ‘pragmatism’ is merely ‘pragmatics’, the morass of linguistic phenomena which defy assimilation to formalisable syntax and semantics. There are, however, no such predicates known to humankind! Against that lingering ‘spectator view’ of human experience and knowledge – and like the Critical realists, including Roy Wood Sellars – pragmatic realists stress that our corporeal actions are both temporally and spatially extended executions, which we guide by monitoring – and as needed modifying or halting – them. No elementary non-modal descriptive predicates – nor modally desiccated descriptive predicates (‘presently seems to me like ...’) – are required for knowledge, and no elementary apparent certainties are required for knowledge, because our experiences, our techniques, our classifications and our theories are all corrigible, not merely fallible, if we but attend with discernment to how our experiences of things unfold as we proceed upon our fallible habits, expectations and corrigible theoretical and practical understandings (including classifications, i.e., intension), all of which are rooted in our corporeal embodiment and in our natural and social environs. In this important regard, Hegel, Peirce, James, Dewey, Lewis (MWO), Ralph Sleeper (1983), and F.L. Will – as also Ingarden, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Rein Vihalemm, and McGuire and Tuchañska (2000) – speak with one robustly pragmatic realist voice.21 Appreciating, understanding and justifying the realism afforded by this pragmatic approach to knowledge and to epistemology requires understanding how constructive self-criticism and constructive mutual criticism 20

All of these points Brandom neglects, apparently because ‘experience’ is ‘not one of’ his ‘words’ (Brandom 2000, 205n.7), and because he is committed to supplanting epistemology with philosophy of language; for discussion of this latter issue, see Westphal (2016b). 21 See Ingarden (1964, 1965, 1974; 2013), Vihalemm (2011, 2012, 2014); regarding Heidegger, see McGuire and Tuchañska (2000). Vihalemm calls his view ‘practical realism’; we concur about the basics highlighted herein.

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and assessment are possible. Those require resolving the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion. Solving these problems are amongst Hegel’s chief contributions to pragmatic realism. Conversely, examining these fundamental modal features of even the simplest sensory perception corroborates Hegel’s contention that truth is always an achievement, and involves knowing some thing itself, which requires discriminating (at least some of) its constitutive characteristics from the merely apparent, incidental or variable features it also exhibits. Thus the present considerations link together Hegel’s contention that objectivity is achieved only by intelligence, not merely by consciousness (above, §§129, 130), how such perceptive intelligence must use Hegel’s Co-determination Thesis (above, §43), in part by our using causal concepts and judgments (sub-personally) to solve the perceptual binding problems, by which alone we can self-consciously identify any one perceptible thing with its many features and discriminate it from its and from our own surroundings (above, §§9.1, 57.4), where all of these intelligent, discriminatory perceptualjudgmental achievements exhibit the constitutive roles of Kant’s concepts of reflection (identity, difference; compatibility, incompatibility; inner, outer; form, matter) in identifying any one particular (above §§55.2, 112.5). 138.7 Brandom is perplexed about how some modal truths may appear – or may indeed be – both conceptual and empirical. One of his puzzles is to reconcile two characterisations of these modalities he claims to find in Sellars (CDCM), saying: it is not easy to see how to reconcile these two characterizations of the modality in question: as causal, physical necessity and possibility, and as some sort of conceptual necessity and possibility. (Brandom 2015, 185)

Brandom’s perplexity results directly from misunderstanding Sellars’s links to classical pragmatism, especially to the C.I. Lewis of MWO, a misunderstanding linked to his persistent misquotation of his favourite passage from Sellars’s (1958) paper on causal modalities. Brandom’s (2015) book aims to explicate what Sellars means by saying that “the descriptive and explanatory resources of language advance hand in hand.” In addition to Kant’s idea, Sellars here takes over Carnap’s idea of understanding concepts whose paradigm is modal concepts as (in some sense) metalinguistic. (Brandom 2015, 43)

Brandom (2015, 40, 43, 57, 68, 135, 178, 180, 182, 195, 214) quotes this passage ten times, usually more fully, though always omitting Sellars’s concluding phrase. Sellars states:

467 The descriptive and the explanatory resources of language advance hand in hand; and to abandon the search for explanation is to abandon the attempt to improve language, period. (CDCM §108/¶201/1958:307)

Brandom neglects Sellars’s nearly verbatim quotation from Lewis (MWO 263, quoted above §135) in the phrase he does quote. The closing phrase Brandom omits shows that, like Lewis (MWO, esp. 259–65), like the Classical pragmatic realists, like Ralph Sleeper (1986) and F.L. Will, Sellars recognised that, and how, empirical inquiry into causal structures, laws, processes and explanations is likewise inquiry into how to refashion relevant portions of our languages in order better to express and assess our discoveries, understanding and explanations. These points comport well with, and further support, Toulmin’s (1949) defence of synthetic necessary truths, and they dovetail with Hegel’s philosophical semantics in both his Logic and his Realphilosophie, including the Philosophy of Nature. In connection with ‘inductive’ scientific confirmation of a significant natural regularity, and the implications of such confirmation for the meaning of the terms used to formulate this regularity, Sellars contends: ... scientific terms have, as part of their logic, a “line of retreat” as well as a “plan of advance” – a fact which makes meaningful the claim that in an important sense A and B are the “same” properties they were “before.” And it is this strategic dimension of the use of scientific terms which makes possible the reasoned recognition of what Aldrich has perceptively called “renegade instances,” and gives inductive conclusions, in spite of the fact that, as principles of inference, they relate to the very “meaning” of scientific terms, a corrigibility which is a matter of “retreat to prepared positions” rather than an irrational “rout.” The motto of the age of science might well be: Natural philosophers have hitherto sought to understand meanings; the task is to change them. (CDCM §86/¶157, cf. §59/¶111)

Notice that Sellars’s contrast between ‘retreat’ and ‘rout’ distinguishes his view not only from Hume’s inductive scepticism, but also from Popper’s falsificationism. In contrast to Brandom, though like pragmatic realists, Sellars recognised that empirical truth and conceptual meaning (intension) are interrelated in myriad ways through empirical and especially through scientific inquiry. In part this is because our explicit definitions do not serve to completely formulate the norms they express, because our norms have rich and wide-ranging ‘latent aspects’, as F.L. Will (1988, 1997) calls them, which can become explicit during periods of fundamental conceptual change, although these guiding latent aspects of norms and their significance function constantly, in guidance, in confirmation and in conceptual change. In this connection, exclusive focus upon the semantics (intension and extension) of scientific terms and principles lends an illegitimate appearance

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of legitimacy to conventionalism, which evaporates when actual scientific methods and procedures are examined with the care they deserve and require, including centrally Newton’s fourth rule of method: In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be considered either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions. (Newton 1999, 796; 1871, 389)

By ‘redefining’ (inter alia) space, time and simultaneity, Einstein’s GR succeeded (inter alia) at better satisfying Newton’s Rule 4 at astronomical distances and at velocities approaching or equalling the speed of light (Harper 2011). Newton’s Rule 4 embeds the key thesis of Kant’s and Hegel’s semantics of singular cognitive reference, that no statement or surmise has any specifically cognitive status unless and until is it referred by Somone to some particulars (structures, phenomena) S/he has localised within space and time (Westphal 2014). This thesis about specifically cognitive reference was also emphasised by Austin, and is central to Sellars’s epistemology (SK): ‘meaning’ is not a referential relation, though specific statements by specific persons on specific occasions in specific circumstances can refer to and be about designated particulars (of whatever scale), and must refer to and be about some localised particulars in order for Someone to know (or even to err about) anything at all – and accordingly to have or to assess any kind or extent of approximate accuracy or cognitive justification. Brandom’s disregard of important details even of recent philosophical history appears to be linked to his excesses of semantic ascent, also evident in his (2015, 91–8) likening his own version of Sellarsianism to Huw Price’s subject naturalism. Brandom fails to identify any clear or consistent sense in which important concepts, terms or ‘vocabularies’ are metalinguistic because he misunderstands Carnap’s linguistic frameworks. In direct connection with the passage quoted just above, Brandom states: For Sellars, the rules which modal vocabulary expresses are rules for deploying linguistic locutions. Their “rulishness” is their subjunctive robustness. Following out this line of thought, Sellars takes it that “grasp of a concept is mastery of the use of a word.” He then understands the metalinguistic features in question in terms of rules of inference, whose paradigms are Carnap’s L-rules and P-rules. (Brandom 2015, 43)

Carnap’s L- and P-rules are rules of inference; they are to state the logical principles and the physical laws constitutive of a linguistic framework. In Meaning and Necessity (1956a) and thereafter these rules are supposed to be subjunctively robust. However, they are not themselves meta-linguistic!! Car-

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nap’s L- and P-rules are specified for and within any linguistic framework governing the use of terms – descriptive and otherwise – by an informal metalanguage, by whatever natural language Someone uses to (re-)construct that linguistic framework. The linguistic framework itself is a conceptual explication of terms, concepts, principles or theoretical laws in use within some specific context of inquiry and explanation. The linguistic framework itself is not a meta-language for the language used in that context; the explicated and thereby explicit linguistic framework is to substitute for its original, though only insofar as it improves upon the original in that context, for its original, and perhaps now also augmented, purposes. Brandom of course says that To find out what the contents of the concepts we apply in describing the world really are, we have to find out what the laws of nature are. And that is an empirical matter. (Brandom 2015, 186)

However, neither Brandom’s inferentialist semantics nor his ‘Modal Expressivism’ substantiates, illuminates, justifies nor otherwise entitles Brandom to these assertions. Brandom’s ‘Modal Expressivism’ is a proposed solution searching to create a problem for itself to solve. Nothing in his current account shows that modality must be meta-linguistic (in any, even minimal sense). Nor does his current account show that Sellars’s semantic resources – his meta-linguistic devices of dot quotes, distributed singular terms and so forth – do not work equally well for modal concepts as for other ‘ontological’ classifications such as ‘property’, ‘universal’ or ‘fact’ (Brandom 2015, 188–9). Indeed, Brandom’s current account funds nothing. Brandom neglects how some synthetic necessary truths are identified by natural sciences, either as constitutive characteristics of various natural systems, structures, events or phenomena, or as constitutive regularities identified and exploited by basic measurement procedures, whereby natural regularities are exploited as information channels in Dretske’s (1981) sense.22 Accordingly, the relative synthetic a priori required to obtain, to assess and to understand scientific knowledge cannot be merely meta-linguistic. 22 Regarding a scientist’s observation report of a ì-meson by using a cloud chamber, Brandom (2015, 115) states: ‘the original [observation] report ... was the exercise of a reliable differential responsive disposition keyed to a whole chain of reliably covarying events, which includes ì-mesons, hooked vapor trails, and retinal images. What makes it a report of ì-mesons, and not of hooked vapor trails or retinal images, is the inferential role of the concept the physicist noninferentially applies’. Intelligent use of that concept certainly is relevant, insofar as it is required to decode information provided via the observational apparatus and the scientist’s visual system. However, reliable co-variation of relevant states does not suffice, for reasons Dretske (1981, Part I) provided: covarying states must also satisfy the constitutive constraints of an information channel; see Westphal (2016b).

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139

CONCLUSION.

Understanding and appreciating empirical knowledge must be much more historical, much more hermeneutical and much more detailed and informed than formal methods afford or (when used in isolation) facilitate. Wilfrid Sellars had already developed his technical and analytical semantic resources to serve the non-formal domain of our actual empirical knowledge of the world, in part by carefully scrutinising the ordinary language of philosophers throughout its history – our history – and domains. Sellars’s philosophical semantics, including his account of ‘synthetic necessary truths’, converges very significantly with Hegel’s. Indeed, the key semantic, explicatory aims of Hegel’s Science of Logic and philosophy of nature (above, §§111-115, 122–126) can now be stated as Hegel’s critical assessment and systematic integration of the key synthetic necessary truths required for our range of cognitive activities, from commonsense through the natural sciences. Whether Sellars had been studying more Hegel than he let on, I do not know, but I think instead their convergence upon robustly pragmatic realism is due to their both re-thinking Kant’s Critical philosophy, so as to refurbish and augment it without Transcendental Idealism, by capitalizing upon Kant’s method of conceptual explication and using it to better understand our empirical knowledge, both commonsense and natural-scientific. Hegel and Sellars both realised that cogent philosophy must be systematic, and can only be systematic by being deeply historically informed about the specific ways in which recurrent if not perennial philosophical issues recur in different versions in different contexts, to help to identify the most important features of an issue, and the most perspicacious ways of formulating and addressing them. What counts as insight or originality is inherently gauged by prior and present accomplishments. This, too, is an inherent feature of the social and historical aspects of rational justification. Philosophers ignore historical philosophy, and historians of philosophy ignore critical assessment, not only at their own peril, but also imperil the philosophical endeavor itself. A cogent philosophical formulation and resolution of a genuine issue may not wear its historical-philosophical erudition on its sleeve, but such decorum doesn’t entail the irrelevance of such reflections. Philosophical focus requires proper context! If Hegel’s name hardly be associated with perspicacity, I understand; he over-estimated his readers’ preparedness for the Parmenidean exercises carefully devised for them in his texts. These general reflections on philosophical semantics and synthetic necessary truths can be brought into more constructive, Critical focus by examining, in the final chapter, Hegel’s critique of contemporary biologism.

CHAPTER 21

Autonomy, Freedom and Embodiment: Hegel’s Critique of Contemporary Biologism 140

INTRODUCTION.

One fundamental implication of Kant’s and Hegel’s Semantics of Singular Cognitive Reference is to distinguish between the semantic content or intension of any term, principle or claim, and the cognitive significance of that term, principle or claim as it is used in (candidate) cognitive judgments about (purported) relevant instances. This distinction is central to Hegel’s philosophical semantics, which distinguishes between the explication of the intension of basic concepts and principles in the Science of Logic and their cognitive significance when used in judging relevant phenomena in the Realphilosophie, including Philosophy of Nature. One central case in point concerns causal principles. The most general causal principle is ‘every event has some cause’; the most general causal principle we can use in any determinate cognitive judgment is the specific causal principle: ‘every spatio-temporal event has some distinct spatio-temporal cause(s)’ (above, §112.6). Causal principles governing kinds of causes and their effects involve further restrictions in scope (intension) and further requirements upon relevant evidence (above, §49.3). These elementary points entail that the entire debate about freedom of human action versus universal causal determinism within nature is fundamentally ill-conceived, because the allegation of universal causal determinism mistakes the unrestricted scope (intension) of the specific causal principle for a justified causal law known to hold universally across the entirety of spatio-temporal nature. As Hume, Kant and Hegel knew, empirical evidence cannot provide sufficient justification for such unrestricted empirical claims. The specific causal principle is a regulative principle, constitutive of causal inquiry within any empirical domain. Causal knowledge, however, consists in the results of successful causal explanation of particular localised events, or (under favourable circumstances) of kinds of localisable recurrent events. Only sufficient, exclusively causal explanation of particular events or of specific classes of events justifies or can justify causal claims about those events. There are very significant further requirements to strengthen any sufficient causal explanation into justifiable claims about causally deterministic expla-

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nation. All of these points are made by Kant’s Critical theory of cognitive and explanatory judgment; they suffice to defend the possibility of free, responsible human action without any appeal to Transcendental Idealism. Kant himself appears not to have appreciated how successfully he had explicated and justified these implications of his own epistemology (Westphal 2017b). Hegel recognised and capitalised upon Kant’s Critical achievements in precisely these regards. Understanding how and why reveals important ways in which contemporary philosophy unCritically relies upon Cartesian and empiricist assumptions which do not survive Critical scrutiny, and how these shortcoming highlight and corroborate the cogency of Hegel’s Critical philosophical semantics and theory of cognitive judgment. A leitmotiv is provided by Nietzsche’s observation: ‘Consciousness is a surface’.1 141 CONTEMPORARY LIFE SCIENCES AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR. The latest results of the life sciences, especially neurophysiology, and their alleged implications for human freedom and autonomy are as exciting as they are controversial.2 A common view of our freedom and autonomy is jeopardised by these findings. However, that view remains in key regards Cartesian, whereas a superior account of our freedom and autonomy was already developed by Hegel, drawing upon and augmenting Kant’s. Here I characterise some central features of Hegel’s account of our freedom and autonomy, in order to show that the life sciences can be expected to provide us further insights into the biological basis of our freedom and autonomy, though they will not explain them away. These findings illustrate and corroborate key features of Hegel’s Critical epistemology. I begin by reviewing some basic features of Cartesian self-transparency (§142) and three relevant findings of contemporary life sciences (§143). These show that the model of freedom challenged by contemporary life sciences is altogether Cartesian, if also commonsense. (Common sense even today is deeply Cartesian.) I then characterise some key features of Hegel’s anti-Cartesianism (§144) and pose the central issue about human freedom raised by contemporary biologism (§145). I argue against this biologism on the basis of Hegel’s analysis of freedom as autonomy (§146) and then comment briefly on biologism in moral theory (§147).

1

Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am so Clever’, §9; Nietzsche (1967), 6.3:292. See, e.g., Singer (2002), (2003), (2006); Geyer (2004), Schockenhoff (2004), Sturma (2006), Engel & Singer (2008), Roth & Pauen (2008), Janich (2009), Zunke (2008), von der Malsburg et al (2010), Horst (2011), Caruso (2012), Falkenburg (2012). 2

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CARTESIAN SELF-TRANSPARENCY.

142.1 Sensing Strictly Speaking. As Descartes established that he infallibly knew of his own existence whenever he so much as considered whether he did, he asked himself: But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions. (Med. 2, AT 7:28; CSM, tr.)

Famously he held that, even when he dreams or even if he were utterly deceived by a powerful, cunning malign spirit, … I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called ‘sensing’ [lat.: ‘sentire’, fr.: ‘sentir’] is strictly just this, and in this restricted sense of the term it is simply thinking. (Med. 2, AT 7:29; tr. rev.)

Accordingly, any- and everything of which I am aware is exactly what it appears to me to be, and is exactly as it appears to me. Accordingly our mind consists in explicit consciousness of ‘ideas’, including feelings, images and concepts, or their combinations. As thinking beings we command infallible self-knowledge of our own existence qua thinker and our own thoughts, in this broad, inclusive sense. I shall refer to this as our Cartesian ‘self-transparency’; it is the direct progenitor of today’s views of ‘narrow’ mental content and of ‘access internalism’. According to this Cartesian self-transparency, consciousness and self-consciousness are identical, and as self-conscious beings we are in principle not causally determined by nature nor by matter. 142.2 Cartesian Freedom. Our independence as thinking beings from all natural causality is also manifest in our complete freedom of will.3 According to Descartes, our will consists in ‘freedom of decision’, which … simply consists in our ability to do or not do something (that is, to affirm or deny, to pursue or avoid); or rather, it consists simply in the fact that when the intellect puts something forward for affirmation or denial or for pursuit or avoidance, our inclinations are such that we do not feel we are determined by any external force. (Med. 4, AT 7:57; CSM, tr.)

3 ‘… I cannot complain that the will or freedom of choice which I received from God is not sufficiently extensive or perfect, since I know by experience that it is not restricted in any way. Indeed, I think it is very noteworthy that there is nothing else in me which is so perfect and so great that the possibility of a further increase in its perfection or greatness is beyond my understanding’ (Med. 4, AT 7:56–7); ‘It is only the will, or freedom of choice, which I experience within me to be so great that the idea of any greater faculty is beyond my grasp’ (Med. 4, AT 7:57); ‘… the power of willing which I received from God … is both extremely ample and also perfect of its kind’ (Med. 4, AT 7:58).

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Regarding either cognitive judgments or practical decisions, Descartes held that for any judgment, … the perception of the intellect should always precede the determination of the will. (Med. 4, AT 7:60; CSM, tr.)

This policy is revealed to Descartes by the (presumed ultimately reliable) ‘natural light’ (ibid.). One can behave otherwise, though not without error and sin (Med. 4, AT 7:58). One might query what counts as ‘internal’ and ‘external’ here, and whether our own ‘inclinations’ may be determined internally rather than externally, but the context makes clear that in proper judgment we affirm or deny, pursue or avoid according to our intellectual grasp of what is true or false, good or bad, or otherwise suspend judgment.4 Accordingly, any ‘external’ determinants must be external specifically to the intellect and to our attentive will in proper judgment, and not merely external to the composite person. 142.3 Three Steps to Decisions. To this model of the will corresponds a familiar, executive Three Step Model of decision-making: First one considers the known, relevant circumstances, evidence, principles, inclinations or desires, etc.; then one exercises one’s will by judging and resolving what do to; and finally one executes that resolve by so acting. On this model, decision-making consists in a strictly linear sequence, in which our freedom consists in a radically independent first instigation of an action; Kant states this idea: … freedom … [is] a particular kind of causality, … namely a capacity absolutely to initiate a state of affairs, and thus also a series of its consequences …. (KdrV B4735)

These basic features of Cartesianism remain commonplace today, including in contemporary philosophy. Cartesian self-transparency appears in contemporary philosophy of mind as the thesis of ‘mental content internalism’, according to which the contents of experiences, feelings or thoughts can be completely specified by reference solely to any relevant first-person and his or her awareness, without reference to that person’s surroundings, non-conscious somatic states or physiology. Radical Cartesian freedom appears in contemporary ‘libertarianism’ or ‘indeterminism’ regarding freedom of the will, according to which free human decisions or acts are not causally determined, and our actions are only caused by our deciding so to act. 4

See the paragraphs from which the two passages just quoted are taken (¶¶8–16). Kant specifies ‘freedom’ in this sense, which is neutral between the views of his predecessors and his own transcendental idealist distinction between phenomena and noumena; only thus does the Third Antinomy bear upon preCritical metaphysics. 5

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THREE FINDINGS OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE SCIENCES.

These basic features of Cartesianism are challenged by contemporary life sciences in at least three familiar ways. 143.1 ‘Blind-sight’. Due to specific kinds of aphasia there are people who can respond quickly, skilfully and accurately to requests by a researcher to hand over an object lying within reach, who plainly perceive the test objects and promptly identify, deftly grasp and hand over the relevant object, although they are unaware of their own visual perception of and action upon that object. Such aphasics visually perceive their surroundings, though without selfconscious awareness of significant regions of their visible surroundings. Consequently, human perceptual consciousness is at least to a significant extent possible without corresponding self-conscious perception. Such consciousness, however, is not merely animalic, because these aphasic patients respond to verbal requests by understanding them and executing them with great perceptual-motor facility. 143.2 Libet Experiments. Neuro-psychological experiments by Benjamin Libet and others report that specific neurological antecedents of response decisions occur up to ten seconds prior to any self-conscious, experienced decision to respond. There is a similar, though briefer time lag in veto decisions (Graves et. al., 2011, 113–5). Such time-lag purportedly shows that the self-conscious, experienced decision cannot be the actual decision made by the experimental subject, because the actual decision is already made pre-consciously and in advance. Some investigators conclude from these premises that we lack freedom of will (e.g., Wegner 2003, Cashmore 2010, Caruso 2012). 143.3 Darwinian Selection contra Morals? In the moral domain, some philosophers have argued that evolutionary theory undermines, if not refutes moral realism, because there are insufficient reasons to presume that our capacity for moral experience, responses or actions would have evolved so as to respond reliably to moral truths, facts or circumstances; and indeed, that rather the reverse would appear to be the case (e.g., Joyce 2006, 2008; Street 2006, 2008). If this line of reasoning is cogent, it would pose equally fundamental problems for most contemporary forms of moral constructivism, which aim to identify or to ‘construct’ various moral principles or norms on the basis of our reactions to one another or to morally salient circumstances or events. How shall such a basis of constructed moral norms enable us to assess the moral status of the selected basic, morally salient responses? This kind of moral constructivism appears to confront a significant problem of vicious circularity, exacerbated by the evolutionary considerations just mentioned. The common appeal to ‘reflective equilibrium’ is little help, because such equilib-

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rium is a conditio sine qua non for a tenable view, but constitutes no justificatory method because it provides no indication, nor any basis, for determining how such reflective equilibrium should be achieved (above, §79.1). 144

HEGEL’S ANTI-CARTESIANISM.

Well before Hegel’s day the basic features of Cartesianism summarised above (§142) had already been challenged by naturalists and materialists such as Hobbes and Gassendi, although they lacked convincing accounts of the human brain, how it functions and how it evolved. Nevertheless it is worth considering two contemporaneous objections to Cartesianism. 144.1 Descartes’ Self-deception. Even at its inception, mental content internalism can be shown to be the fundamental self-deception of Cartesianism, indeed within the second and sixth of Descartes’s Meditations, where Descartes poses the proper question about his own independence, but answers mistakenly. In the second Meditation Descartes considers this prospect: And yet may it not perhaps be the case that these very things which I am supposing to be nothing, because they are unknown to me, are in reality identical with the ‘I’ of which I am aware? I do not know, and for the moment I shall not argue the point, since I can make judgements only about things which are known to me. I know that I exist; the question is, what is this ‘I’ that I know? If the ‘I’ is understood strictly as we have been taking it, then it is quite certain that knowledge of it does not depend on things of whose existence I am as yet unaware. (Med. 2, AT 7:27–8; CSM, tr.)

Descartes’ clear and distinct conviction regarding his cognitive independence from whatever is unconscious or unknown to himself indicates Descartes’ commitment (in this case) to mental content internalism, as specified earlier (§142.2). It also indicates his commitment to justificatory internalism, the thesis that any and all factors which bear upon the justificatory status of one’s beliefs, claims or judgments are such that one is aware of them, or can readily become aware of them by self-conscious reflection. Descartes’ judgments about his cognitive independence and his commitment to justificatory internalism do not at all count as knowledge because – on his own terms – Descartes erred about both. His error in this regard is most apparent in Meditation 6, where he argues as follows: First, I know that everything which I clearly and distinctly understand is capable of being created by God so as to correspond exactly with my understanding of it. Hence the fact that I can clearly and distinctly understand one thing apart from another is enough to make me certain that the two things are distinct, since they are capable of being separated, at least by God. … Thus, simply from the fact that I know that I exist, and that at the same time I notice that obvi-

477 ously nothing else belongs to my nature or essence except that I am a thinking being, I rightly conclude that my essence consists entirely in my being a thinking thing. … because on the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, insofar as I am merely a thinking thing and not an extended thing, and because on the other hand I have a distinct idea of a body, insofar as it is merely an extended thing and not a thinking thing, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it. (Med. 6, AT 7:78; tr. rev.)

Mind-body dualism does not follow validly from these premises (regardless of soundness). Granting that God ‘can’ create the human body and the human soul or mind as two entirely distinct, mutually independent substances, this does not imply that God did in fact so create them as entirely distinct, mutually independent substances; nor does it imply that God does make them distinct and mutually independent substances, only one of which – the extended body – is perishable and perishes when a person dies. The crucial modal term ‘can’ in the final clause of the quoted passage is equivocal between ‘can in principle’ – though counter-factually – and ‘can in fact’. Descartes seeks to prove the latter, but at most he only argued for the former. Compounding this error is his claim to notice that ‘obviously nothing else’ belongs to his nature than thinking, whereas his cautions about judgment in Meditation 4 would caution that the most Descartes can claim is instead that nothing else ‘obviously’ belongs to his nature – though for all that, his apparently transparent thinking self may well in fact be a manifestation of his constitutively ensouled body, or of his constitutively embodied mindedness. Plainly, the prospect of an mauvais genie instilled neither sufficient judgmental caution nor cognitive modesty into Descartes’ meditating. In the Principles of Philosophy (1:60) Descartes claims that if God can make two substances distinct and independent then they are really distinct, and not merely modally or conceptually distinct, even if they form a unity, such as, centrally, the mind and body of any one human being. Here, too, what God ‘can’ do is insufficient for specifying what he did or shall do (quite aside from Descartes’s pronounced divine voluntarism); on this crucial point Descartes’ views are neither clear nor distinct. Indeed, Descartes’s views about the essential distinction between mind and body and the unity of any human being as a person, both in the Meditations and in the Principles, are but a hair’s breadth removed from Spinoza’s modal distinction between the intellectual and the extended attributes of the one substance: At best, Descartes’s analysis can distinguish between mental (thinking, non-extended) and physical (extended, non-thinking) attributes, though not between numerically distinct mental and physical substances. This is because Descartes’s analysis suffices to distinguish between his concepts of ‘mind’ and of ‘body’, but not to distinguish between their objects, i.e., between any mental substance and any

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physical substance, in part because Descartes’s analysis does not suffice to show that either of his concepts of mind or of body are adequate or complete. That he conceives himself to be nothing but a thinking being (as quoted above) does not entail that he is nothing but a thinking being. In this paradigmatic instance, that is the fundamental self-deception of Descartes’s purported self-transparency. (Great shades of Frege’s distinctions between sense, reference and object!) Even for purely a priori concepts, Descartes neglected the key questions raised by Kant and pursued more thoroughly by Hegel of whether we are able to use such concepts in justifiable cognitive judgments, and if so, how and within what domain(s)? Contemporary Cartesians, too, neglect these key questions by analysing conceptual intension yet ignoring whether or how to refer any such intension to any relevant, localised particulars.6 I have revisited this familiar text once again, pointedly, to make clear that at the very outset of the Cartesian tradition, which persists into the present within mainstream Anglophone philosophy, that conceptual analysis alone cannot suffice for epistemology, theory of action, philosophy of mind nor philosophy of language. Carnap (1950a, 1–18) stressed this insufficiency, and not only for semantics, by distinguishing between conceptual analysis and conceptual explication, though to little avail, despite Wick (1951) having highlighted it (above, §§89.3, 102). Kant was the first philosopher to highlight the insufficiency of mere conceptual analysis for non-formal domains, by distinguishing his specifically transcendental logic from general logic, and by distinguishing between conceptual analysis and conceptual explication. Hegel further developed Kant’s methodological and substantive Anti-Cartesianism. 144.2 Cartesian Learning? A second objection to Cartesianism concerns identifying consciousness and self-consciousness (apperception), and selfconsciousness with the ‘I’ or with one’s ‘self’. Consider the question, Can Cartesians learn? Famously Meno confronted Socrates with this paradox: … how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not at all know? Of everything you do not know, what will you propose as the subject of your enquiry? And if you happen upon what you seek, how will you ever know that it is what you did not know? (Plato, Meno 80d)

If indeed we consist merely in Cartesian self-transparency, then this paradox holds. Only because we can understand something incompletely, partially, can we learn more new information about it. The phenomenon of partial understanding and its anti-Cartesian implications have been emphasised by Burge (1979), and previously by Polanyi (1966), though they are already cen6 ‘Cartesianism’ results from fixation upon the mauvais genie and justificatory infallibilism. Descartes was no such Cartesian; when we drop that fixation, he has much of interest to say about human embodiment (Ferrini 2015) and intentionality (Moran 2014).

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tral to Hegel’s analysis of the self-critical structure and capacity of our consciousness of objects (above, §§62, 63, 88.2). An important implication of that account can be highlighted briefly: There is more to each of us qua conscious beings than our explicit self-conscious awareness (and whatever we are explicitly aware of). For example, when I consider, think through and solve a problem, I become aware of the solution as such only as I finally grasp it. However, whilst pondering and thinking the problem through, though I may be expressly aware of many relevant considerations, much of my own solving of the problem remains unconscious. Nevertheless, I think the problem through and I solve it, even though only retrospectively can I recount – even to myself – how I solved it or what considerations proved to be relevant, and which weren’t. In this regard I am no exception; this example has parallels across the range of intelligent human activities. (Musicians, athletes, artisans and martial artists exhibit such embodied intelligence, and many know of it too.) Hegel discussed the Meno Paradox in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and mentions the Platonic mythology of recollecting what one once knew. Hegel stressed that our comprehension of any solution to a problem is our own cognitive achievement (Hegel, VGP, MM 18:466–7, 19:44–5). Likewise our self-knowledge is a cognitive achievement; we are not automatically selftransparent. The progress from the preconscious to nascent consciousness, and from nascent consciousness to the expressly known and comprehended, is repeated throughout Hegel’s philosophy, and not only in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit.7 By itself this is sufficient reason not to identify ourselves with the self-transparent surface of our own explicit self-consciousness. We human beings are not automatically self-conscious. Like Leibniz and Kant, Hegel too distinguished between ‘perception’ as (sheer) sensory awareness of our surroundings and ‘apperception’ as our self-conscious awareness of ourselves and of what we experience.8 Like Kant, Hegel too stressed that we are only able to achieve self-consciousness insofar as we perceive our surroundings, and on that basis distinguish ourselves from that which we perceive around us (above, §§65–70). Kant and Hegel lacked information about the sorts of perceptual aphasia mentioned above (§143.1). However, the empirical finding that people who suffer such aphasia can perceive their surroundings without self-conscious awareness of significant portions of their visual field is neatly accommodated by their views, though not at all by Cartesianism. In connection with freedom of the will (below,§145), it is important to recall that those who suffer such aphasia nevertheless respond effectively, skilfully and rationally to an investigator’s requests for various items within 7 8

Cf. Hegel, MM 2:382–3, 5:55–6, 10:131, 19:42–48, 20:84, Rph §144Z. Hegel does not, of course, use this terminology; see Westphal (1998a), §6.5.

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that person’s reach. Their actions are rational, even without full perceptual self-consciousness. Whilst rejecting reductionism (above, §§122–126), Hegel argued en detail that necessarily spirit is embodied, also in the case of each individual person (Wolff 1992, 118–55; above, §68). According to Hegel’s view, our consciousness and self-consciousness are based in our neurophysiology, which Hegel examined in detail under the heading ‘Anthropology’, in connection with relevant contemporaneous science.9 I have highlighted the distinction between perception and apperception, and the anthropological basis of rational thought and action, to suggest the plausibility of Hegel’s view that we are able to guide our own thought and action on the basis of implicit concepts and principles. To this point I return below (§146). 145

BIOLOGISM TODAY?

145.1 Today’s Biologism. Even today the thesis of biologism – that human actions are altogether causally determined by our biology – is vigorously asserted. For example, the biologist Anthony R. Cashmore, member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), contends: … the simple but crucial point [is] that any action, as ‘free’ as it may appear, simply reflects the genetics of the organism and the environmental history, right up to some fraction of a microsecond before any action. […] there is a trinity of forces – genes, environment, and stochasticism (GES) – that governs all of biology including behavior, with the stochastic component referring to the inherent uncertainty of the physical properties of matter. (Cashmore 2010, 4500)

This refined formulation of the thesis of biologism differs in only one regard from the deterministic thesis regarding human behaviour which Hegel criticised in 1807 in connection with the psychological explanation of individual actions. According to psychological determinism, any person’s actions are completely explicable on the basis of his or her ‘several capacities, inclinations and passions’ (PhdG 9:169.17/¶303), together with his or her circumstances, including his or her ‘situation, habits, customs, religion etc.’ (PhdG 9: 169.39/¶305). In this connection note first that citing causes of individual actions does not suffice to explain them deterministically! Deterministic explanation requires providing a complete, sufficient, exclusively causal explanation of any individual action. To such contentions Hegel quite rightly replied that, although the kinds of factors just mentioned are necessary (PhdG 9: 170.15–21/¶306), they are not sufficient to explain causally and deterministi9

Hegel, Enz. §§388–412, Hegel (1992); cf. Ferrini (2009a–c), Westphal (2009b).

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cally any person or his or her actions. In a striking passage Hegel designates a representative person as an ‘individuality’ (Individualität) and argues thus: However, this individuality just is this: equally well to be the universal and so in a calm, immediate way to blend into the established universalities, customs, habits, etc. and to accord with them, as also to set him- or herself against them and instead to invert them – or instead in his or her singularity to relate to them utterly indifferently, neither allowing them to affect him- or herself, nor to act against them. What shall have an influence on the individuality and which influence it shall have – which actually is redundant – thus depends solely upon the individuality him- or herself; in this way this individuality has become this particular individuality, which is to say, he or she has already become this individuality. (PhdG, 9:170.6–15/¶306)10

Accordingly, any person determines, i.e., decides for him- or herself how to act in response to his or her present circumstances and considerations. Like other determinists, Cashmore (2010, 4502) replies that neither freedom nor responsibility can consist in mere statistical contingency. Whilst true, this does not determine (i.e., specify) whether or to what extent human decisions reduce to merely stochastic series of events. Here again the neurobiological findings by Brembs (above, §138.4) are relevant. His results reveal forms of behaviour which cannot be reduced to mere stochastic sequences, because they reveal goal-directed processes of learning based upon sensory reafference, by which an organism distinguishes those sensations resulting from its own bodily motions and those occasioned by the its surroundings (Brembs 2011, 936). This feedback loop of sensory reafference is also fundamental to human actions, because executing any action requires monitoring how the world responds to our actions (Brembs 2011, 936). Contra the simple linear Three Step Model of human decision and action (above §142.2), our corporeal actions are temporally and spatially extended executions, which we guide by monitoring, and as needed modifying or halting them. 145.2 Reconsidering Libet’s Experiments. With these preparations, reconsider the Libet Experiments. We may accept – provisionally – the finding that the neurological antecedents of any pressing of a button, and likewise those of 10

„Diese Individualität aber ist gerade dies, ebensowohl das Allgemeine zu sein und daher auf eine ruhige unmittelbare Weise mit dem vorhandenen Allgemeinen, den Sitten, Gewohnheiten usf. zusammenzufließen und ihnen gemäß zu werden, als sich entgegengesetzt gegen sie zu verhalten und sie vielmehr zu verkehren – sowie gegen sie in ihrer Einzelheit ganz gleichgültig sich zu verhalten, sie nicht auf sich einwirken zu lassen und nicht gegen sie tätig zu sein. Was auf die Individualität Einfluß und welchen Einfluß es haben soll – was eigentlich gleichbedeutend ist –, hängt darum nur von der Individualität selbst ab; dadurch ist diese Individualität diese bestimmte geworden, heißt nichts anderes als: sie ist dies schon gewesen“.

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any decision about which button to press, precede in time any research subject’s explicit awareness of his or her decision and action. However, neither this temporal precedence, nor the (purportedly) reliable prediction based upon those neurological antecedents of which button a research subject shall press, demonstrate that either the selection of which button to depress or the act of pressing that button occur without the experimental subject’s intentions: Only due to information and instructions from the researcher does the research subject react at all to the illuminating of a lamp as an occasioning signal to depress one or another button. There is simply no experimental evidence which would neurologically explain away this basic intention, upon which depends the entire experimental design. To the contrary, the neurological antecedents to any selection and depression of a designated button only occur on the basis of the research subject’s prior, standing intention to coöperate by executing the researcher’s instructions (Horgan 2011, 163–8). In connection with these kinds of neurological investigations of human decision and action we can well expect a result similar to what occurred regarding presumed genetic determinism (Keller 2002, Noble 2016): that the actual neurological processes which make possible our decisions and actions will prove to be much more complex and intricate than is consistent with deterministic claims. Once feedback loops enter our understanding of decision and action (§145.1), then the linear Three Step Model of decision and execution (§142.2), which is fundamental to determinist claims about the will, must be rescinded. As noted (§144.2), human thought does not consist simply in what we self-consciously think (apperceive). Like Descartes, Libet et alia simply assume that any free decision must be a completely self-conscious, utterly self-transparent event. In this regard, Descartes, Libet and rather too much Cartesian commonsense – or rather: common Cartesian nonsense – are mistaken. 145.3 Hegel’s Incisive Anticipations. These remarks may appear distant from Hegel’s philosophy, though they are not. Like others who take the practical syllogism seriously – above all, Aristotle and Kant – Hegel recognised that our actions are complex, insofar as we typically execute in one and the same action several intentions which differ in their generality or specificity, even though we often expressly attend only to one or a few of our several intentions. In particular, Hegel distinguished expressly between the purpose (Vorsatz) and the intention (Absicht) of an action (Rph §119): The purpose of an action is whatever is directly effected by acting; for example, grasping and moving my pen. The intention is the end one aims to achieve through executing that purpose; for example, signing a cheque. This action may involve several more, and more general intentions; for example: to pay my rent on time;

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by so doing, to support my family; to respect my landlord, with whom I am on good personal terms; to maintain my own credibility and integrity; to contribute my part to renovating my neighbourhood; by so doing to support, indirectly, the political prospects of my local district representative, etc.. All of these things I can do at once, and I can do them all intentionally, even though I may only expressly (self-consciously) think of a few of them whilst signing my cheque, which I know to be my rent payment. Hegel’s distinction between the purpose and the intention(s) of any human action strongly indicates that our actions cannot be reduced simply to bodily behaviour. In this connection two important basic points regarding causal explanation and reductionism should be noted. 145.4 Human Behaviour and its Contributing Causes. Obviously in everyday life we can identify various factors in connection with human actions which count as occasioning, or even contributing causes of a particular action, albeit in an informal, imprecise sense. Such commonsense psychology, however correct or faultless it may be within its everyday context, is not at all sufficient for causal-deterministic explanation of any human action, which occurs on the basis of many and various factors, most of which are simply neglected in everyday contexts. Any deterministic causal explanation requires (1) a causally closed system, together with (2) the identification of actual, occurrent efficient causes which are jointly sufficient to produce the event in question – which Modern philosophers designated the total sufficient cause of an event, and (3) a system which is relevantly insensitive to variations in its initial conditions. Beginning in the 1960's physicists recognised that many relatively simple mechanical systems satisfying Newton’s laws are, for strictly mathematical reasons (as contrasted to measurement errors, etc.), behave chaotically (Lighthill 1986; Lichtenberg & Lieberman 1983). Determinism about human behaviour presupposes a highly simplified mechanical model of causation which does not apply universally even within macro-scale physical mechanics! This exposes one fundamental self-deception of the exponents of determinism regarding human action. Any deterministic causal explanation requires precise appeal to the relevant causal laws and the causal characteristics of the relevant causal factors (contributing causes), and it requires a causally closed system! None of us is a causally closed system, and in everyday contexts no one has this kind or extent of information about any human action to explain it causally, rather than casually, i.e., informally, very incompletely. In everyday life such extensive causal information would be superfluous distraction. In everyday contexts, even if we do identify relevant occasioning causes of someone’s action, we know far too little to rule out on causal grounds that the person in ques-

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tion freely resolved to act as s/he did. Commonsense psychology is altogether insufficient for causal explanation of any human action; only sufficient causal explanations of actions – all human actions – suffices for causal determinism about human behaviour. In this regard it is important to stress that causal description is insufficient for causal ascription – that is, for causal predication – and that causal ascription, in turn, does not suffice for causal knowledge, that is, for sufficiently justified causal ascription. Because causal descriptions are not merely formal, but rather are substantive claims – they are expressed by synthetic, not by analytic statements; causal ascription requires localising the putative, ascribed (attributed) causal factors (events or objects) within space and time. Only such spatio-temporal localisation suffices for predication, that is, for ascription or attribution, in contrast to empty or ambiguous (non-referring or indefinite) expressions. That is a crucial finding of Kant’s semantics of singular, specifically cognitive reference, which Hegel recognised and for which he argued (soundly, I submit) in ‘Sense Certainty’, independently of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, and which Hegel further used regarding causal judgment and explanation in ‘Force and Understanding’ and in ‘Reason Observing Nature’ in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. One consequence of their semantics of singular cognitive reference is that the causal principle, according to which any spatio-temporal event has a (set of) sufficient spatio-temporal cause(s), is a legitimate, necessary presupposition and principle regulating any and every causal inquiry. However, causal knowledge we obtain only as a result of completed, successful causal explanation of any particular event (or class of events). Only such explanations provide sufficient cognitive justification of causal ascriptions (that is, of specific, accurate, justified causal predications), which alone count as causal knowledge.11 Accordingly, the causal principle, that any spatio-temporal event has a (set of) sufficient spatio-temporal cause(s), as such is not a cognitively justified causal law and does not itself count as causal knowledge. Accordingly, the causal principle cannot be assumed as a known major premiss in putative explanations of human behaviour, nor in the assertion that human behaviour ‘must be’ causally determined somehow or other. Empirical psychology, especially in regard to human behaviour, simply cannot provide deterministic causal explanations. NB: This is an observation of a fact. It is not a criticism of empirical psychology; it is criticism of philosophical abuses of allegedly empirical psychology. Contemporary so-called ‘causal’ theories of the mind are far too vague to succeed even as causal descriptions of the relevant ‘mental’ 11

Cf. Westphal (2015a). The present point is a direct corollary to views Yeomans (2011) rightly ascribes to Hegel.

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phenomena, nor of their putative components or occasioning causal factors; they certainly do not suffice for causal ascription to any particular action or ‘mental’ event, nor to any of its alleged neurological basis or its component, contributing factors. Consequently, contemporary causal ‘theories’ of mind, action or language do not count as, and do not suffice for, causal judgments, because neither their truth values nor their (putative) cognitive justifications can be determined (as contrasted to merely alleged), because not even their putative referents can be localised in any specific, determinate way so as to be identified and known to be contributing causes. In sum, contemporary ‘causal theories’ of mind (etc.), despite their wide-spread popularity amongst self-styled scientific philosophers, are altogether pseudo-scientific. This is scientism, not scientific philosophy. (For specifics, see Westphal 2016b). The view asserted by Cashmore (above, §145.1) is a highly speculative claim about the sufficiency of a causal-explanatory natural science of human behaviour which has yet to be developed, which is supposed to demonstrate that each and every human action can be fully explained solely by citing causal factors in a person’s environment, genetics and the stochastic characteristics of his or her material constitution. To what extent human behaviour can be explained causally or deterministically we can learn only by completing this research programme. For now note that careful methodological assessment of the ‘Libet Experiments’ (Radder & Meynen 2013) shows that these experiments are entirely insufficient to rule out or explain away, free decisions on the part of any research subject.12 For the following reasons, despite what some may say, we are in no position today to conceive any such putative, causally-deterministic science of human behaviour. 145.5 Explaining Human Behaviour Causally. To explain human behaviour causally requires either explaining or explaining away propositional contents. For good reason Descartes distinguished between the ‘formal’ reality and the ‘objective’ reality of any idea: ‘formally’ considered, an idea is some actual state of mind (whether occurrent or dispositional) which represents something. This representational character or capacity of any idea – what it represents and how it represents it to be, in sum, its content – is its ‘objective’ reality (Med. 3, AT 7:40). Although Descartes’ dualism of mental and physical substances is highly dubious, his aspectual dualism of the formal and the objective reality of ideas (or of mental content more generally) is crucial (Moran 2014), also as regards semantic counters (inscriptions, sign designs, symbol strings). We still do not properly and fully understand how exactly the physical and the semantic characteristics of any sign or symbol relate; much 12

On the methodological issues in in this topic see Kaplan & Craver (2011), Horst (2011), Falkenburg (2012).

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less do we have any fully physical, causally sufficiently explanation of any semantic content, whether it be the content of a written text (e.g., an individual sentence, such as this series of marks which you, dear reader, are now – remarkably – reading and understanding) or a verbal expression or a neurological activation. Contemporary brain imaging techniques or neuro-surgical operations provide fascinating information about local brain activations, but altogether no information about how those activations are linked with any specific mental or semantic content(s). Even today’s neuro-sciences, with all of their truly exciting advances and discoveries, provide at most correlations between neurological states formally regarded and thoughts or experiences objectively regarded, qua representings – which still today can only be regarded first-person by the research subject or patient him- or herself. Quite simply: We still cannot sufficiently explain – causally or otherwise – exactly what distinguishes a mere spot like this: › . ‹ from a logical conjunction, a mathematical symbol for multiplication, a punctuation mark, a typographical error or a mere printing blunder. These distinctions require recourse to specific intelligent and intelligible uses of a dot, which themselves are only determinate – and specifiable – within specific contexts of usage, including their framework principles and linguistic rules. (These are central to Toulmin’s (1949) defence of synthetic necessary truths.) Causal covariance alone does not suffice for the constitution, nor for the determination (specification, interpretation or understanding) of semantic contents; causal covariance alone does not suffice to constitute any proper name. Contemporary empiricists still have not learnt this basic lesson, although it is corroborated, indeed demonstrated, through strictly internal critique of Book I of Hume’s Treatise; Hegel demonstrated it in 1807.13 In ‘Sense Certainty’ Hegel states a maximally extensional specification of a ‘universal’, which matches exactly Hume’s account of ‘abstract idea’.14 By strictly internal critique of this account of universals Hegel demonstrates that our conceptions of ‘space’ and of ‘time’ are determinable quantitative conceptions, which we can determine (specify) arbitrarily, and which we determine (specify) intelligently – not merely according to a Humean habit or custom – when designating and comprehending any spatio-temporal individual we happen upon and identify. Hume’s ‘copy theory’ of sensory impressions and ideas, together with his three (alleged) laws of psychological association, can at most account only for determinate, specific conceptions (classifications, 13 Cf. Dretske’s (1981, 27–39) account of why causal relations do not suffice for information relations; information relations are necessary (if not sufficient) for semantic content. The common tendency to treat Dretske’s information-theoretic epistemology as a generic reliability theory is a serious, symptomatic mistake. 14 PhdG, 9:65.5–13/¶96; cf. Hume, T 1.1.7.18/SBN 25.

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intension) of sensed qualities, though not at all for merely determinable conceptions, such as ‘space’ and ‘time’.15 Hume recognised, of course, that we do use determinable, linguistically mediated conceptions. Within Hume’s philosophy of mind, only our human imagination can account for determinable conceptions (or for language). However, for this capacity and activity of our imagination Hume provides altogether no empiricist account; neither does he provide an empiricist account of how any sensory idea within any ‘bundle of perceptions’ which is (purportedly) a human mind can function as a word, as a linguistic tag. Hume’s Copy Theory and his three stated laws of association are altogether too vague and imprecise to found, to constitute, to determine or to specify any such semantic content or relation whatsoever (Westphal 2013a). That even the simplest use of signs or symbols requires our intelligent capacity of imagination to comprehend the sign or symbol and whatever it designates or symbolises is an important, basic point Hegel rightly and repeatedly stressed in his Anthropology (Enz. §§379–84, 457–60).16 145.6 Earning Causal Claims Legitimately. Talk is cheap, and causal talk is especially cheap. Causal knowledge must be earned, and can be earned only by actual causal explanation of any specific phenomenon. Causal determinism is even more demanding, for it can be earned only by complete, sufficient, exclusively causal explanation of a specific phenomenon. Holm Tetens (2013) notes that we have no ‘master argument’ demonstrating that human freedom of thought and action are not ultimately undermined or explained away by natural causal determinism. However, such an argument can only be devised and assessed if we properly pose the problem to be addressed. Despite the confidence of legions of determinists, we still have no clear, specific formulation of the problem. The biological determinism discussed above (§145.1) is an important research programme. However, do not mistake a programme of research for established, justified, known results! With these points in view, we may now consider freedom as our rational autonomy. A Leitmotiv here is that, even if we had such an anti-deterministic ‘master argument’, its assessment and use would require exercise of our rational autonomy, without which there is no cognition via argument, evidence or proof.

15 Hume’s principles of psychological association do not count as ‘laws’ because they are much to imprecise to exclude anything as violations or exceptions. Semantic contents or relations are woefully under-specified by his principles of association (qualitative similarity, temporal or spatial contiguity, and 1:1 correlation); hence his principles do not suffice to specify any semantic content or relation. 16 On the many explanatory gaps regarding mental phenomena, see Horst (2011), Falkenburg (2012), esp. 351–66.

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146

FREEDOM AS AUTONOMY.

Properly understanding freedom as autonomy requires recalling three closely related points, stressed by Kant’s Critical philosophy (above, §§2, 3). 146.1 Exercising judgment is the exercise of one’s own powers of judgment. Rational judgment is autonomous insofar as we are each able to – and do – pass our own judgment, rather than simply adopting others’ judgments, recommendations, advice or commands. 146.2 The exercise of judgment is normatively, and not merely causally, constituted. Exercising one’s own judgment is autonomous insofar as it involves regulating one’s own thought and judgment in identifying and considering the proper assessment of relevant methods, evidence and principles of reasoning and their justificatory use. This is literally auto-nomy: the self-regulation of one’s own thinking and judging in view of appropriate grounds of evidence and grounds of proof, including methods, principles and grounds of rational justification. This second aspect of autonomy shows that rational judgment is autonomous with regard to merely causal processes or events of our neuro-physiopsychology. That our capacity to judge and our exercise of our capacity to judge is based in and enabled by our neuro-physio-psychology Hegel does not deny; to the contrary, this is precisely why he sought to integrate Kant’s functionalist cognitive architecture with Aristotelian philosophy of the human soul. However, the normative conditions of rational judgment can be neither explicated nor explained merely causally. If we assume that judging, understood as a physiological or psychological process, is a causal process, this process counts as exercising judgment only insofar as it responds appropriately to normative considerations and criteria, and not simply to its causal antecedents as such. A judgment is a conclusion reached by assessing its justifying grounds and principles of inference or evaluation; it is not merely an effect of whatever causes may correspond to those grounds or principles, or to their recognition by us as relevant justifying grounds or principles. Insofar as whatever processes enable or generate justification are causal processes, they count as justificatory processes, not because of their causal structure, but because they satisfy sufficient normative conditions which specify or constitute appropriate functioning, appropriate identification and assessment of justificatorily relevant considerations and appropriate drawing of conclusions, so as to support or to constitute rational justification (cognitive or practical).17 17

That justificatory norms cannot be explicated merely causally corresponds to Dretske’s (1981, 27–39) finding that information relations cannot be explicated merely causally. These correspond in part because norms of rational justification involve semantic or propositional contents, which themselves require or involve information relations.

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146.3 The exercise of judgment is required for responsible action. Acting responsibly, in contrast to merely behaving, is only possible through (actual or potential) exercise of judgment, because acting responsibly is based upon justificatory grounds, in contrast to mere excuses or exculpations. Acting responsibly involves autonomy of judgment in ways which highlight the spontaneity of rational judgment, which is expressed in genuine judgment in this way: We act responsibly only insofar as we rightly claim to have sufficient justifying grounds to act as we do. This holds too for those cases in which we act out of habit or inclination, though only insofar as we judge that, on the present occasion, acting on that habit or inclination is appropriate and permissible. This point likewise holds for those cases in which we act very rapidly, without time to reflect expressly about how best to act: our acting responsibly in such cases requires that we can exercise appropriate judgment about our actions, and would do so if circumstances permitted and required us to. Otherwise we relinquish rational considerations or deliberations and absent ourselves from what Sellars (1963, 169) called ‘the space of reasons’. In such cases, McDowell (1994, 13) rightly notes, we can only fabricate for ourselves excuses or exculpations, though no justification of our behaviour. This kind of analysis of freedom as the autonomy of our rational power of judgment is developed by Hegel in his explication of persons as ‘individualities’ (above, §145.1) and also in the Introduction to his Philosophical Outlines of Justice (Rph §§5–7), where he restates in his own fashion Kant’s ‘Incorporation Thesis’, the view that no inclination becomes a motive in any human action, unless and until it is incorporated into an agent’s judgment about how it is permissible and appropriate to act on that occasion (Vieweg 2012, 57–93). This analysis of the autonomy of judgment corresponds to Hegel’s fallibilist account of rational justification in non-formal, substantive domains of knowledge and action (including morals, both ethics and justice). Fallibilist accounts of rational justification, and especially Hegel’s, centrally involve the feedback loop of one’s own critical self-assessment, and also the feedback loop of our constructive mutual assessment of each other’s judgments and actions. Our freedom and autonomy centrally involve, indeed they centrally consist in, the self-regulation of our own thinking, judging and acting, including our self-regulation in these regards as we execute any action and, if need be, revise, modify or curtail our action. A relevantly similar model of freedom as action-control has been advocated recently by some cognitive psychologists (Mele 2009; Baumeister et al. 2011).18 In view of contemporary biological sciences, and especially medicine, it has been noted that to various extents and for various periods of time our autonomy can be limited by various kinds 18

Stating Hegel’s view in terms of ‘judgment’ does not limit his view to logic of judgment(s).

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of illness. In these cases, including cases of psychiatric disorder, the autonomy of the patient remains nevertheless a crucial benchmark, or even a goal, of proper treatment.19 147

IS MORALITY UNDERMINED BY CONTEMPORARY DARWINISM?

As noted above (§143.3), there is continuing discussion of whether, or the extent to which ethology or human evolution undermine morality. Moral realists have, of course, replied to Darwinian criticisms of moral theory.20 Objections to moral realism based upon ethology or Darwinian evolutionary theory address what amounts to a moral sense theory, according to which we have some more or less natural capacity to sense or to perceive moral facts or morally relevant circumstances. Such objections would appear equally to address contemporary forms of moral constructivism which are based upon various subjective responses to morally salient circumstances, or which link the identification or justification of moral principles to human motivation (whether individually or collectively). Comparative ethology has some rather frightening lessons regarding human motivation and affective responses, insofar as many of humanity’s most inhumane episodes have vivid parallels in well-documented unsavoury chapters of chimpanzee behaviour, such as genocide (Diamond 2006; Mitani, Watts & Amsler, 2010). These findings are especially unwelcome news for moral theories which link the identification or the justification of moral precepts, principles or practices to our motivation, to our moral sensibilities or to our morally salient responses (or lack thereof). However, debates about motivation, about subjective responses or about moral realism and its contemporary anti-realist or irrealist alternatives are not the central issues, because the strict objectivity of fundamental moral norms and institutions can be justified without any appeal, pro or contra, to those debates! This is a central finding of the radical reinterpretation and reconstruction of natural law theory inaugurated by Hume and further developed by Rousseau, Kant and Hegel (Westphal 2013b, 2016a). The key insight of this approach is Hume’s observation: Though the rules of justice be artificial, they are not arbitrary. Nor is the expression improper to call them Laws of Nature, if by natural we understand … what is inseparable from the species. (Hume T 3.2.1.19/SBN 484)

Natural law purports that basic, legitimate (rationally justifiable) moral principles are independent of conventions, they are non-arbitrary and invariant. 19

Cf. Spitz (1996), Schild (1996), (2001); Herman (1998), O’Neill (2002), Manson & O’Neill (2007). Cf. Copp (2008), Caruthers & James (2008), Lillehammer (2010), Wielenberg (2010), Brosnan (2011), Skarsaune (2011); cf. Burghardt (2009), Rose (2009). 20

491

Basic moral principles are the sufficient minimum basic principles and institutions which we require – as the finite, mutually interdependent rational agents we are – in order to be able to act at all under conditions of relative regional population density and consequent relative scarcity of goods, whereby these principles and institutions are ones for which each of us can provide any and all others with sufficient justifying reasons. This is a complex claim, central to an uncommon form of natural law constructivism, which cannot be detailed here. For present purposes it suffices to note that the basis of this subtle and illuminating form of moral constructivism lies neither in our subjective responses of whatever kind (as typifies most contemporary forms of moral constructivism), nor in any form of moral realism, nor in any account of human motivation, but rather in the basic conditions of our capacities to act, and our converse incapacities as finite, mutually interdependent rational agents, which Kant designated ‘practical anthropology’ (TL §45), and which Hegel detailed in his account of Sittlichkeit (‘ethical life’; Rph §§142–340). The basic facts about humanity, about society and about our finite though global context of action, required by and pertaining to this form of natural law constructivism, have long been sufficiently known to us, regardless of any implications of ethology or evolutionary theory for human morality. 148

CONCLUSION.

We may expect to hear further declarations of deterministic biologism. However, Hegel’s analysis of our rational autonomy should encourage us to expect from the life sciences further insights into the biological basis of human freedom and action.21 We have much to look forward to! Hegel’s philosophical semantics and Critical account of rational judgment are crucial to taking proper philosophical account of what we learn from continuing scientific inquires. Carefully explicating the content or intension of philosophical concepts and principles is crucial, yet not sufficient: we must also examine and specify the proper use of these concepts and principles within their intended domains, and the proper cognitive significance of actual instances of such cognitive judgments: the scope and significance of established knowledge. Too much contemporary analytical philosophy mistakes mere intension (meaning, assertion) for substantive cognitive claims, thus reducing the field to a talking shop (Westphal 2016b, 2017f). This cannot continue; if we do not bring our philosophical houses into responsible order, we cannot justly protest if instead others decide to close them down. (When this last occurred in 21

See, e.g., Eibl-Eibesfeldt (2004), deWaal (2006), Krebs (2008), DeScioli & Kurzban (2009), Baumeister et al (2010), de Boer (2011), Laland & Brown (2011).

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529 C.E., it required nearly a millennium to begin repairs.) Doubtless some will protest that these broadly naturalistic considerations miss ‘the’ philosophical point of the issues. To the contrary, the present study has argued in systematic, historical and textual detail that the presumption that ‘the’ philosophical issues are merely or purely conceptual has no credible basis in philosophical method, philosophical theory, philosophical history nor the roles of philosophy within or in regard to other forms of inquiry. It is exactly in this regard that Hegel refurbished Kant’s Critical philosophy without its purely a priori, Transcendental Idealist aspirations. Hegel thus refurbished Aristotle’s meta ta physica semantically, as the explication, specification and evaluation of synthetic necessary truths and their proper cognitive use, rooted in actual sciences of nature and of society (in his day, political economy). Today’s viable philosophical options all lie in varieties of multidisciplinary inquiry, which require disciplined inquiry – of several kinds. Philosophising responsibly requires much more extensive and careful homework, and much less speedy compilation of ‘published results’. Many may protest, but splendid results within history and philosophy of science devoted to making proper, sound philosophical sense of actual sciences and its actual history show that such multi-disciplinary philosophy is humanly possible, and splendidly informative! Kant’s Critical philosophy is separable from his Transcendental Idealism, and results in a cogent form of philosophical semantics and Critique of rational judgment with cogent resources for resolving stubborn philosophical issues. Critical philosophy is overdue for serious attention. The standard philosophical alternatives are bankrupt. Hegel’s philosophical semantics, semantics of singular cognitive reference, use of strictly internal critique and determinate negation, coupled with his comprehensive grasp of philosophical and intellectual history, used for cogent conceptual explication, suffice to identify and to justify very significant philosophical results. Critical philosophy both requires and affords a genuinely changed manner of thinking. Hegel’s Critical methods can be used by much more finite mortals than he, as I have sought to exhibit. Everything must indeed be made as simple as possible, though no simpler! We have for too long, in epistemology and in many other domains, thwarted our aspirations, our obligations and our efforts with over-simplifications. If this study contributes to rectifying our myriad misunderstandings of robust, Critical pragmatic realism, to rehabilitating Hegel’s philosophical credentials or to making his texts and issues more interesting or accessible to curious philosophers, it has succeeded. Thank you for allowing my attempt! Now what do you think? And how well does your judgment withstand critical scrutiny?

CHAPTER 22

APPENDIX 149

A SNAPSHOT FROM LONDON OF PHILOSOPHY CIRCA 1880.

In its first decade, Mind published numerous reports on the state of the art in philosophy and psychology (including physiology, comparative ethology etc.) in Europe and North America. These reports are listed in two groups: (1.) by region (complete), (2.) by field, topic or period (selected).1 Journal: Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy. Founding Editor: George Croom ROBERTSON , Professor of Mind and Logic, University College, London. First issue: January 1876. Reports: (Capitalised NAMES indicate contributing authors.) 1. By Region: Cambridge, Philosophy at (H. SIDGWICK), 1.2 (1876):235–246. Dublin, Philosophy at (W.H.S. MONCK), 1.3 (1876):382–392. Dutch Universities, Philosophy in the (J.P.N. LAND) 3.9 (1878):87–104. France, Philosophy in (Th. RIBOT), 2.7 (1877):366–386. Germany, Visual Perception, The Question of, in (J. SULLY), 3.9 (1878):1–23, 3.10 (1878):167–195. Germany, Physiological Psychology in (J. SULLY), 1.1 (1876):20–43. Germany, Philosophy in (W. WUNDT), 2.8 (1877):493–518. Holland, Psychology in (T.M. LINDSAY), 1.1 (1876):144-145. Italy, Philosophy in (G. BARZELLOTTI), 3.12 (1878):505–538. London, Philosophy in (G.C. ROBERTSON), 1.4 (1876):531–544. Oxford, Philosophy at (M. PATTISON), 1.1 (1876):82–97. Scottish Universities, Philosophy in the (J. VEITCH), 2.5 (1877):74–91, 2.6 (1877): 207–234. United States, Philosophy in the (G.S. HALL), 4.13 (1879)89–105. 2. By Field, Topic or Period: Cerebrum, Functions of (G.C. ROBERTSON), 2.5 (1877):108–111, 5.18 (1880):254-259. English Thought in the 18th Century, by L. Stephen (G.C. ROBERTSON), 2.7 (1877): 352–366. English Philosophy, Kuno Fischer on (C. READ), 4.15 (1879):346–362. German Philosophical Journals (R. FLINT), 1.1(1876):136–143. Greek Philosophy, Relation to Modern Thought (A.W. BENN), 7.25 (1882):65–88, 7.26 (1882):231–254. 1

E.g., omitted are articles by James and by Dewey, and a book note on Frege, Begriffschrift.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_0�3

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Hegelian Contributions to English Philosophy, Recent (T.M. LINDSAY), 2.8 (1877): 476–493. Hegelianism and Psychology (R.B. HALDANE), 3.12 (1878):568–571. Infant, A Biographical Sketch of an Infant (C. DARWIN), 2.7 (1877):285–294. La Morale anglaise contemporaine, M. Guyau (F. POLLOCK), 5.18 (1880):280–288. Life, Teleological Mechanics of, by E. Pflüger (anon.), 3.10 (1878):264–268. Lotze, Hermann (T.M. LINDSAY), 1.3 (1876):363–382. Natural Science of Man, Can there be a? (T.H. GREEN), 7.25 (1882):1–29, 7.26 (1882):161–185, 7.27 (1882):321–348. ‘Mind’, History of the word (J. Earle), 6.23 (1881):301–320. Pathology, Reports on (W.R. GOWERS), 1.2 (1876):267–273, 1.4 (1876):552–554. Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewußtseins, E. von Hartmann (W.C. COUPLAND), 4.14 (1879): 278–284. Philosophical Journals (R. FLINT, J. SULLY, W.C. COUPLAND), 1.2 (1876):273–282. (French, German, USA) Philosophical Journals (R. FLINT, J. SULLY), 1.3 (1876):416–424; 1.4 (1876):555–560. (French, German, Italian) Philosophie, Histoire de la, en Angleterre depuis Bacan jusqu’ à Locke, by Ch. de Rémusat (C. READ), 4.13 (1879):128–132. Philosophy and Science (S.H. HODGSON), 1.1 (1876):67–81, 1.2 (1876):221–235; 1.3 (1876):351–362. Physiological Journals (J.G. McKENDRICK), 1.1 (1876):132–135. Physiology and Pathology, Reports on (W.R. GOWERS), 1.2 (1876):267–273. Physiology and Pathology, Reports on (J.G. MCKENDRICK, W.R. GOWERS), 1.3 (1876):409–416. Political Economy as a Moral Science (W. CUNNINGHAM ), 3.11 (1878):369–383, (D. SYME), 4.13 (1879):147. Psychology and Philosophy (G.C. ROBERTSON), 8.29 (1883):1–21. Psychology of Man, Comparative, The (H. SPENCER), 1.1 (1876):7–20. Psychology, A Science or a Method? (J.A. STEWART), 1.4 (1876):445–451. Sciences, On the Classification of the (H.M. STANLEY), 9.34 (1884):265–274. Scientific Philosophy: A Theory of Human Knowledge (F.E. ABBOTT), 7.28 (1882): 461–495. 3. Index to Mind (1876–1885), vols. 1–9: Mind 10.40 (1885):i–xiii. Also see: 4. Arthur Liebert, 1938. Philosophy in Germany, a series of articles published in Mind and in The Philosophical Review, 1926–1938. (Available at: archive.org)

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150

ANALYTICAL CONTENTS Contents Acknowledgements Note on Sources and Citations

1 INTRODUCTION 1 Hegel an Epistemologist? 2 Kant’s Critical Philosophy: A Synopsis 2.1 Kant’s Critical Fallibilism 2.2 Key Features of Rational Judgment 2.3 Judgment and Cognitive Reference 2.4 Kant’s Three-fold Strategy 2.5 Kant’s Methodological Constructivism 2.6 Transcendental Proof and Transcendental Idealism 3 Kant’s Critical Philosophy Outlined 3.1 Kant’s Key Questions 3.2 Kant’s Main Critical Writings 3.3 Kant’s Main Critical Problems 3.4 Kant’s System of Critical Philosophy PART I

vii vii ix

1 1 9 9 10 11 13 14 15 16 16 17 18 20

Hegel’s Critical Reconsiderations of Metaphysics and Epistemology

2 HENRY HARRIS AND THE SPIRIT OF HEGEL’S 1807 PHENOMENOLOGY 4 Introduction 5 Harris, Hegel and Philosophical History 6 Harris and Hermeneutical Method 7 Harris on Hegel’s Epistemology 8 Harris’ Epistemological Shortcomings 9 Some Critical Reservations about Hegel’s Ladder 9.1 Harris, Hegel and Perception 9.2 Harris, Hegel and ‘The Moral World View’ 10 Harris, Epistemology and Hermeneutical Method 11 Hegel’s References to Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism 12 The Problem of Assessing Standards of Knowledge 13 Distinguishing Recollection from mere Imagination 14 Dialectic, Justification and Hermeneutical Method 15 Coda: Some Brief Replies to Harris

25 25 25 28 32 33 34 34 36 38 40 45 48 53 56

3 IDEALISM : TRANSCENDENTAL OR ABSOLUTE? 16 Introduction 17 Some Critical Questions 18 Does Hegel’s Absolute Idealism Develop out of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism? 19 Does Hegel Retain the Model of an Intuitive Intellect?

57 57 59 60 63

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20 Transcendental Idealism, Scientia and Hegel’s Absolute Idealism 21 Some Basic Features of Hegel’s Mature Idealism 22 The Costs of neglecting Hegel’s Introduction to the 1807 Phenomenology 23 Do Transcendental Idealism or Intellectual Intuition Illuminate Hegel’s Mature Philosophy? 24 Conclusion

64 66

4 HEGEL’S EARLY CRITIQUE OF KANT’S CRITICAL FOUNDATIONS OF PHYSICS 25 Introduction 26 The Role of the Foundations in Kant’s Critical System 27 Hegel’s Early Critique of Kant’s Foundations 28 Three Internal Problems with Kant’s Foundations 28.1 Kant’s Flawed Proof of Matter’s Basic Forces 28.2 Kant’s Circular Account of Matter’s Quantity 28.3 Why Forces Transcend Kant’s Critical Analysis 28.3.1 Kant’s Flawed Proof of Newton’s Law of Inertia 28.3.2 Kant’s Flawed Disproof of Hylozoism 29 The Ramifications of these Problems for Kant’s First Critique 29.1 Kant’s Table of Categories as a Groundplan for Rational Physics 29.2 External Causation and Kant’s Analogies of Experience

77 77 77 79 80 80 81 82 82 83 86 86 86

5 THE TRANSCENDENTAL, FORMAL AND MATERIAL CONDITIONS OF THE ‘I THINK’ 30 Introduction 31 Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Sensory Affinity 32 Kant’s Transcendental Idealist Explanation of Sensory Affinity 33 Kant’s Fatal Equivocation 34 Hegel’s Recognition of Kant’s Problem with Transcendental Affinity 34.1 Some Interpretive Difficulties 34.2 Traces of the Problem of Transcendental Affinity in Hegel’s Early Writings 35 Implications of Kant’s Problems with Transcendental Affinity 36 Appendix: Evidence of Hegel’s Awareness of Kant’s Issue of Transcendental Affinity

89 89 89 91 93 95 95

73 74 75

96 99 106

6 THE FATE OF ‘THE’ INTUITIVE INTELLECT IN HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY 37 Intellectual Intuitions and Intuitive Intellects 38 Aconceptual Intuitionism in Schelling’s and Hegel’s Early Views 39 Hegel’s Youthful Neglect of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic 40 In Principle, Intellectual Intuition entails Petitio Principii 41 Hegel’s Reconsideration of the Problem of Petitio Principii 42 Hegel’s Critique of Schelling’s Intuitionism in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy

109 109 112 113 114 115

7 HEGEL’S POST-KANTIAN EPISTEMOLOGICAL REORIENTATION 43 Hegel’s Co-determination Thesis 44 Hegel’s Post-Kantian Reorientation

127 127 130

122

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44.1 The Idea of System 44.2 The Status of Necessity 44.3 The Relation between Philosophy and Physics 44.4 The Emptiness of Kant’s Categories 44.5 The Metaphysics of Transcendental Arguments 44.6 Hegel’s Post-Kantian Agenda 45 Some Remarks on Naturalism and Fallibilism 46 Conclusion PART II

130 131 132 133 133 134 136 139

Hegel’s Critical Epistemology in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit

8 Hegel’s Manifold Response to Scepticism in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit 47 Introduction 48 Pyrrhonian Scepticism 48.1 The Regress Argument 48.2 Equipollence 48.3 Vicious Circularity and the Dilemma of the Criterion 48.4 Epoché and the Greek ‘Ontological’ Conception of Truth 49 Empiricist Scepticism 49.1 Introduction 49.2 Knowledge by Acquaintance 49.3 Hume on the Concepts of ‘Cause’ and ‘Body’ 49.4 Induction 50 Cartesian Scepticism 51 Kantian Scepticism 51.1 Kant: Sceptic or Anti-Sceptic? 51.2 Hegel’s Strategic Response to Kant’s Idealism 51.3 Hegel’s Critical Response to Kant’s Idealism 51.4 Hegel’s Direct Response to Kant’s Idealism 52 The Persistence of Infallibilism 53 Conclusion 9 HEGEL’S PRAGMATIC CRITIQUE AND RECONSTRUCTION OF KANT’S SYSTEM OF PRINCIPLES I: THE 1807 PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 54 Introduction 55 Three Unjustly Neglected Features of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 55.1 Kant’s Semantics of Singular Cognitive Reference 55.2 The Completeness of Kant’s Transcendental Doctrine of the Power of Judgment 55.3 The Integrity of Kant’s Principles of Causal Judgment 56 Live Issues from Hegel’s Early Studies 57 Five Central Points from the 1807 Phenomenology 57.1 Hegel’s Defence of Kant’s Cognitive Semantics 57.2 Justificatory Fallibilism in Principle

143 143 144 144 145 146 148 149 149 149 152 154 155 158 158 158 158 159 160 161 163 163 165 165 168 169 170 172 172 174

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57.3 Pure A Priori Concepts 57.4 The Binding Problems 57.5 Deflating Global Perceptual Scepticism 57.6 Hegel’s Refutation of Empirical Idealism 57.7 Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology and the Logic’s Point of Departure 58 Pragmatic Realism and Natural Science 59 Interim Conclusions

174 174 176 177 177 178 180

10 HEGEL’S SOLUTION TO THE PYRRHONIAN DILEMMA OF THE CRITERION 60 Introduction 61 The Dilemma of the Criterion and its Epistemological Significance 62 Forms of Consciousness 63 Knowledge as a Relation 63.1 The Problem 63.2 Eight Aspects of Knowledge as a Relation 63.2.1 Two Senses of ‘In-itself’ 63.2.2 A Grammatical Case Distinction 63.2.3 Consciousness as Reflexive; the List Doubled 63.3 Hegel’s Criterial Inference 64 The Issue of Completeness

181 181 186 188 190 191 192 193 194 195 197 202

11 HEGEL’S TRANSCENDENTAL PROOF OF MENTAL CONTENT EXTERNALISM 65 Introduction 66 Hegel’s Semantics of Singular Cognitive Reference 67 Hegel’s Justification of his Semantics of Singular Cognitive Reference in ‘Consciousness’ 68 ‘Self-Consciousness’, Thought and the Semantics of Singular Cognitive Reference 69 Hegel’s Interim Critique of the Ego-Centric Predicament 70 Conclusion

205 205 206

12 Mutual Recognition and Rational Justification in Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit 71 Introduction 72 Hegel’s ‘Self-Consciousness’ and Kant’s ‘I think’ 73 Hegel’s Analysis of Mutual Recognition: The State of Debate 74 Hegel’s Phenomenology and Kant’s ‘I Think’ 75 What Links the ‘I think’ and the Thesis of Mutual Recognition? 76 Rational Judgment, Autonomy and Spontaneity 77 Individual Rational Judgment and the Community of Rational Judges 78 Kant’s Constructivist Account of Rational Justification 79 Hegel’s Generalisation of Kant’s Constructivist Model of Justification 79.1 Hegel’s is no Coherence Criterion 79.2 Fallibilism and Constructivist Justification 79.3 Self-Criticism and Mutual Critical Assessment 80 Mutual Critical Assessment in Hegel’s Analysis of ‘Evil and Forgiveness’

208 214 226 228 231 231 234 236 240 241 243 245 247 252 253 256 256 257

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81 Mutual Critical Assessment and the Historical Dimensions of Rational Justification 82 Conclusion

261 262

13 MUTUAL RECOGNITION AND RATIONAL JUSTIFICATION IN SUBSTANTIVE DOMAINS 265 83 Introduction 265 84 The Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion 265 84.1 The Dilemma 265 84.2 The Pyrrhonian Dilemma contra Coherentism 266 84.3 The Pyrrhonian Dilemma contra Foundationalism 266 84.4 The Pyrrhonian Dilemma: First- and Higher-order Challenges 267 85 Deduction, Scientia and Infallibilism 268 85.1 Justificatory Infallibilism 268 85.2 Self-evidence 269 85.3 Justificatory Fallibilism 269 86 Solving the Dilemma of the Criterion 270 86.1 Justification in Formal and in Non-formal Domains 270 86.2 Justificatory Internalism and Externalism 271 86.3 Integrating Justificatory Internalism and Externalism 271 86.4 Distinct Levels of Epistemic Analysis 271 86.5 Epistemic Circularity 271 86.6 Epistemic Circularity: Virtuous versus Vicious 272 87 Determinate Negation 272 88 The Possibility of Constructive Self-criticism 273 88.1 Conceptual Schemes: Access or Cage? 273 88.2 Hegel’s Explication of Consciousness in Relation to Objects 274 88.3 Mature Judgment 279 88.4 Hegel’s is not a Coherence Criterion 280 88.5 Fallibilism and Constructivist Justification (again) 281 89 The Social Dimensions of Rational Judgment and Rational Justification 282 89.1 Objective Claims and Public Implications 282 89.2 Classifications and Social Education 283 89.3 Social Scrutiny 284 89.4 Individualism in Principle? 286 89.5 Rationally Justifiable Judgment and Mutual Recognition 288 90 Mutual Critical Assessment and the Historical Dimensions of Rational Justification 289 90.1 Determinate Negation of Relevant Alternatives 289 90.2 Social Epistemology: An Example from Physics 290 90.3 Social Epistemology and Engineering 290 90.4 Social Epistemology and Individual Innovation 291 91 Conclusion 292

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PART III Hegel’s Systematic Critical Pragmatic Realism 14 HEGEL’S CRITIQUE OF INTUITIONISM : ENCYCLOPAEDIA §§61–78 92 Introduction 93 Jacobi’s Critique of Discursive Knowledge 94 Jacobi’s Alternative to Discursive Knowledge 95 Hegel’s Questions About ‘Immediate Knowledge’ 96 Hegel’s Critique of ‘Immediate Knowledge’: I 97 Hegel’s Critique of ‘Immediate Knowledge’: II 98 Hegel’s Critique of ‘Immediate Knowledge’: III 99 Some Philosophical Significance of Hegel’s Critique of Jacobi’s Intuitionism 15 Analytic Philosophy and the Long Tail of Scientia: Hegel and the Historicity of Philosophy 100 Introduction 101 Why Bother with Philosophical History? 102 Van Fraassen’s Constructive Empiricism 103 From Formulation to Justification 104 What kind of history of philosophy does philosophy require? 105 Philosophy: its History and Ours 106 The Modern Epistemological Predicament 107 Residual Infallibilism 108 Some Necessary Conditions of our Singular Cognitive Reference 109 The Pragmatic A priori 110 Conclusion 16 HEGEL’S PRAGMATIC CRITIQUE AND RECONSTRUCTION OF KANT’S SYSTEM OF PRINCIPLES II: THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC AND ENCYCLOPAEDIA 111 Introduction 112 Transcendental Logic in Hegel’s Science of Logic and Philosophy of Nature 112.1 What of Kant’s Critique of Cognitive Principles can be Justified? 112.2 Hegel’s Rejection of Rationalism 112.3 The Empirical Grounds of Hegel’s Critique of Cognitive Principles 112.4 Hegel’s Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference 112.5 Hegel’s Reconfiguration of Kant’s Modal Categories 112.6 ‘The’ Causal Principle: General or Specific? 112.7 Transcendental Analysis cannot be Purely a Priori 112.8 Transcendental Analysis must be Pragmatic 112.9 Hegel’s Rejection of Transcendent Metaphysics 112.10 Hegel’s Pragmatism is Rooted in Natural Science 112.11 Hegel’s Functionalism and Emergentism 113 Hegel’s Pragmatic A Priori 113.1 Hegel’s Pragmatic Development of Kant’s Constructivism 113.2 Hegel’s Anti-Cartesian Externalisms 113.3 Hegel’s Moderate Semantic Holism

297 297 299 302 303 305 310 313 316 319 319 319 322 327 329 332 337 339 341 344 348 349 349 350 350 350 352 352 354 355 356 357 358 358 359 359 359 360 361

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113.4 Hegel’s Pragmatism is Robustly Realist, not Neo-Pragmatist 113.6 Conceptual Analysis, Logical Possibility and Explication 114 Hegel’s Ontology and the Realisation of the Concept 115 Conclusion

362 365 367 371

17 SCIENCE AND THE PHILOSOPHERS 116 Introduction 117 The Advent of Modern Science 118 Modern Philosophical Reaction 118.1 Descartes 118.2 Hume 118.3 Kant 119 Van Fraassen’s Empiricist Stance 120 Hegel’s Transcendental, Pragmatic Realism in Epistemology 121 Concluding Unscientistic Postscript

373 373 373 378 378 380 381 382 390 391

18 HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE: ITS AIMS, SCOPE AND SIGNIFICANCE 122 Introduction 123 Galileo, Newton and Philosophy of Nature 123.1 Galileo’s Methodology 123.2 Newton’s Two Questions 123.3 Some Limits of Newton’s Methods 123.4 Hegel’s Causal Realism 123.5 Corpuscularism and Dynamic Forces 123.6 Hegel’s Causal Realism (again) 123.7 Hegel’s Debts to Newtonian Physics 124 Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: Ontology, Metaphysics or Semantics? 124.1 Natural Science and Hegel’s Naturalism 124.2 Hegel’s Philosophical Semantics 125 Central Systematic Aims of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature 126 Conclusion

395 395 397 397 398 399 400 400 402 404 405 405 408 409 416

19 COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, INTELLIGENCE AND THE REALISATION OF THE CONCEPT IN HEGEL’S ENCYCLOPAEDIC EPISTEMOLOGY 127 Introduction 128 Is Hegel a Subjective Idealist? 129 Corroborations from Hegel’s Lectures on Logic and Philosophical Psychology 129.1 Psychology, Reason and Spirit 129.2 Hegel contra the ‘Metacritiques’ 129.3 Thinking and Experience 129.4 Cognition and Laws of Nature 129.5 Hegel’s Rejoinder to Herder’s Causal Scepticism 129.6 Causal Laws and Concrete Universals 130 Intelligence and Objectivity 130.1 Hegel’s Sensationism 130.2 Intelligence and Natural Science

417 417 418 421 424 426 427 429 430 431 433 433 434

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130.3 Objectivity, Logic and Denkbestimmungen 131 Conclusions 20 ROBUST PRAGMATIC REALISM IN HEGEL’S CRITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY: SYNTHETIC NECESSARY TRUTHS 132 Introduction 133 Sellars, Kant and Semiotics 134 Why the Relative Synthetic A Priori cannot be merely Linguistic 134.1 Carnap, Conceptual Explication and Linguistic Frameworks 134.2 Conceptual Explication and Semantic Externalism 134.3 A Brief Example from Huw Price 135 Measurement Procedures, Conventions and the Relative Synthetic A priori 136 Why the Relative Synthetic A Priori cannot be merely Meta-linguistic 136.1 Some Preliminaries 136.2 Brandom’s Metalinguistic ‘Kant-Sellars Modal Thesis’ 136.3 Empiricism and Basic Empirical Descriptive Terms 137 Material Inferences sans ‘Inferentialism’ 137.1 Brandom’s ‘Inferentialism’ 137.4 Brandom’s Explanatory Aspiration 137.5 Brandom on DN Explanation 138 Sellars on the Modality of Ordinary Empirical Description 139 Conclusion 21 AUTONOMY, FREEDOM AND EMBODIMENT: HEGEL’S CRITIQUE OF CONTEMPORARY BIOLOGISM 140 Introduction 141 Contemporary Life Sciences and Human Behaviour 142 Cartesian Self-transparency 142.1 Sensing Strictly Speaking 142.2 Cartesian Freedom 142.3 Three Steps to Decisions 143 Three Findings of Contemporary Life Sciences 143.1 ‘Blind-sight’ 143.2 Libet Experiments 143.3 Darwinian Selection contra Morals? 144 Hegel’s Anti-Cartesianism 144.1 Descartes’ Self-deception 144.2 Cartesian Learning? 145 Biologism Today? 145.1 Today’s Biologism 145.2 Reconsidering Libet’s Experiments 145.3 Hegel’s Incisive Anticipations 145.4 Human Behaviour and its Contributing Causes 145.5 Explaining Human Behaviour Causally 145.6 Earning Causal Claims Legitimately

435 437 439 439 441 443 443 444 445 448 452 452 452 453 454 454 457 458 461 470 471 471 472 473 473 473 474 475 475 475 475 476 476 478 480 480 481 482 483 485 487

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146 Freedom as Autonomy 146.1 Exercising judgment is the exercise of one’s own powers of judgment 146.2 The exercise of judgment is normatively, and not merely causally, constituted 146.3 The exercise of judgment is required for responsible action 147 Is Morality undermined by Contemporary Darwinism? 148 Conclusion 22 APPENDIX 149 A Snapshot from London of Philosophy circa 1880 150 Analytical Contents Bibliography Index of Names Index of Subjects

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Index of Names Alston, W.P., 65, 145, 183–6, 267n, 271–2, 252, 451 Amico, Robert, 181n Aristotle, 10, 14, 53, 80n, 83, 160, 201n, 237, 259, 270, 283, 309, 319, 312, 323, 326, 337, 345, 347, 359, 371, 375, 395, 400–1, 409–10, 417, 432, 457n, 482, 488, 492 Augustine, 44n, 242 Austin, J.L., 13, 340, 455, 468 Bacon, Francis, 32, 225, 321, 373, 377, 395, 436 Bartels, Andreas, 326 Bernoulli, J., 69, 399 Bonjour, Laurence, 184, 228, 266 Bouwsma, O.K., 176 Brandom, Robert, 6, 128n, 145–6, 206, 325, 330, 352n, 362–5, 441, 450, 452–61, 465–9 Brembs, Björn, 464–5, 481 Buchdahl, Gerd, 132n, 283, 286, 345, 397–8, Bunsen, C.C.J. Freiherr von, 333n Burge, Tyler, 197, 233n, 263n, 274n, 284, 348n, 391, 478–9, Caird, Edward, 5, 9, 31 Carnap, R., 5–6, 10, 13–14, 56, 145, 179n, 184, 254n, 268, 270, 279n, 285, 293n, 324–7, 330, 333–5, 339, 344–5, 347–8, 350n, 361, 364–6, 388, 439–53, 459–69, 478 Cashmore, Anthoney R., 475, 480–1, 485, Cassirer, Ernst, 7–8 Castel, L.-B., 399 Chisholm, R., 52, 147n, 181–2, 184–5, 266, 268, 327–8 Comesaña, Juan, 267n, Davidson, D. 13, 125, 184, 199n, 206, 255, 280, Deregowski, Jan, 287 Descartes, René, 8, 10, 29, 31, 50, 56, 65, 136, 138, 145, 155–6, 160–1, 171, 184, 218, 225, 227–8, 245, 268–9, 279n, 287–8, 306n, 308n, 320–1, 330, 337–8, 341, 358–9, 366, 374, 378–80, 381, 389, 391, 393, 397–8, 401, 409–11, 415, 417, 424, 443, 462, 463n, 473–5, 476–8, 482, 485–6 Dewey, John, 164, 334, 349, 372, 419, 453, 465 Dretske, Frederick I., 145, 184, 259n, 340, 363, 364n, 386–7, 462n, 469, 486n, 488n, Einstein, Albert, 293, 372, 447–51, 468 Evans, Gareth, 13, 70, 135, 147, 150n, 168, 207–8, 211–12, 342 Feigl, Herbert, 262n

Fichte, J.G. 36–8, 41n, 58, 96, 97, 99, 103, 107, 109–10, 114n, 119, 126, 129, 155, 196, 216–8, 226, 235, 237, 240, 242, 254, 257, 276n, 364 Fogelin, Robert, 52, 184, 265–6, 389, 389n Förster, Eckart, 78–9 Forster, Michael, 41n Francoeur, L.B., 399 Franks, Paul, 1, 122, 123, 434n Frege, G., 13, 168, 174, 453, 456, 478 Friedman, Michael, 79n, 449, 450, 460 Galilei, Galileo, 171, 337, 358, 359, 373–9, 396, 397–8, 410, 415, 451 Gettier, E. 206, 227, 270, 324, 338, 339, 366 Gombrich, Ernst, 460 Goodman, Nelson, 255, 449, 455, Gram, Moltke S., 109–11 Griffin, James, 255n Haack, Susan, 199n, 228, 255–6, 281 Hamann, Johann Gottlieb, 150, 297, 298, 308 Harper, William L., 179n, 321, 375, 392n, 450–1, 457, 468, Harris, H,S., 3, 25–56, 96, 101, 121n, 206, 330–1, 395–6, 412, 413, 416, 436, 438 Hempel, Carl G., 266, 387–8, 455–6 Herder, J.G., 45, 55, 67, 419, 420, 421, 426–7, 430–1 Hintikka, Jaakko, 440, 463 Hookway, Christopher, 350 Houlgate, Stephen, 48n, 75n, 260n, 351n, 414n Hume, David, 10, 13, 18, 25, 35–6, 45, 114, 131, 144, 145, 149, 151, 152–5, 157, 158, 159, 170, 175, 184, 188n, 208n, 211, 245, 245n, 250, 254n, 268, 269n, 279n, 283, 286, 291n, 298, 312n, 313, 320–1, 326n, 330, 343, 365, 366, 380–2, 384, 391, 400n, 406n, 428, 442n, 464, 467, 471, 486–7, 490 Husserl, Edmund, 320n, 383n Ingarden, Roman, 465 James, William, 178–9, 450, 452, 465 Kaplan, David, 13, 336n, 345n, 361 Kaufmann, Walter, 28–31 Kocourek, Alfred, 336 Krug, Wilhelm Traugott, 149, 297 Kuhn, Thomas, 147–8, 178, 447–8, 450, 451 LaGrange, F., 69, 396 Laplace, Pierre Simon de, 399 Lauer, Quentin, 28, 30 Leibniz, G.W., 8, 170, 206–7, 235–6, 351, 381, 382, 479

540 Lehrer, Keith, 184, 262n, 271n Lewis, C.I., 154n, 174, 176, 180, 269, 270, 280n, 282, 323, 360, 361, 419, 439–40, 449, 451, 452, 457n, 461, 462, 463n, 465–7 Libet, Benjamin, 475, 481–2, 485 Lighthill, Sir James, 483–4 Locke, J., 39, 45, 67, 114, 151, 175, 245, 304, 305, 406n, Mach, Ernst, 449–50 McDowell, John, 1, 60n, 135n, 145, 245, 271n, 330, 340–1, 489 Mendel, G., 337 Mill, John Stuart, 282n, 321, 384 Moore, George Edward, 9, 18, 333, 390 Morris, Charles 442–3, 444, 447, 460 Moser, Paul, 53, 182–4, 389 Nasti deVincentis, Mauro, 12n, 399n, 126 Newton, I., 3–4, 18, 69–70, 79, 81–3, 117, 131–2, 170–1, 176, 179, 213, 266n, 283, 321, 337, 343, 345, 354n, 358, 373–82, 384, 393, 122, 396– 405, 408, 430–1, 440, 447–51, 468, 483 Nietzsche, F., 28, 333, 334, 392–3, 472 Nussbaum, Martha, 279n O’Neill, Onora, 247–50 Onnasch, E.-O., 58–9 Parmenides 44, 140, 201, 219, 223–6, 326, 327, 346n, 470 Parrini, Paolo, 355n, 440, 449–52 Pattaro, Enrico, 336 Peirce, C.S. 163, 170, 178n, 349, 352, 360, 362, 365, 371, 372, 419, 442, 447, 449, 451, 452, 461, 465 Pfleiderer, C.F. 170–1, 358, 403n, 404–5 Pinkard, Terry, 34n, 38n Pippin, Robert, 60n, 62–3 Plato, 27, 201n, 224, 373, 395, 478–9 Ploucquet, Gottfried, 352n, 371–2n Popper, Karl R., 145n, 273, 321n, 467, Price, Huw, 445–8 Protagoras, 67 Quine, W.V.O., 13, 69n, 132n, 143n, 145, 154n, 173, 184, 228, 269n, 279n, 325, 330, 339, 361–2, 382, 384, 387, 388, 440, 441–2, 446–7, 449, 450, 453, 460, 461 Rawls, John, 250, 255 Redding, Paul, 352n, 362–3, 367–8, 460–1 Reichenbach, Hans, 153, 440, 449–52 Reid, Thomas, 304 Robinson, Jonathan, 30

Rorty, Richard, 5, 55, 178, 280n, 297, 316, 329– 30, 332, 348, 363, 364, 449, 450 Rosen, Michael, 31, 50 Russell, B., 13, 56, 143, 145, 149, 172–4, 184, 208, 304–5, 333, 341, 344, 384, 390 Sans, Georg, 152n, 166n, 368–9n Schelling, F.W.J., 4, 57–9, 62–3, 75, 102, 109– 126 passim, 155, 196, 306n, 316, 333, 351–2, 403n, 412, 414n, 423 Schulze, G.E., 4, 43, 45, 63, 100n, 117–8, 144, 149, 98, 352 Sellars, R.W., 465 Sellars, W., 5, 146, 148, 245, 326, 330, 347, 363, 364, 365, 386, 439–70 passim, 489 Sextus Empiricus, 12, 18, 39–47, 52, 55, 65, 116, 118, 120–2, 129, 136, 144–9, 181–202, 228, 246, 252, 261–2, 291, 315, 327, 389–90, 416 Spinoza, B. 57, 58, 62–3, 102, 120n, 129, 268n, 298, 300, 311n, 477 Stein, Howard, 392n Stekeler, Pirmin, 3, 326, 408 Strawson, P.F., 5, 103n, 135, 143, 236 Stroud, Barry, 176, 280n, 339 Taylor, Charles, 28 Teller, Paul, 264, 384–6, 388, 393 Tempier, Étienne, 10, 136, 152n, 213, 226, 245, 268, 269, 319, 341, 436 Tetens, Holm, 487 Tetens, J.N., 11–12, 71, 165, 166n, 201, 206, 222, 225, 226, 260, 331, 353–4, 367–71, 418, 437, Toulmin, S., 16, 343, 355–6n, 449–50, 467, 486 Tuschling, B. 57–61, 79n, 86–7, 263n, 388 van Fraassen, Bas, 5, 13, 145, 184, 253, 264, 322–3, 382–93, 403n, 455 Vihalemm, Rein, 372, 465 Wallgren, Thomas, 264n, 293 Watkins, Eric, 170n Watson, John, 5, 9, 32, Weiss, Friedrich, 39 Wick, Warner, 8, 285, 324, 326n, 339n, 357n, 478 Wigmore, John Henry, 336 Will, F.L., 161n, 180, 257n, 333, 388, 419, 452n, 455–6 Williams, Michael, 267–8, 442n Williamson, Timothy, 339n Wittgenstein, L., 13, 236, 254n, 257n, 270n, 286n, 320n, 326n Wolff, Michael, 3, 13, 14, 151, 164, 175–6, 178, 270, 323, 396, 433n, 457n, 480

Index of Subjects NOTE: The present study is systematic, detailed and wide-ranging. This concise subject index aims to complement (not reduplicate) the Analytical Contents (§150) and Index of Names by selective on focus on key terms, distinctions, issues, examples and theses, thus providing thematic cross-referencing perhaps not evident from the other two registers. The entries for ‘examples’ and for ‘mottos’ list those discussed herein. Paradigmatic passages are indicated by these abbreviations: defines or specifies a key term: ‘df.’; quotes an exemplary passage: ‘qt’; distinguishes key terms: ‘vs’. accept(ance), in justification, 35–6, 41, 48, 49, 52, 54, 115n, 136–7, 182, 183–5, 188, 201, 224, 248, 252n, 259, 262–3, 264, 271, 284n, 299, 320, 322–3, 384, 386, 390, 451–2n, also see consent acquaintance, (aconceptual) knowledge by 5, 13, 32, 47, 109–13, 121, 125, 127–8, 134, 149–50, 168, 172–3, 191–2, 199, 201, 208–10, 274, 279, 304–5, 307, 316, 343–4, 365, 416 affinity, transcendental, of sensory manifold 4, 62, 89–107, 127, 130, 138, 155–60, 360 Analogies of Experience (KdrV), 61, 62, 73, 78, 87, 98, 103n, 104, 127, 129, 165, 169–70, 355–6, 464 analysis, mathematical (calculus), 8, 63–4, 69, 163–4, 170–1n, 396, 400 analysis, conceptual, 5, 6, 9, 206, 292, 317, 324–5, 338, 339, 364, 365–6, 443–4, 461, 478; paradox of 9; also see explication, conceptual analytic/synthetic distinction 34n, 66, 172, 406 a priori, absolute vs relative df. 35, 151–2, 366; 9, 60, 65, 72, 134, 154, 156, 160, 172, 174, 175–6, 342, 428; vs a posteriori 60, 72, 74, 131, 134, 151, 172, 406; proof in natural science 171, 375; pure vs impure df. 175; 207–8, 210n, 212, 356–67, 391, 406, 492; synthetic 15–19, 57, 64, 78–9, 90, 92n, 104–5, 127–9, 131–2, 163, 343, 353; pragmatic 164, 344–7, 349, 439–70; also see synthetic necessary truth anti-naturalism 131, 132n, 206, 363, 492 apperception 4, 90, 236, 240–1, 356, 478–80; analytic unity of 90, 92, 94, 102, 104, 353, 361; synthetic unity of 90, 93–4, 104–5; vs perception 235–6 ataraxia (quietude, unperturbedness) 144, 223 atomism, corpuscular 375–6, 400–1, 409; ontological 68–9, 116, 310, 440; semantic 344–5, 452–3, 465; sensory 433

being, Parmenidean conception of, 43–4, 148–9, 223–5 blind sight (aphasia) 475, 479–80 Bildung (education, enculturation) 26, 69, 263 binding problems df. 175; 174–6, 211, 356, 439, 466 biologism df. 480; 471, 480–91 Categorical Imperative (Kant) 232, 247–8, 251; also see universalisability tests categories (Kant) 14, 18, 97n, 98–9, 366; acquired originally 156; completeness of 86; emptiness of 131, 133; modal 354–5; objective validity of 90–1, 165–6, 356; realisation of 11–2, 165–6, 206–7; schematism of 79, 135, 168–9, 355; Table of 86, 101; Transcendental Deduction of 62, 64, 95, 100–3, 122n, 130, 133, 138, 243, 357, see also judgment, Table causal disposition, see force; – judgment, see judgment, causal; – knowledge, see explanation, causal; – power, see force; – principle, general vs specific 61, 85, 87, 135–6, 152–3, 159, 169, 355–6, 471, 484–5 causality (Hume) 153, 170, 487n cause, transeunt df. 170, also see causal principle, specific, Analogies of Experience certainty, epistemological senses 50, 124, 223, 256, 269, 306, 314, cf. 389, 462, also see infallibilism; Hegel’s sense 189, 223, cf. 218n; of sense data 269–70, 462–3, 465, 473, 476–7 chemistry 18, 20, 21, 72, 74, 178, 283, 290, 355, 359, 370, 377, 384, 400–1, 407, 411, 450 circularity, vicious 52, 56, 136, 145–8, 181–3, 186, 191, 227, 231, 252, 255–8, 271, 330, 389, 475; vs epistemic 271–4, 278–9, 281, 352, 451–2 co-determination thesis df. 128; 127–30, 345, 408, 439, 466

541

542 cognitive psychology, philosophical, Hegel 6, 102–3, 160, 203, 417–38, 410–1; Hume 35, 151–4, 381; Kant 90–1, 219, 244, 411–2; Locke 175; pragmatism 177; proper functioning 160, 244, 255–6, 281, 364; also see binding problems coherentism 9, 15, 66, 132, 145, 148, 183, 184, 198– 9, 228, 231, 252–7, 280–1, 327, 346, 388; Davidson 199n concept(s) (Begriff, Hegel) 36, 67, 69, 102, 126, 222, 310–1, 331, 367–9, 404, also see Denkbestimmung; as classification, intension 3, 70, 113, 130, 166–7, 207, 282–4, 307–8, 345, 353, 367–8, 371, 405–9, 427–8, 441–2, 448n, also see description, definite; (merely) determinable 428, 486–7; – empiricism df. 35, 134; 13, 151, 152–4, 156, 174–5, 366, 428, 462n; 13, 36; – pragmatism df. 35, 463–6, cf. 349–50; a priori, pure vs impure (mixed) 151; open texture 282, 340, 455; realisation of (Hegel) 71, 166, 201, 223, 225, 226, 260, 331, 353–4, 367–8, 370–1, 418, 427–8, 437 conceptual network 146, 192, 345, 377, 4056, cf. 178–9; necessity 407–8, 414, also see synthetic necessary truth; scheme 273–4, also see framework, linguistic; holism, semantic consciousness, form of df. 188–90; self-critical structure of 191–202, 274–9; also see apperception, perception consent, in justification, 248–9 constructivism, moral 231, 247–51, 490–1; see justification, constructivist method content, broad vs narrow, mental df. 197, 160, 283, 286–7, 340, 473; semantic, see concept pragmatism, cf. neo-pragmatism Criterion, Dilemma of qt 40–1; 46, 47, 52, 59, 66, 73–5, 116–21, 146, 148, 150, 157, 181–203, 217, 222, 244, 227–8, 231, 246–7, 252, 253, 255, 256, 261, 262–3, 265–8, 270–4, 281, 288–93, 316, 327–8, 345–6, 352, 389–90, 406, 437, 466; Problem of (Chisholm) 146n, 181n, 181–3, 185, 266, 268, 327–8 Critical philosophy (Kant), df. 9–21 cultural circle 8, 253, 264, 279, 293, 325, 333, 384, 387, 388, 460; also see stance deceiver, evil (mauvais genie) 136, 155, 226, 228, 287n, 288, 307, 308n, 338477, 478n deduction, logical (provability) 15; proof of entitlement (Kant) 56, 177–8, 238n, 243, 263, 414, 424; Transcendental Deduction (Kant) 62, 64, 95, 100–3, 130, 133–4, 138, 203, 357; deductive logic, canon vs organon 460

deductivism, see justification, infallibilism Denkbestimmung 103, 178, 408–9, 418, 423, 425– 32, 435–8, also see concept; nature, law of description, definite, grammatical form vs referential uniqueness 173, 206–7, 210–2, 341, 343, 344n, 381, also see reference, singular cognitive descriptive terms, modality of 452–70; also see concept, open texture determinate negation df. 138–9, 145; 37, 39, 56, 60, 87, 118, 12n, 130, 138, 147–8, 174, 186, 200, 227, 261, 272–3, 289–90, 363, 492; Brandom’s misuse of term 362–3 deterministic explanation, see explanation, deterministic disposition, causal, see force divine, command 38; the – 38n, 43–4, 110, 225, 242, 260–1, 337, 377, 414, 477; God 19, 27–8, 38, 49–50, 54, 62, 101, 110, 123, 125, 260, 300– 12, 337, 378–9, 431, 473n, 476–7; also see religion, philosophy of domains, formal vs non-formal df.270; 4, 14–5, 65, 75, 173–6, 180, 213, 226–8, 246n, 323–5, 327, 341, 457n; also see fallibilism; reference, singular cognitive dualism, Cartesian 136, 411, 412, 415, 476–7, 485; Kant’s 84, 97, 411 elimination, argument by, 139, 190; Kant 100, also see neglected alternative emergence (complex system behaviour) 359, 372, 412–5 empiricism 18, 35–6, 45, 64–5, 125, 131, 137, 143, 145, 149–55, 176–7, 179, 213, 227, 245, 264, 268–9, 304, 309, 321, 338, 339, 345, 354, 366, 378, 380, 392, 422–3, 428, 431, 440, 450, 452; concept – df. 35; 13–4, 134, 156, 174–5, 304, 366, 380, 460, 472; constructive – (van Fraassen) 322–7, 382–90, 403n; logical – 151, 179, 335, 345n, 354n, 377, 384, 388, 448–9, 455; vs pragmatism 465; semantic 444–5, 453–4, 456–7, 462–3, 486–7, also see atomism, semantic; verification (Hume’s fork) df. 13, 151n; 320, 380; vs pragmatism 465 enlightenment 51, 54, 335; ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (Kant) 51; The Enlightenment 217, 227, 298, 310, 390, 419; Counter-Enlightenment (German), 298–302 epistemology, irreducibility of, 167, 342, 364–5, 458; naturalised (Hegel) 69, 74–5, 99, 100, 130–1, 134, 136, 172, 179, 281n, 293, 372, 392; (Quine) 382

543 epoché (suspension of judgment) 42, 144–5, 187, 223, 267, 474 equilibrium, reflective 182, 184–5, 228, 255, 328, 346, 475–6 equipollence (isothenai) 42, 145, 273, 389n, 396 evidence, having vs accepting 52, 185, 244; genuine vs apparent 52, 185, 245n, 256, 269, 316–7; self-evidence 145, 269, 378–9 examples: angle 446–7; billiard ball, errant 84–5; day 43; cheque signing 482; dot 486; earth, moon 464; horror vacui 404–5; Hesperus, Phosphorus, Venus 168; house 207n, 208, 209, 357, 464; keys, desk 461; ladder 43, 117; lime twig 44; Müller-Lyre illusion 287; night 43, 208, 273; rain 368n; salt grain 198; ship 464; spy, shortest 173; sweet, bitter 43; sun, stone 152; tie, colour 461–2; tree 208, 209, 273, 307, 308n exercises, Parmenidean 140, 201, 219, 224, 470 explanation, causal, 6–7, 255n, 302, 323, 343, 471, 480–1, 484–5, 487–8; boundary conditions (of physical systems) 171, 403n, 459, 483; deductive-nomological 458–9; deterministic 344, 355, 483–4; idealisations in, 171, 375, 403n; initial conditions 70–1, 213–4, 402–3, 483; scientific 70–1, 358, 397–405 explication, conceptual df. 324–5; 5, 6, 7, 9–10, 14, 147–8, 163, 292–3, 347–8, 359, 453, 454–8, 461, 470, 478; and linguistic frameworks 443–4, 460, 469; and semantic externalism 325–6, 329, 331, 364–6, 427–8, 435–6, 444–5, 448; also see synthetic necessary truth externalism, see internalism/externalism fallibilism df. 10, 137; 9–15, 73, 130–1, 136, 147, 174–5, 180, 232, 242–3, 256–9, 265–93, 328, 346, 360, 375, 389–90, 437, 441, 463, 465; vs infallibilism 10, 15, 65–6; and realism 137, 155, 226–8, 253, 360; and objectivity of moral norms 489 fallibility, Descartes’ 473, 476–8 fantasies 48–9, 281, 340; epistemological 351n; explanatory 374; Gnostic 39, 49, 438; metaphysical 52n, 342–3, 351, 385, 445n; neo-Platonic 31, 50, 52, 331, 438; also see myth, re: Hegel force (causal) 35, 67–70, 72, 80–6, 152, 172, 212–3, 343–4, 370, 375–6, 397–404, 408–9, 426–33, 450–1, 457 formalism, Carnap’s 325; schematising 33, 75, 414n Foundherentism (Haack) 199n, 255–6, 281

framework, linguistic (Carnap) 14, 350n, 388, 442–5, 448, 449, 450, 454, 459, 468–9 freedom (of action, agency) 471–91 gaps, logical vs justificatory 213, 226–7, 286, 343, also see infallibilism goldfinch (Austin) 282, 340, 455 hermeneutics 3, 5, 25, 28–32, 38–40, 53–5, 139, 164–5, 203, 327, 347, 461, 470 historicity df. 329 history, philosophy of (Hegel) 25–8, 202, 292n, 331, 367 holism, block universe 412; justificatory 52, 128, 151, 185, 406, 408; moderate ontological 67, 96, 103, 116–8, 129–30, 310, 312, 367–72, 391, 415, 420; moderate semantic 126, 285, 324, 326n, 345, 347, 352, 361–2, 366; QM 393; radical semantic 324n, 325n, 361–2, 421 humility 259 hylozoism 3–4, 83–6, 356, 411 ‘I think’ (Kant) 104–5, 232–43, also see apperception idealism, Hegel’s holistic 67, 96, 103, 116, 118–9, 126, 129, 310, 367, 370–1, 372, 391, 395–416, 420, cf. 128; Refutation of (Kant) 62, 95, 100, 103, 130, 138, 160, 172, 177, 188n, 215, 241, 361 subjective 93, 149, 191, 229, 258, 274, 418–33; also see Analytical Contents (§150) identity vs predication 56, 344n, 463, also see reference, singular cognitive incorporation thesis (Kant) 244–5, 252, 489, cf. 70, 167 induction 18, 149, 154–5, 176n, 266, 321, 374, 468 infallibilism df. 10, 64–5, 75, 128, 136–7, 154–5, 160–1, 213, 226–8, 245, 256, 268–9, 280, 286, 325+n, 365–6, 379–80, 389–90; irrelevant to non-formal domains 14–5, 269–71, 319–24, 341, 459; of sense data 269, 286, 338–41, 462–3, 473, cf. 453, also see judgment, terminating (Lewis) inferentialism (Brandom) 352n, 362–5, 454–61, 469 Intelligenz (intelligence, Hegel) 433–7 intension vs extension df. 448n, also see concept internalism/externalism df. 254n, access internalism df. 197; 473; justification df. 476; 154, 161n, 182, 246–7, 253, 280–1, 286–8, 381; mental content df. 474; 279, 284, 476–7; mixed 4, 254, 256, 271, 280–1; semantic content 147, 362, 444–8; also see Burge (anti-individualism), content, mental broad/narrow interpretationism (Lavine) qt 419

544 intuition, intellectual 1–4, 74–5, 109–26, also see intuitionism; intuitions as data, see equilibrium, reflective; modal – 377, 402 intuitionism 9, 15–6, 63, 112–3, 117, 121–6, 128, 297–318, 352, 418, 423 judgment, causal, 483–5; classificatory 441–2, see also concept; discriminatory 128–9, 167, 169– 70, 173–4, 208n, 370, 439; formal features, Table (Kant) 13, 101n, 127, 151, 156; infinite negative form (Kant) 127–8, 357, 455; mature 259n, 262n, 279–80; normative structure 243–5; perceptual 362, 367–8, discriminatory 167, 356–7, 466, causal character of 211; key features of 10–1, 231, 243–7, 488–90; non-terminating vs terminating (Lewis) 269–70; pragmatic character 463–6, 481; synthetic a priori (Kant) 104, 127, 128, 361; teleological 300, 355; transcendental doctrine of power of (Kant) 168–9, 349, also see reference, singular cognitive justification, coherentism 9, 15, 66, 148, 183, 184, 199n, 228, 231, 252–5, 266–7, 280–1, 327, 388; cognitive vs epistemic df. 147n; 267; contextualism 264, 385–6; criteria (Hegel’s) 197–201, 274–81; Critical (Kant) 14–5, 247–51, 281–2, 359–60; foundationalism 65, 66, 132, 145, 148, 149–50, 157, 184, 227–8, 231, 246–7, 256, 266–7, 269–70, 281, 327–8, 346, 379, 381, 389, 406–7; historical aspects 138–9, 261–3, 289–93; K-K thesis 201, 214, 254, 271, 280; pragmatic 261–2, 289–93, 328–9, 360; reflective equilibrium 182, 184–5, 228, 255, 328, 346, 475–6; social aspects 243, 256–60, 262–3, 282–9, 328, 346, also see judgment, mature; method, constructivism; scientia knowledge, causal, see explanation, causal law of nature 70–1, 92n, 103, 171, 177, 178, 190, 213, 300–1, 309, 358–9, 374–8, 397, 400–3, 429– 33, 452, 458–9, 469; dynamic 80, 170, 179n, 376–7, 393, 400–5, 431–2, 457; kinematic 80, 81, 170, 358, 378, 393, 400, 431; phenomenological 67–8, 400 linguistic framework (Carnap) 14, 350n, 388, 442–5, 449–50, 454, 460, 468–9 logic, formal 14–5, 270, 323, 457n; general 14–5, 478; transcendental 14, 163–5, 173–8, 347, 349– 72, 378; Hegel’s Logik 68, 71–2, 75, 82n, 95, 102–3, 110, 121, 163–4, 170n, 177–8, 238, 349–71, 399, 402, 407–16, 420, 470, 471, cf. 116 meta-language 178, 179n, 364–5, 445–7, 461, 469, also see speech, formal mode; linguistic framework

metaphysics, analytic 13, 152, 384–5, 445n, 447n; Critical (Kant) 4, 21, 77–87, 96, 132, 356, 365, 435; experience-transcendent 13, 31, 45, 65–6, 112, 117n, 120–1n, 144, 152, 268n, 297–8, 299, 334, 343, 350, 358–9, cf. 206, 429–31, 474n; foundations of natural science 4, 86, 131–3, 159, 171, 212–3, 245, 358–9, 374–8, 381–2, 397, 399, 403, 431, cf. 179; practical (Kant) 38, 45n, ; rationalist, see experience-transcendent; Transcendental Idealism (Kant) 133–6, 158–60 method, constructivism 14–5, 231–4, 247–57, 281–2, 355, 359–60, 448, 475, 490–1; piecemeal problem solving 8, 285, 324, 339n; – of thinking, changed (Kant) 5–6, 7, 158–9, 162, 317, 492; also see conceptual analysis vs explication, determinate negation, internal critique mind-body problem 409–10, 476–8 modal expressivism (Brandom) 452–469 monotonicity vs non-monotonicity 455–9, cf. 322–7 mottos: Back to the 18th Century! 333; Caveat emptor! 330, 363n; hypothesi non fingo 405; Know thyself! 26, 229; Posit no transcendent entities! 260, 414; Sapere Aude! 51, 330 multi-disciplinarity 334–5, 492 mutual recognition, Fichte’s thesis 235; generic thesis; Hegel’s thesis df. 258; 265–93, cf. 232, 315, 360; initial thesis 235–6, 241–2, mutual critical assessment, constitutive of rational justification, see mutual recognition, Hegel’s Thesis; justification, social aspects myth, of the given (Sellars) 365, 441–2; re: Hegel 25, 74–6, 116n, 140, 162, 343, 351, 367; incarnation 49; physical objects (Quine) 154n; recollection (Plato) 479 nature, philosophy of (Hegel), 6, 65, 69, 71–2, 75, 103, 178, 139, 350–72, 395–416, 417, 428n, 432–7, 467, 470, 471 natural history 266n; – philosophy 10, 84, 337, 354, 381, 467; – science, see causal explanation, law of nature, Newton, scientific revolution naturalism, broad vs narrow 100, 130, 293, 363; 18, 69, 74–5, 94, 99, 130–1, 134, 136–7, 172, 179 281n, 372, 382, 385, 392, 405–6, 409, 416–7, 476, 492; subject – (H. Price) 445n, 458n, 468; also see anti-naturalism, Quine necessity of the concept (Hegel), see conceptual necessity neglected alternative, objection to Transcendental Idealism 99–100, 114, 135

545 Paris condemnation (1277) of Neo-Aristotelian heresies 10, 64, 128, 152n, 161, 213, 216, 245, 268, 319, 320–1, cf. 337–8 neo-Kantianism 2, 45, 103, 135, 343, 448 neo-pragmatism 6, 362, 364–5, 440, 445, 448, 450, 456, 465 objective validity of Categories (Kant), 87, 165–6, 168, also see concept, realisation of Okham’s razor 263, 293, 492 ontology, social: individualism, atomistic, 232, 348; moderate collectivism 337, 258–9, 289, 372, 491; totalitarian 348 paradox, lottery 137, 161; Meno 178–9; – of analysis, see analysis, conceptual; – of fallibility (Kim & Lehrer), see infallibilism petitio principii 4, 9,34, 41–2, 45–6, 48, 52, 63, 74, 81–2, 114–22, 126, 129, 144–5, 146, 181, 185–8, 191, 193, 200, 217, 227–8, 246, 266–7, 271n, 272–4, 279, 280, 307, 312–3, 316–7, 327–8, 333, 343, 389, 452n, Phenomenology of Spirit, parts, chapters, sections of, see below: Appendix philosophy, historical aspects of 5–6, 289–2, 319–48, 348, 365, 373–389, 391, 393–4, 408, 473–4, 478, 483, also see historicity; explication; justification, historical aspects of philosophy of language, as first philosophy 206, 325, 362, 458, cf. 461; syntax, semantics, pragmatics 443–4; also see meta-language; speech, formal mode pragmatics, of language 443–4, 445, 460, 465 pragmatism 148, 161; vs empiricism 333, 350, 385, 440, 462, 465; vs neo-pragmatism 178–9, 364, 441, 445–6, 448–50, 452–62, 465–70 predicament, ego-centric 205, 217–9, 226–9, 269n, 286, 338, 382, 387, 391; Modern epistemological 143n, 337–9, 410–1 predication, grammatical form vs ascription 12–13, 70, 135, 166–7, 207–11, 341–3, 368–9, 439, 484–5, cf. 105; also see description, definite; reference, singular cognitive proof, regressive 34, 96, 100, 130, 134, 138, 240, 254, 273 psychologism df. 219; 76, 441; cf. 244, also see biologism, determinism (about action) rationalism 2, 9, 13, 15, 16, 36, 45, 53, 64, 66, 74, 131, 132, 143, 151–2, 177, 179, 297–301, 320, 350–1, 378–81, 385, 402, 411, 414, 421, 442n, 476–80 reafference, sensory df. 464–5; 481 realism df. 2, 419; 62, 94, 380; causal 176, 213, 343, 400, 402, 404–5, 444, also see force; critical

(USA) 465; framework-internal (Carnap) 444, cf. 447–8, also see neo-pragmatism; Hegel’s 2–3, 6, 33, 61, 66, 68, 96, 100, 103–5, 138, 160, 180, 219–20, 253, 362–4, 423, 426–9; internal (Putnam) 145, 147, 179n, 448n; moral 490–1; naïve, 118, 144, 149, 193, 210–1, cf. 305; practical (Vihalemm) 372, 465; pragmatic (robust) df. 2–3, 130–1; 148, 161, 179, 269, 292, 346–7, 358, 372, 419, 467; scientific 323; transcendental (Kant) 57; unregenerate (Quine) 382 reality, formal vs objective (Descartes) 443, 485–6, also see semiosis recognition, mutual, see mutual recognition reference, deflationism about 445–8; demonstrative (deixis) 11–12, 15, 135, 154–5, 199n, 201, 209–11, 213, 260, 303, 331, 342, 344, 353–4, 357, 367–8, 416, 418, 437, 486–7; descriptions theory of 70, 135, 147–8, 173, 252n, 279, 447–8; singular cognitive – df. 167; 13, 15, 16, 87, 135, 165–8, 172–80, 205, 206–29, 260, 270n, 341–4, 349, 350, 352–4, 358, 361, 362, 364, 365, 368, 381, 414, 416, 433–4, 439, 447n, 468, 471, 484, 492 cf. 128 reflection, transcendental 10, 20, 103, 136–9, 202–3 regress, infinite 41, 118, 144–5, 150, 182, 184, 186, 267, 300, 389, 447 relations, internal vs external, underlying equivocation 68–9 relativism 2, 182–3, 185n, 201, 282, 348, 379; historicist – df. 338; 54–5, 255, 293, 317, 348, 360, 418–9 relativity, sceptical trope 116, 118, 129, 223, 224 religion 16, 17, 125, 250, 297–8, 308–9, 313, 373, 393, 480; philosophy of (Hegel) 26–7, 43–4, 48–53, 235, 242, 260–1, 413, 414, 416 scepticism, Cartesian 136–8, 143, 155–7, 160–1, 176, 205, 219, 226–8, 286, 319, 341, 343, 344, 366, 380–2, 387, 390, 391, 410, cf. 197, 235; global perceptual 138, 157, 160–1, 176–7, 182–203, 222–8, 260–2, 265–8, 280, 287, 321, 339, 344, 366; Humean 45, 131, 143, 149, 151–4, 157–9, 170, 175, 188n, 268, 269n, 286, 321, 326n, 330, 343, 380–1, 382, 384, 391, 428, 464, 467, 486–7; Kantian 158–60; Pyrrhonian 3, 4, 25, 38–52, 55, 59–60, 63, 66, 73–5, 116–8, 143–50, 157, 176, 161, 273, 278–9, 289–93, 316–7, 327–30, 337, 343–6, 352, 389, 406, 466, also see criterion, Dilemma of, Sextus Empiricus; things, as unsensed causes of sensory experience 67; ‘Of Scepticism with regard to the senses’ (Hume), 35–6, 153,

546 175, 330; trilemma, see trilemma science, natural, 373–416; metaphysical foundations of, see metaphysics; proper, see scientia scientia 59–60, 74, 75, 227, 268, 319–48; Aristotelian vs infallibilist df. 10, 268, 320; 64–5, 245; vs historia df. 247, 266; 177, 247, 252, 327, cf. 66; proper science (Kant) 77–8, 382, 406, cf. 132, also see justification self-criticism, difficulties confronting 52, 186–92, 270–272, also see evidence; how possible 192–202, 273–81; constitutive of rational justification 10–11, 243–5, 256–62, 269–293 Self-Sufficiency Thesis, Fichte’s 216, 240, 242, 254, 257, 364; General 218, 220, 226, 361; initial 215–7; cf. 217, 286–8 semantic(s), ascent 447n, 468, also see speech, formal mode, meta-language; descriptive (Carnap) 325, 444, 448n, 460; meaning (intension), see concept, intension; as first philosophy, see language, philosophy of; also see reference semiosis, semiotics 441–3, 447, also see reality, formal vs objective sensationism (re: sensations) 364, 433–4 sense (Art des Gegebenseins, Frege) 168, 174, 478 speech, formal vs material modes 253, 326, 347; also see meta-language, linguistic framework stance 182, cf. 255; empiricist 382–93, also see circles, cultural, Kulturkritik synthetic necessary truth 6, 343, 439–70, 486, 492, also see a priori, relative trilemma, Agrippa’s (Williams) 267–8 universal, concrete, see Begriff, Denkbestimmung universalisation tests (Kant) 247–9, 359–60 validity, objective; see objective validity voluntarism, divine (Descartes) 477; van Fraassen 384, 385, 388

APPENDIX: Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel, 1807), parts, chapters, sections of (outlined in order of Hegel’s contents; only those mentioned are listed; elisions are indicated): Preface 7, 53, 56, 73, 187, 315, 360 Introduction 7, 37, 39–42, 46–7, 53, 56, 73–4, 118, 120–2, 187, 194–7, 201, 247, 328, 360, 390 Consciousness 36, 43, 73n, 134, 151, 154, 205, 208– 14, 224, 228, 240, 241, 261 Sense-Certainty 32, 43, 47, 66, 74, 121, 135, 149, 150, 152, 173, 189, 191, 194, 198, 208–11, 217, 224, 236n, 240n, 308n, 344, 484, 486–7 Perception 32, 34–7, 150, 152, 154, 158, 175, 176n, 189, 198, 199n, 211–2, 240n, 433n Force and Understanding 43, 67–70, 74, 136, 150, 152, 158, 176, 199n, 211–2, 214, 229, 240, 343, 402, 430–1, 484 Self-Consciousness 155, 159–60, 176–7, 205, 208n, 214–92, 343–4, 359–61 The Truth of Self-Certainty 215–6, 217 Self-Sufficiency and Self-Insufficiency of SelfConsciousness; Mastery and Servitude 177, 215–29, 240–58, 286, 361, 364 Freedom of Self-Consciousness 205, 221 Stoicism 216, 222, 224–5, 234, Scepticism 216, 222 Unhappy Consciousness 43, 222, 224–5, 234–5, 240, 242 Reason The Certainty and Truth of Reason 217–8, 225–6, 402n, 436 Observing Reason 69, 74, 122, 155, 158, 177, 228–9, 436 … Logic and Psychology 482–7 … The [Self-] Actualization of Rational Self-consciousness 217 … The Animal Kingdom of the Spirit and Humbug 217, 331–2 … Evil and Forgiveness 33, 235, 239, 243, 257–61, 360 Religion 26–7, 48–52, 235, 260–1 … Absolute Knowing xviii, 6, 26, 31n22, 94, 153, 226–7, 243, 246–63, 266, 268, 273, 274