Quorant asked recently, "How is Wittgenstein related to both Kant and Hegel?". I answered: The early Wittgenstein, the author of the TRACTATUS, is very much a Kantian as to epistemology. His own linguistic epistemology is what you get if you try to adhere to Kant as closely as possible consistent with a rejection of Kant’s idea of “synthetic a priori” knowledge. Kant would be surprised at the notion that anyone CAN separate Kantianism from the synthetic a priori. But Wittgenstein, in a manner, pulls it off. Of that of which we cannot speak, Wittgenstein tells us, we must be silent. He was speaking here of the really real, of that which is beyond that conceptual tools in our minds that control what we can take in as "facts." As to the knowable world, what "is the case" is a fact, not a thing. It is provisionally or pragmatically real, not really real. A Hegel/Wittgenstein link? That is a different trick. You COULD try to see the movement from th...
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Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) was a fascinating and powerful thinker whom I do not think I discuss enough in this place. But someone asked a question on Quora thus: whether there was anyone who continued Nietzsche's work in something akin to the way in which Hegel continued that of Kant. There are many ways I might have gone about answering it. To be quite honest, the querent actually mentioned how "Kant" had continued the work of "Hegel". That is a chronological absurdity of course, so I presume that Kant (1724 -1804) and Hegel (1770 - 1831) were simply reversed in the question by typographical haste. If as I suspect the querent meant to ask about a continuance of Nietzsche in the manner of the continuance of Kant by Hegel, we also have to consider what kind of continuance THAT is. I infer that the querent meant not someone calling him/herself a Nietzschean and dedicated to exegesis of a Master, but someone who continued-with-a-difference. So I repl...
Let's think some more about that James passage I quoted yesterday. For James, a concept is something quite simple. It may form directly from perception without benefit of any intermediary thinking. It, is accordingly, NOT an act of abstraction. Consider an intestinal polyp again. We are already supposing it can perceive. Suppose it perceives visually, and in color. It 'sees' a certain orangey-patch pass by. [Part of a carrot that its host is consuming, we say as outside observers.] The polyp may just call this patch of orange to itself the thingumbob. Later, in the absence of the thingumbob, the notion of the patch of orange, a quite specific shade of orange, may pass through its polypy noggin. There doesn't have to be any abstractness here. It can be as particular a notion as you please. The polyp is think of the same as the same, and so it is internally encountering the thingumbob again. It is conceptualizing. In general, and speaking now again of ...
Immanuel Kant is a giant in the history of philosophy. He is remembered as the leading exponent of deontological ethics; as the inventor of a sort of transcendental idealism that breaks both with Plato's objective and Berkeley's subjective idealism; and a proponent of keeping Christianity within the realm of reason (a determination that really ticked off poor Kierkegaard, among others.) G.W.F. Hegel is another giant. He is remembered for sticking yet another modifier in front of "idealism." No objective, subjective, or transcendental -- it is Absolute Idealism that was his brand. The line from Kant to Hegel is contested terrain. The figures in between, especially Fichte and Schelling, are generally treated as exactly that, as in between figures, as transitions. Historians of 19th century German idealism debate how those intermediaries brought Kantianism to the point of becoming Hegelianism. Markus Gabriel has a different view. In his 2013 book, TRANSCENDENTAL ...