Hegel and the Transformation of Philosophical Critique

by Bristow, William F.

• ISBN13: 9780199645275
• ISBN10: 0199645272
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-04-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

William F. Bristow presents an original and illuminating study of Hegel's hugely influential but notoriously difficult Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel describes the method of this work as a 'way of despair', meaning thereby that the reader who undertakes its inquiry must be open to theexperience of self-loss through it. Whereas the existential dimension of Hegel's work has often been either ignored or regarded as romantic ornamentation, Bristow argues that it belongs centrally to Hegel's attempt to fulfil a demanding epistemological ambition. With his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant expressed a new epistemological demand with respect to rational knowledge and presented a new method for meeting this demand. Bristow reconstructs Hegel's objection to Kant's Critical Philosophy, according to which Kant's way of meeting the epistemologicaldemand of philosophical critique presupposes subjectivism, that is, presupposes the restriction of our knowledge to things as they are merely for us. Whereas Hegel in his early Jena writings rejects Kant's critical project altogether on this basis, he comes to see that the epistemological demandexpressed in Kant's project must be met. Bristow argues that Hegel's method in the Phenomenology of Spirit takes shape as his attempt to meet the epistemological demand of Kantian critique without presupposing subjectivism. The key to Hegel's transformation of Kant's critical procedure, by virtue ofwhich subjectivism is to be avoided, is precisely the existential or self-transformational dimension of Hegel's criticism, the openness of the criticizing subject to being transformed through the epistemological procedure.

Author Biography

William F. Bristow is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Hegel's Objection
Is Kant's Idealism Subjective?	p. 19
An ambiguity in 'subjectivism'	p. 20
The epistemological problem	p. 25
The transcendental deduction of the categories and subjectivism	p. 28
Are Kant's categories subjective?	p. 38
Hegel's Suspicion: Kantian Critique and Subjectivism	p. 50
What is Kantian philosophical criticism?	p. 53
Hegel's suspicion: initial formulation	p. 61
A shallow suspicion?	p. 64
Deepening the suspicion: criticism, autonomy, and subjectivism	p. 68
Directions of response	p. 88
Critique and suspicion: unmasking the critical philosophy	p. 91
Hegel's Transformation of Critique
Introduction	p. 105
The Rejection of Kantian Critique: Philosophy, Skepticism, and the Recovery of the Ancient Idea	p. 117
Hegel's epistemology in the shadow of Schelling	p. 117
Schulze's skepticism contra the critical philosophy	p. 122
Ancient versus modern skepticism: Hegel's difference	p. 133
Against the modern conception of rational cognition	p. 140
Against modern self-certainty	p. 150
The history of skepticism: decline into dogmatism	p. 155
Philosophy counter culture and time	p. 164
The Return to Kantian Critique: Recognizing the Rights of Ordinary Consciousness	p. 169
Two conceptions of philosophical critique	p. 170
The return to critique and the relation of philosophy to its history	p. 175
The rights of ordinary consciousness and the need for critique	p. 182
Critique as the realization of the science of metaphysics	p. 191
Hegel's Self-transformational Criticism	p. 204
Presuppositionless philosophy	p. 205
The problem of the criterion	p. 213
Self-transformational criticism	p. 218
The problem of the 'we'	p. 230
Our transformation	p. 238
Hegel's alternative model: critical transformation as self-realization	p. 242
Bibliography	p. 248
Index	p. 254
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