Abstract rationality in education: from Vygotsky to Brandom

Abstract rationality has increasingly been a target of attack in contemporary educational research and practice and in its place practical reason and situated thinking have become a focus of interest. The argument here is that something is lost in this. In illustrating how we might think about the issue, this paper makes a response to the charge that as a result of his commitment to the ‘Enlightenment project’ Vygotsky holds abstract rationality as the pinnacle of thought. Against this it is argued that Vygotsky had a far more sophisticated appreciation of reason and of its remit. The paper proceeds first by examining the picture of Vygotsky that is presented in the work of James Wertsch, and especially his claim that Vygotsky was an ambivalent rationalist, goes on to provide an account of Vygotsky that corrects this picture, and develops this in the light of the work of Robert Brandom, who shares Vygotsky’s inheritance of Hegel. The conclusion towards which this piece points is that the philosophical underpinnings of Vygotsky’s work provide a radically different idea of rationality and epistemology from that characterised as abstract rationality and that this has significance for education studies.

Brandom and the Second Person

Brandom is one of the main advocators of the idea that meaning is instituted within basic linguistic practices through mutual exchanges. The aim of this paper is to show that such framework cannot do the required job if the dynamics of mutual exchanges is understood in interpretational terms. After arguing that the interpretational framework does not work, the paper presents an alternative second-personal conversational model capable of meeting the challenge.     

Fichte,Hegel, and the Life and Death Struggle

Several commentators have argued that Hegel's account of ‘self-consciousness’ in Chapter IV of the Phenomenology of Spirit can be read as an ‘immanent critique’ of Fichte's idealism. If this is correct, it raises the question of whether Hegel's account of ‘recognition’ in Chapter IV can be interpreted as a critique of Fichte's conception of recognition as expounded in the Foundations of Natural Right. A satisfactory answer to this question will have to provide a plausible interpretation of the ‘life and death struggle’ as an immanent critique of Fichte's account of recognition. This paper aims to provide such an interpretation. The first part of the paper provides a discussion of Fichte's account of recognition that emphasizes its ‘epistemic’ concerns. The second part argues that Hegel's account of the ‘life and death struggle’ can be read plausibly as an immanent critique of Fichte's account of recognition.     

Adorno,Hegel, and Dialectic

This article explores critical theory's relations to German idealism by clarifying how Adorno's thought relates to Hegel's. Adorno's apparently mixed responses to Hegel centre on the dialectic and actually form a coherent whole. In his Logic, Hegel outlines the dialectical process by which categories – fundamental forms of thought and reality – necessarily follow one another in three stages: abstraction, dialectic proper, and the speculative (famously simplified as ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’). Adorno's allegiance to Hegel's dialectic emerges when he traces the dialectical process whereby enlightenment reverts to myth and human domination over nature reverts into our domination by nature. However, Adorno criticizes Hegel's dialectic as the ultimate form of ‘identity thinking’, subsuming unique, material objects under universal concepts by using dialectical reason to expand those concepts to cover objects utterly. These two responses cohere because Adorno shares Hegel's view that dialectical contradictions require reconciliation, but differs from Hegel on the nature of reconciliation. For Hegel, reconciliation unites differences into a whole; for Adorno, reconciled differences co-exist as differences. Finally, against Habermas who holds that Adorno cannot consistently criticize the enlightenment practice of critique, I show that Adorno can do so consistently because of how he reshapes Hegelian dialectic.     

Conservatives and Racists: Inferential Role Semantics and Pejoratives

According to inferential role semantics (IRS), for any given expression to possess a particular meaning one must be disposed to make or, alternatively, acknowledge as correct certain inferential transitions involving it. As Williamson points out, pejoratives such as ‘Boche’ seem to provide a counter-example to IRS. Many speakers are neither disposed to use such expressions nor consider it proper to do so. But it does not follow, as IRS appears to entail, that such speakers do not understand pejoratives or that they lack meaning. In this paper, I examine recent responses to this problem by Boghossian and Brandom and argue that their proposed construal of the kind of inferential rules governing a pejorative such as ‘Boche’ is to be ruled out on the grounds that it is non-conservative. I defend the appeal to conservatism in this instance against criticism and, in doing so, propose an alternative approach to pejoratives on behalf of IRS that resolves the problem Williamson poses.

Hegel,modal logic,and the social nature of mind

ABSTRACT

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit provides a fascinating picture of individual minds caught up in “recognitive” relations so as to constitute a realm—“spirit”—which, while necessarily embedded in nature, is not reducible to it. In this essay I suggest a contemporary path for developing Hegel's suggestive ideas in a way that broadly conforms to the demands of his own system, such that one moves from logic to a philosophy of mind. Hence I draw on Hegel's “subjective logic”, understood in the light of modern modal logic, in an attempt to model the way minds might be thought as connected by way of shared intentional contents. Here, we should not be surprised at some of the parallels that emerge between the approaches of Hegel and the modal logician Arthur Prior, as Prior had testified to the influence of his teacher, John N. Findlay, who himself had strong Hegelian leanings. In the final section, Robert Stalnaker's version of possible-world semantics is suggested as a framework within which Hegel's recognitive account of the mind might be understood.     

Arrested Development: On Hegel,Heidegger and Derrida

ABSTRACT

Although both Heidegger and Derrida criticize Hegel as the archetype and historical culmination of the metaphysics of presence, Hegel’s dialectics also serves as a model for their critical destruction or deconstruction of metaphysics. Through an analysis of the notions of ‘arrest’ and ‘halt’ in Derrida and Hegel, this paper will show how both Heidegger and Derrida take up elements of Hegel’s theory of the development of consciousness, which is characterized both by an ‘unhalting forward motion’ but also by delay, interruption and inertia. This paper will develop the strange parallel between Derrida’s notion of l’arrêt and the halting movement of spirit in Hegel. It will show that Hegel’s ‘rhythm of the concept’ is not so distant from the ‘arrhythmia’ Derrida finds in the notion of l’arrêt. It will thus show how time, history and spirit are linked in a self-deconstructive manner in this unstable point of the arrest/halt.     

Method in Kant and Hegel

ABSTRACT

For Kant as for Hegel method is not a structure or procedure imported into philosophy from without, as, e.g. a mathematical demonstration in modern physics or in the proof-structure of philosophies such as Spinoza’s or Wolff’s. For both Hegel and Kant method is the arrangement that reason gives its contents and cognitions; for both, that is, method and object do not fall asunder, unlike in all disciplines other than philosophy. For Kant method is the design and plan of the whole, the scientific form that guides the organization of cognitions (KrV A 707/B 736, Ak 24, 780). Likewise, Hegel writes that method is the consciousness of the form of its inner movement (WL 1, 49, SL 53, W 3 47, PhS 28). Unfortunately, Hegel never considers Kant an example or a precursor or a positive role model. It is important to ask why Hegel never takes seriously Kant’s Doctrine of Method. Why, if he shares so many central points with the Architectonic of the first Critique, does he never acknowledge Kant as a possible ally? Why does he misunderstand Kant on analysis and synthesis as he does? These are some of the questions I plan to discuss in this paper.     

Hegel,Danto, Adorno,and the end and after of art

In this paper, I consider Adorno's claim that art is at, or is coming to, an ‘end’. I consider Adorno's account in relation to the work of Arthur Danto and G. W. F. Hegel. I employ Danto's account, together with two distinct interpretive glosses of Hegel's account, as heuristic devices in order to clarify both Adorno's own arguments, and the context within which they are being advanced. I argue that while Danto and Hegel see art as coming to an end autonomously, owing to art's successful realization of its governing principle, Adorno by contrast sees art as coming to an end heteronomously. Art's narrative is forcibly broken off, rather than completed. Adorno's account, indebted to Hegel, of art's commitment both to autonomy and the realization of ‘spiritual needs’ is explored in order to clarify how, on Adorno's view, this has happened to art; and why, precisely, he believes art is coming to an end.     

Hegel and the history of idealism

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to expose an unwarranted narrowness in the study of idealism in nineteenth century philosophy, and to show that the field of idealism is much wider than usually assumed. This narrowness stems from the influence of Hegel’s history of philosophy, which saw the idealist tradition as beginning in Kant, passing through Fichte and Schelling, and then culminating in his own system. This conception of history has been disseminated by Hegel’s followers and still prevails today. I argue that this conception is too narrow for several reasons. First, it ignores the romantic idealists (Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel); second, it excludes the opposing tradition of idealism of Herbart, Fries and Beneke, which affirmed (against Schelling and Hegel) transcendental idealism, an empiricist epistemology, the existence of the thing-in-itself and the value of the Kantian dualisms; and, third, it neglects the history of idealism after Hegel later in the nineteenth century, more specifically, the idealism of Trendelenburg, Lotze and Hartmann.     

LANGUAGE,MIND, AND WORLD: CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?

Abstract: This article addresses recent claims made by Richard Rorty about antirepresentationalist theories of meaning. Rorty asserts that a faithful rendering of the core antirepresentationalist assumptions precludes even revised pieces of representationalist semantics like “refers” or “true” and epistemological correlates like “answering to the facts.” Rorty even asserts that such notions invite reactionary authoritarian elements that would impede the development of a democratic humanism. I reject this claim and assert that such notions (suitably constructed) pose no greater threat to democratic humanism than the alternatives and in fact are crucial to its maintenance and continuing success. These notions (suitably constructed) reflect a metatheoretical stance that I call “openness,” which I believe lies at the heart of both democratic humanism and the pragmatism from which Rorty claims to take his inspiration.     

Solger and Hegel: Negation and Privation

Abstract

This paper has two related goals. Firstly, after briefly clarifying the theoretical core of Solger’s thought, it will analyse his metaphysics from Hegel’s point of view, emphasizing that sacrifice is, for Solger, the fundamental structure of the relationship between the finite and the Infinite. Secondly, it will investigate the main reasons behind Hegel’s criticism of Solger, showing that they have different conceptions of privation and negation and concluding that Solger and Hegel have different aims. Hegel’s aim consists in recomposing the unity of finite and infinite, whereas Solger’s thought is structured on the rupture between these two.     

The I and World history in Hegel

In this paper, I investigate the relations between the notion of the I and the conception of World history in Hegel’s philosophy. First, I address Hegel’s account of the I by reconstructing its phenomenological and logical development from consciousness to self-consciousness through recognition with the other and arguing that the project of the Philosophy of Right is normative, as it provides an account of the logical process of affirmation of the I as the normative source of the realm of objective spirit. I then argue for an account of World history as the self-conscious development and liberation of the I in time and objectivity, and I consider Hegel’s philosophy of history in light of the Philosophy of Right as the historical emergence of the I through the forms of objective spirit in history. Finally, I focus on two of the allegedly most problematic issues related to Hegel’s conception of World history: the nature and very possibility of an ‘intersubjective consciousness’ and the notion of ‘World spirit’. I conclude by outlining how the conception of World history, if reconstructed in light of Hegel’s conception of the I, can have previously unnoticed political implications.     

The Extended Mind Rehabilitates The Metaphysical Hegel

The nonmetaphysical interpretation of Hegel's philosophy asserts that the metaphysical reading is not credible and so his philosophy must be rationally reconstructed so as to elide its metaphysical aspects. This article shows that the thesis of the extended mind approaches the metaphysical reading, thereby undermining denials of its credibility and providing the resources to articulate and defend the metaphysical reading of Hegel's philosophy. This fully rehabilitates the metaphysical Hegel. The article does not argue for the truth of the metaphysical Hegel's claims. Rather, it defends the correctness of reading his philosophy as metaphysical.     

Social Conceptions of Moral Agency in Hegel and Sellars

This essay contributes to our understanding of the relation between the philosophies of Hegel and Sellars. While most treatments of this relation have focused on metaphysics or epistemology, I focus on ethics, and in particular on the formulation of moral agency. I argue that Hegel and Sellars arrive at a similar metaphilosophical rejection of individual moral agency in favor of conceptions of moral agency as the outcome of social mediation. To demonstrate this, I trace how Hegel and Sellars offer parallel resolutions of the ‘Kantian paradox’: the apparent problem that, in Kantian ethics, moral agents must both freely self-legislate the moral law unto themselves and stand in a dutiful relation to the moral law as a necessary function of practical reason. Drawing Hegel and Sellars together in this way casts new light on Sellars’s understudied ethical theory and further evidences the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s moral philosophy.     

The Art of Nature: Hegel and the Critique of Judgment

This essay examines the reasons for Hegel's frequently professed claim that Kant's Critique of Judgment simultaneously reveals the internal limits of critical philosophy and opens the door to his own system of speculative idealism. It evaluates Hegel's contention that the conceptions of aesthetic experience, organic purposiveness, and the intuitive intellect developed in the third Critique together conspire to undermine the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of the theories of nature and freedom advanced in the first and second Critiques . Finally it explains how Hegel understands his logic and real philosophy as a realist and quasi-naturalistic alternative to Kant's subjective idealism, one that purports to generate a system of categories adequate not only to dead matter but also to organic life and free self-conscious spirit.     

On Marx,Hegel, and Critical Theory in Postwar Germany: A Conversation with Iring Fetscher

This paper consists of an introduction to the life and work of Iring Fetscher by the interviewer, followed by a conversation with Fetscher, and notes. In the interview, Fetscher discusses his relationship to Marxism, Hegelianism, Lukács, and the Frankfurt School, as well as his critique of Althusser. The contribution of Fetscher, an extremely well-known German specialist on Soviet and Marxist thought, is here discussed in greater detail than anywhere else to date in the English-language scholarly literature.