A Greek Tragedy? A Hegelian Perspective on Greece's Sovereign Debt Crisis

Focusing on Greece, this essay aims to contribute to a philosophical understanding of Europe's current financial crisis and, more generally, of the aporetic implications of the modern determination of freedom as such. One the one hand, I draw on Hegel's Philosophy of Right in order to argue that modernity entails a potential conflict between a market economy and a state that is supposed to further the interests of the society as a whole. On the other hand, I draw on Sophocles' Oedipus the King as well as on Hegel's account of tragedy in the Phenomenology of Spirit to reinterpret the conflict between the spheres of civil society and the state as a tragic conflict. Modernity threatens to undermine itself from within, I maintain, because the simultaneous development of capitalism and democracy makes it very hard to prevent the sphere of particular interests from encroaching upon the sphere of politics

Ideal Embodiment: Kant's Theory of Sensibility

A Review of: Ideal Embodiment: Kant's Theory of Sensibility, by Angelica Nuzzo. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008, 414 pp. ISBN: 978-0-253-35229-3 hb, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-253-22015-8 pb,$ 27.95

Kant’s Account of Sensible Concepts in the Inaugural Dissertation and the Critique of Pure Reason

The present paper aims to trace back Kant’s account of the schematism of the pure understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason to the Dissertation. I do so by discussing Kant’s understanding of sensible cognition in view of his assessment of metaphysics. I argue, first, that Kant in both texts aims to defend metaphysics against skeptical attacks by discarding those of its elements he considers unwarranted and, second, that this undertaking hinges on his account of concepts that function as the sensible condition of cognition. Yet whereas Kant argues in 1770 that metaphysics must be purely intellectual, he in 1781 draws on his earlier account of sensible concepts to argue, against the Wolffians, that determining intelligible objects by purely intellectual means does not amount to cognition proper

Kant’s Transcendental Turn to the Object

In the Critique of Pure Reason and elsewhere, Kant uses the term ‘object’ in various ways and often without clearly signaling its different meanings. As a result, it is hard to gauge the extent to which Kant’s account of the object of cognition breaks new ground. In this article, I take the Critique to establish what is required to generate an object of cognition per se soleley by examining the various ways in which the human mind can objectify the content of its representations. To clarify this endeavor, I distinguish four different ways in which the term ‘object’ is used in the Critique, namely, to refer to (1) material things, (2) the content of any type of thought, (3) the mind-immanent correlate of a cognition in the broad sense of the term, and (4) the mind-immanent correlate of a cognition in the strict sense of the term. On my reading, the fourth meaning of the term ‘object’ is key to the Transcendental Deduction and completes Kant’s unprecedented conception of the cognitive acts by means of which the human mind produces objects of cognition out of a manifold of representations