Grounds of Pragmatic Realism

Critical Studies in German

Idealism

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Paul G. Cobben

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

By

Kenneth R. Westphal

LEIDEN | BOSTON
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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 ix
Note on Sources and Citations xi

1 Introduction 1

PART I: 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 Con-

cept 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 495

Bibliography 505
Index of Names 539
Index of Subjects 541
Acknowledgements

This book draws upon materials previously published in articles listed below,
variously improved, revised, augmented and integrated into the present stu-
dy. I am grateful to each of the editors, journals and presses who have permit-
ted me to recast this material here, and thank them (and their anonymous re-
ferees) for so supporting my research. I am also grateful to the several organ-
isers 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 help-
ful 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 conversa-
tions 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 philos-
ophy 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 Phenomenol-
ogy: A Reappraisal (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 23–29.
‘Hegel’s Attitude Toward Jacobi in the “Third Attitude of Thought Toward Objectiv-
ity”’. 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 Recep-
tion 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 Phäno-
menologie 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., Sci-
ence: 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. On-
nasch, 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 Phi-
losophy’. 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 Phe-
nomenology’. 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., Recogni-
tion – 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 canadi-
enne de philosophie 54.2 (2015):333–369.
‘Cognitive Psychology, Intelligence and the Realisation of the Concept in Hegel’s An-
ti-Cartesian Epistemology’. In: S. Herrmann-Sinai and L. Ziglioli eds., Hegel’s Phil-
osophical 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 pri-
mary sources and main works are cited by initials listed below. Kant’s and He-
gel’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 pub-
lication; otherwise I cite the date of the edition used. Translations are my
own unless otherwise noted. Multi-volume works or editions are cited by vol-
ume:page numbers. ‘§’ is used for sections of a text so numbered by its au-
thor; ‘¶’ 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). Re-
liable translations provide the pagination of the critical edition of the origi-
nal. Where needed, page or paragraph numbers to an English translation fol-
low after a slash (‘/’) the reference to the original. Occasionally ‘chapter’ is ab-
breviated 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.: Har-
vard 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 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.)
CSM 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. Individ-
ual 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., En-
quiries 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: Ox-
ford 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 Deut-
sche) 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: Cam-
bridge 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: Cam-
bridge 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 Uni-
versity 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: Gar-
land, 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 refer-
ences 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. Deut-
sche 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 ver-
schiedenen 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 Mod-
ifications 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 Fichte-
sche 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 Gio-
vanni 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 Univer-
sity Press, forthcoming (draft: 2013). Cited by consecutive paragraph num-
bers (¶) 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 Univer-
sity 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 edi-
tion 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 Natur-
recht im Grundrisse (1821), GW 14, 3 Parts. – Philosophical Outlines of Jus-
tice; 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 Cali-
fornia Press, 1990, 1994, 2006.
Briefe Briefe von und an Hegel, 4 vols., 3rd ed. J. Hoffmeister, ed. Hamburg: Mei-
ner, 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., Lon-
don: 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 num-
ber.¶ 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 Univer-
sity Press, 2008.
Secondary Sources
HL Henry S. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder, 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass., Hackett Publish-
ing Co., 1997.
HER K.R. Westphal, Hegel’s Epistemology: A Study of the Aim and Method of He-
gel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989.
KTPR ——, Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity 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 Rea-
son, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy and in the conceptual prelimi-
naries to his Encyclopaedia, appear inept and understandably have drawn cri-
ticism 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 epistemol-
ogy, 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 episte-
mology 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 al-
ternative to Kant’s epistemology involves intellectual intuition, which is just
as worrisome as radicalising Transcendental Idealism: both apparently re-
nounce 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 co-
gently 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 Lo-
gic (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�

2

views contain genuine epistemological insights which remain informative to-

day. 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 the-
oretical and in practical philosophy. This study focuses on theoretical philos-
ophy, 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 ques-
tion, 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-Kanti-
ans 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 untenabil-
ity of Transcendental Idealism. Indeed, these two defects highlight important
ways in which to reconstruct Kant’s critique of rational, justificatory judg-
ment 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 Cri-
tical philosophy, disentangling Kant’s landmark insights into rational judg-
ment 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 knowl-
edge – physical particulars, events, processes, structures or other natural phe-
nomena, 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 as-

2
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 phenom-
ena, 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 knowl-
edge 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 heter-
odox. 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 Lad-
der also shows what aspects of Hegel’s Phenomenology I set aside in order to
examine, reconstruct and defend Hegel’s epistemology, and why his episte-
mology 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 examin-
ing 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 in-
tuition. By 1802 Hegel recognised that, in its own terms, Kant’s Transcenden-
tal Idealism cannot justify Newtonian physics because Kant’s analysis fails to
rule out – as it must, by its own argumentative design – the possibility of hy-
lozoism. The grounds summarised in chapter 3 for rejecting those two suppo-
4

sitions are detailed in chapters 4 and 5.

Chapter 4 shows that Hegel recognised that, in principle, Kant’s Transcen-
dental Idealism can provide neither transcendental nor metaphysical ‘foun-
dations’ for Newtonian physics. Kant’s attempts to provide such foundations
requires ruling out the very possibility of hylozoism (living, self-active mat-
ter). 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 (ap-
perception) 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 (mix-
ed) forms of semantic, mental content and justificatory externalism.
Chapter 6 demonstrates that Hegel learned what Schelling (and his devo-
tés) never fathomed from Schulze’s (1803) brilliant, anonymous parody of in-
tellectual 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 epistemologi-
cal reorientation.
PART II, comprising chapters 8–13, examines Hegel’s epistemological agen-
da in the Phenomenology of Spirit, first by detailing the key points of its mani-
fold response to various forms of scepticism (chapter 8) and then examining
Hegel’s critical reconstruction of Kant’s Critical Principles in the 1807 Phe-
nomenology (chapter 9). Three core epistemological analyses are then exam-
ined: 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 sys-
tematic 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.
 5

PART III, comprising chapters 14–21, shows that these same Critical episte-
mological 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 recon-
structs in detail and defends Hegel’s mature critique of Jacobi’s intuitionism
in the conceptual preliminaries (Vorbegriff) to his philosophical Encyclopae-
dia. 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 meth-
od, and within substantive philosophical inquiry, of intuitions and of concep-
tual analysis. Examining these points highlights how Hegel accepted and ad-
dressed 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 Fraas-
sen 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 transcen-
dental proof remain widespread in Anglophone analytical philosophy. Straw-
son’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 conscious-
ness’, remains true today.3 Many philosophers and many historians of philos-
ophy continue to rely, often unwittingly, upon Cartesian or empiricist meth-
ods 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 in-
sufficiency of conceptual analysis for substantive philosophical inquiry, toge-
ther with the need for, and the character and procedures of, conceptual expli-
cation. Almost uniquely amongst Anglophone philosophers, Sellars realised
that Kant’s and Carnap’s case for the centrality of conceptual explication jus-
tifies and requires exacting, historically informed philosophical scholarship.
These central methodological relations between philosophy and history, in-
cluding 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.
6

xix). Hegel’s further reconstruction and development of Kant’s changed, Cri-

tical 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 dis-
tinction, central to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and later to Carnap’s se-
mantics, between ‘conceptual analysis’ and ‘conceptual explication’. Concep-
tual explication is methodologically decisive; whilst Carnap would not have
welcomed it, it entails significant, fundamental aspects of semantic external-
ism. For the broad, categorial kinds of questions central to philosophy, this
semantic externalism also entails that philosophical history, together with in-
tellectual and cultural history more broadly, are methodologically fundamen-
tal to any tenable philosophical explication.
One decisive episode in our cultural history is the ‘revolutionary’ develop-
ment 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 misun-
derstood 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, ontologi-
cal and natural-scientific, by showing how Hegel integrates them in his cogni-
tive psychology, a central phase of his encyclopaedic Philosophy of Spirit
(Enz. §§388–482). Reconsidering these issues in light of Hegel’s recently pub-
lished lectures on these topics (the Encyclopaedia is a very terse lecture com-
pendium) offers good occasions to expose further misunderstandings of He-
gel’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 Criti-
cal epistemology, by integrating these considerations into Hegel’s philosoph-
ical 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 pragma-
tism Hegel developed.
Chapter 21 brings these methodological and semantic issues to bear upon
current controversies regarding freedom of action and contemporary neuro-
physiology, to show how Hegel undercut key determinist presumptions about
causal explanation which have stymied these debates, and how he brings
 7

greater clarity to important, basic features of our embodied form of agency.

Chapters 20 and 21 illustrate and corroborate the Critical importance of dis-
tinguishing 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 examina-
tions 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 individ-
ually. 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 Phenomenol-
ogy. That overview is superceded by the present study, and in other regards
by The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (2009a), which pro-
vides a comprehensive, collective commentary on Hegel’s entire book. Ano-
ther study, nearly complete, complements these: Hegel’s Critique of Cognitive
Judgment: From Naïve Realism to Understanding presents the full-scale exami-
nation, 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 ‘Phenom-
enology’ (§§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
8

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 philoso-
phy from the fundamental conditions contained in Leibniz’s scholarly research-
es 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, scien-
tific 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 ob-
scured, by compartmentalising his views.
I note with regret that some readers dislike my referring to my other re-
search. I have made each book as self-contained as possible, yet attentive
readers should have questions about various points which deserve more ex-
tensive analysis and documentation. When I have provided such analysis, I
have cited it; where others have provided relevant analysis, I cite theirs. Phil-
osophy – and especially Critical philosophy as Hegel reconstructs it into prag-
matic realism – requires systematic, detailed and comprehensive investiga-
tions. 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), re-
gardless 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 charac-
ter, scope and validity of forms of rational judgment and their roles within
human experience, knowledge and action, the integrity of Kant’s Critical phil-
osophy stands out in relief, and clarifies how many of Kant’s expository, and
some substantive wrinkles can be ironed out.
 9

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 He-
gel 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 sys-
tematic Critical philosophy. This imbalance is not due to lack of good infor-
mation (cf. Watson 1881, 1908; Caird 1889). Here I first summarise basic fea-
tures 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 sophis-
ticated alternative to what remain today the default options regarding cogni-
tive justification: empiricism, rationalism, intuitionism, coherentism, reliabil-
ism, 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-con-
cepts: 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 infor-
mative? If we can determine or assess the success of a conceptual analysis, so
doing apparently would require complete and adequate antecedent under-
standing 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).
10

(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 se-
mantic externalism; it also directly entails significant aspects of fallibilism re-
garding philosophical justification.
Kant espoused fallibilism about empirical knowledge (KdrV A766–7/B
794–5), and also about his philosophical method (KdrV B862), which he call-
ed ‘transcendental reflection’ (KdrV A260–1/B316–7). According to the justifi-
catory 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-Aris-
totelian 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 re-
quires demonstrating the logical impossibility of any and all alternatives to
whatever one claims to know. Accordingly, he declares that natural philoso-
phers may only propose ‘possible explanations’ of natural phenomena. This
may be a brilliant ploy to exalt faith over human reason, but is an epistemo-
logical disaster. The infalliblisist-deductivist model of a ‘proper’ science re-
mained profoundly influential from Descartes through the Twentieth Cen-
tury (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, increas-
ingly 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 hu-
man powers of judgment are five basic yet widely neglected points:

5
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).
 11

1. Reasoning using rules or principles always requires judgment to guide the pro-
per 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 re-
sponse to circumstances by forming or revising beliefs, because judgment in-
volves considering whether, how or to what extent the considerations one
now draws together in forming and considering a specific judgment (conclu-
sion) 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 consider-
ations 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 acknowl-
edging 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 informa-
tion 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 infal-
libilist deductivism develops the implications of some basic points regarding
specifically cognitive reference to particulars. Kant noted, that is, that think-
ing 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 re-
quires demonstrative reference to them, whether by sensory perception, or
12

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 re-
gard.6 Moreover, what philosophers of language call ‘demonstrative’ refer-
ence 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, epis-
temology and cognitive reference.
Kant’s express distinction between merely thinking something, and think-
ing something about any particular(s), which requires localising and referring
to it (or to them), is crucial in several philosophical regards. First, this distinc-
tion 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 par-
ticular(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 par-
ticular(s) with sufficient cognitive justification to constitute knowledge.
Per (1.), merely thinking something consistently does not suffice to know any-
thing, 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 justifica-
tion (per 4.), but sufficient cognitive justification (per 5.).

6
Melnick (1989), KTPR, Bird (2006).
7
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.
 13

These distinctions allow considerable latitude regarding tolerable (in)ac-

curacy or precision, and what extent or degree of accuracy or cognitive justifi-
cation 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 experi-
ence-transcendent metaphysics. Indeed, Kant’s semantics of singular cogni-
tive reference achieves one of the key aims of verification empiricism, without
invoking verificationism about meaning, nor about semantic or mental con-
tent (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, Na-
than Salmon, Gareth Evans (1975), Charles Travis and Ilhan Inan. They stand
together against what has become ‘mainstream’ epistemology and philoso-
phy of language, from Russell (1911) through Quine, Davidson, Putnam, van
Fraassen and beyond into contemporary ‘analytic metaphysics’.9 This quin-
tuple 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 funda-
mentals of concept empiricism and empiricist semantics in detail: Hume,
C.D. Broad and Carnap. Their attempts are enormously important and in-
structive, 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, exper-
ience 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 recon-
struct and to justify his completeness claim (Wolff 1995, 2017). The second
phase of Kant’s strategy is to identify the most fundamental concepts affor-
8
On Kant’s semantics of singular cognitive reference, see KTPR §§60–64.
9
On Quine, see Westphal (2015b); on van Fraassen, see below, §119, and Westphal (forth-
coming b); on Davidson, see Westphal (2016b); on Putnam, see Westphal (2003b).
10
See, respectively, Westphal (2013a), Turnbull (1959) and Westphal (2015b).
14

ded by those twelve formal aspects of judgment: our Categories, plus the con-
cepts 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-person-
ally) 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 con-
structivist (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 recog-
nised 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 refor-
mulation 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 per-
form 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 legiti-
mate 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 pos-
tulates. (This holds too for mathematics, which requires sets, for mathemati-
cal logic and for predicate calculus.) Their accuracy, adequacy or soundness
cannot be assessed by purely formal techniques alone. Only within pure axio-
 15

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 cog-
nitive 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-for-
mal 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 suffi-
cient for cognitive justification, nor does it constitute cognitive justification.
Only alternatives which can be deictically (ostensively, demonstratively) re-
ferred 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 continu-
ing 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 re-
vive prospects for one or another of those standard alternatives, I have over
the past three decades argued repeatedly en detail that they are indeed in-
structive, yet in principle and in practice irreparably flawed.
2.6 Transcendental Proof and Transcendental Idealism. Does Critical philo-
sophy require Transcendental Idealism? Kant claims that transcendental an-
alysis 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.
16

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 ration-
alist 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 an-
alyses and proofs in the Critique of Pure Reason substantiate this claim. He-
gel’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 tran-
scendental analyses and proofs in the Critique of Pure Reason directly under-
mine 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 con-
clusions without appeal to Transcendental Idealism. Hegel’s key Critical in-
sight 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.
 17

3.2 Kant’s Main Critical Writings:

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

KdrV Critique of Pure Reason, 1st edition KdrV 1781 ‘A’ 4:3–251 (to A405)

2nd rev. edition 1787 ‘B’ 3

KdpV Critique of Practical Reason. KprV 1788 § 5:3–163
KdU Critique of the Power of Judgment. KdU 1790 § 5:171–485
MAdN Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. MAdN 1786. § 4:467–565
Gr Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Gr 1785 p. 4:387–463
MdS Metaphysics of Morals (2 parts): MdS § 6:203–493
I Metaphyiscal First Principles of Justice RL 1797, 1798 § 6:203–372
II Metaphyiscal First Principles of Virtue TL 1798 § 6:373–493
Rel. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Rel. 1793, 1794 p. 6:1–202
Anth. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Anth. 1798, 1800 § 7:119–333
18

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?
__________________________
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) ?
 19

Metaphysics: How is metaphysics as a system of synthetic propositions known a priori at all possible for us?
1. Rational Psychology: 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 self-
contradiction 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.

KANT’S CENTRAL THESIS: All the above metaphysical questions are in principle unanswerable by human reason, for systematic rea-
sons. 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.

__________________________
12. I.e., any indirect theory of perception, which affirms our self-knowledge, but makes dubious our experience of our surroundings.
20
3.4 Kant’s System of Critical Philosophy.
I. Critique of Reason:
Critique of pure theoretical reason
Doctrine of Elements:
Doctrine of Method:
Critique of pure practical reason:
Critique of reflecting power of judgment:
Cognitions a priori from concepts and principles
Method: transcendental reflection (KdrV A260–1/B316–7)
KdrV
Transcendental Aesthetic: Space, Time
Transcendental Analytic: 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
 21

II. Critical Metaphysics KdrV B873–613

A priori analysis of a logically contingent concept of a basic kind of being:
1. embodied rational agent: º critical metaphysics of morals Gr, MdS
first principles of justice MdS 1 Rechtslehre
first principles of virtue MdS 2 Tugendlehre
2. matter = ‘the movable in space’: º critical metaphysics of nature
transcendental philosophy (not ontology) KdrV Tr. Analytic
rational physiology14 of pure reason
immanent: rational physics MAdN
rational psychology —
rational doctrine of natural organisation (crystals, chemicals; life): KdU 2 Teleology
transcendent: transcendental15 cosmology —
transcendental theology KdpV, Rel.

__________________________
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.
 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 Lad-
der, 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 criti-
cally examining a philosopher’s attempts to justify his or her views is a cruci-
al, 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 Phenomenol-
ogy, he does not address its role or legitimacy. §§8 and 9 criticise Hegel’s Lad-
der on three counts stemming from Harris’s disinterest in epistemology: Har-
ris recognises neither the importance of Hume for Hegel’s account of percep-
tion (§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 scepti-
cism (§§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 im-
portant further implications for Hegel’s philosophical system and its justi-
fiability (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 Phenomen-

ology 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

26

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 encultur-
ation (Bildung) through which Homo sapiens become actually sapient (HL
2:747). Life forces us as language-using social animals to remake the con-
scious goals of our lives, primitively given to us as self-preservation and self-
reproduction (HL 2:774). Harris stresses that philosophy cannot be under-
stood 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 en-
culturation 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-medi-
ating 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 self-
cognitive 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 consci-
ousness 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 per-
spective of ‘theological’ language is inverted.1 Hegel’s ‘manifest’ religion is the
form of world-consciousness which corrects this inversion. ‘Creation’ indi-
cates 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.
 27

world rationally. Christianity is the ‘absolute’ or ‘manifest’ religion because

the incarnation grounds an interpretation of religious language which co-
heres 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 construct-
ing it as such by reconstructing its historical phases, its past states and cir-
cumstances 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 artic-
ulate 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 inter-
pretation. 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. How-
ever, these disagreements provide no basis for criticising Hegel until we un-
derstand his own selections, interpretations and evaluations (HL 1:71–3).
Harris’s claim to show why the period from Augustus to Napoleon is im-
portant is disarmingly modest. In fact, showing why this period is so impor-
tant 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 Neph-
ew. Harris also notes Hegel’s clear awareness of the Persian and Egyptian ori-
gins 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.
3
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.
28

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 fic-
tion, it is especially important that Harris enables us to see how well the origi-
nal master of Kulturkritik discerned and systematised the social and historical
development of our rational capacity to know both nature and our own ratio-
nal 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 la-
conically 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 inter-
preters, 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 de-
velop freely the themes and arguments that they find intelligible and interest-
ing 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 suc-
cessfully 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 argu-
ment, 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 diffi-
culty of understanding the gist of their views to the difficulty of understand-
ing 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).
 29

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-synthe-
sis’ 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 di-
rectly 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 meth-
od. 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 consider-
ations, 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 ro-
mantics 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’.
30

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 prin-
ciple 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 logi-
cally 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 reconstruct-
ing Hegel’s text in exacting detail to provide a maximally complete and accu-
rate 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 pos-
sible simply to ‘read the text’, that is, its details, and construct an adequate
interpretation piecemeal. The basic point of hermeneutics echoes a corner-
stone 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 con-
text 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 hypothe-
ses, 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 scrupu-
lously accounted for. (One key example is detailed below, §§71–91.)
 31

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 inevita-
ble 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 dis-
cussing Hegel’s epistemology prior to 1975. Their quality is no greater than
their quantity: they are too general to address the details of basic epistemo-
logical issues or Hegel’s innovative responses to them. Epistemology is peren-
nially central to the justification of claims to knowledge. Disregarding episte-
mology leads to pre-Critical metaphysics and other unconstrained specula-
tions; it leads precisely to the unCritical romanticism excoriated by Kauf-
mann – 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 phil-
osophical 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 com-
parable 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 Drey-
er 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 in-
volves, Hegel’s expositors have also isolated Hegel from common philosophi-
cal problems. This isolation is hermeneutically disastrous because it seals He-
gel 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.
32

close connection with other exemplary philosophical treatments of them.

Nothing less suffices for an illuminating reconstruction – whether pro or con-
tra – of a philosophical text. One reason for the greatness of the classic com-
mentaries mentioned above is that their authors had the background, train-
ing 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 schol-
ar, 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 re-
sponse 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 discur-
sive, 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 self-
conscious within it, and that to be a world at all the world must have a neces-
sary structure unto itself (HL 2:681). Hegel studied mathematics and the em-
pirical 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 reason-
able 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.
 33

establishes the social basis of the mutual assessment of principles and prac-
tices.10 Harris thus recognises that Hegel held the unconventional yet illumi-
nating view that realism can be reconciled with a socio-historical account of
human knowledge. Quite independently, Harris ascribes the same basic epis-
temology 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 disre-
gards how Hegel justifies his highly original and controversial views in the
Phenomenology, he discounts the epistemological aspects of Hegel’s Phenom-
enology and he disregards many of Hegel’s specifically philosophical engage-
ments 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 character-
istics 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 ap-
pealing 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 deni-
grated 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 as-
sessing his achievement. However, showing how the structure of any of He-
gel’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 logi-
ca docens to explain, understand and expound what has happened (HL 1:118).
Harris states: ‘Hegel applies the logical terms Concept, Judgment and (especi-
ally) 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.
11
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.
34

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 pos-
sible 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 intro-
duction 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 ar-
gue 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 criti-
cism and indirect proof. That is how I set out the structure of Hegel’s episte-
mological 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 argu-
ment 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 ap-

peal 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 per-
ception as observed consciousness coming to recognise that intellectual ac-
tivity, ultimately the understanding, is required to unite the perceived pro-
12
See Westphal (2017d, 2018a, forthcoming b). Pinkard (1994, 420 n. 10) claims my interpre-
tation 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).
 35

perties of a thing into the perception of some one thing, and that the postula-
tion of causal forces is necessary to account for the unification of those prop-
erties 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’ re-
plies 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 ac-
count for the concept of the identity of a perceptible thing – a crucial compo-
nent 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 non-
logical 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 pragma-
tism.13 This point is also important in connection with the quite general prob-
lem of how we integrate various sensations to perceive any one object. Refer-
ring to ‘Of Scepticism with regard to the senses’ affords a complete, intelligi-
ble, sound and philosophically informative reconstruction of Hegel’s analysis
in ‘Perception’. Hegel’s argument constitutes a two-pronged reductio ad ab-
surdum 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.
36

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 episte-
mological 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 ‘discov-
ery’ 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 expli-
cate or assess its justification. Regrettably, this is not an isolated problem;
Harris often refers to ‘Perception’ as the model for subsequent dialectical epi-
sodes.14 There are indeed correspondences between Hegel’s analyses in ‘Con-
sciousness’ 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 criti-
cal 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 al-
ways 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 “intu-
ition” 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 su-

perficial 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 else-
where 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 de-
scribes Hegel’s analysis as providing ‘an ironic reduction of the moral stand-
point 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 introduc-
tion 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 interpre-
tation 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.
38

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 incoher-
ent; Kant’s view of the autonomy of moral agency is inconsistent with view-
ing the moral law as a divine command; finally, Kant’s moral principles can-
not 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 com-
plement to’ his own analysis (HL 2:450 n. 3, 451 n. 10). I grant that Harris’s ac-
count 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 na-
ture of things (WdL I, 21:232.22–29), Harris shows a tender-heartedness to-
ward 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 phi-
losophy. In particular, he neglects issues central to Hegel’s phenomenological
method about the assessment and internal criticism of alternative philosoph-
ical 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.
 39

‘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, Sex-
tus 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 gen-
eral 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 li-
cense to ignore epistemology and focus upon the supposed object of ‘abso-
lute’ 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 epistemol-
ogy and engaging directly in cognition of things (PhdG 9:54.30–55.30/¶4). His
Introduction (Einleitung) then provides a very sophisticated method for ex-
amining epistemological issues without succumbing to many pitfalls of mo-
dern and contemporary epistemology. Many of his most important episte-
mological cues Hegel took from Sextus Empiricus.
Though some recent studies have paid some attention to Hegel’s episte-
mology, too often expositions of Hegel’s views on knowledge have been re-
18
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.
40

stricted to the expositor’s epistemological preconceptions. As noted, Harris

reads Hegel’s Phenomenology with an open epistemological mind and identi-
fies several of Hegel’s most important and innovative views about human
knowledge. However, Harris pays insufficient attention to the role of justifica-
tion in knowledge, and so pays insufficient attention to Hegel’s justification
for his own views. I now focus these general issues by considering the funda-
mental importance of Sextus Empiricus for Hegel’s Phenomenology. Despite
my detailed account of Hegel’s concern with Sextus and of Hegel’s sophisti-
cated response to Pyrrhonian skepticism (HER; cf. below, §§60–64, 83–91),
Hegel’s Ladder disregards Sextus. Harris finds my account ‘unnecessarily com-
plicated’ (HL 1:204 n. 45). Repetition is unpersuasive; here I augment my sys-
tematic 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 appar-
ent knowledge. How can we distinguish genuine from counterfeit knowl-
edge? 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 exami-
nation 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 determin-
ing, on the basis of the resulting agreement or disagreement with the stan-
dard, 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 Dilem-

ma of the Criterion:
20
See Harris (1998), 625–9. There Harris recognises that we agree that Hegel’s Phenomen-
ology 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 re-
duces itself to a form of circular reasoning the discovery of the criterion be-
comes 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 Pyr-
rhonian scepticism, and in particular, a central concern with this crucial Di-
lemma of the Criterion. We should expect this, given Hegel’s extended analy-
sis 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 com-
mon 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. For-
ster (1998, 131) happens to quote Sextus mentioning in passing the Dilemma of the Criter-
ion, 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 asser-
tion. (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 ‘employ-
ing’ (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 formu-
lation 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 pre-
pared 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.
 43

use, by which we discover the truth, already makes assumptions about knowl-
edge 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 Philoso-
phy that ancient scepticism undermines purported, merely sensory knowl-
edge.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 con-
cerns ‘the changeable’ and ‘the unchangeable’ in ‘Unhappy Consciousness’
(PhdG, chapt. IVBc). Harris writes:
These terms (Unwandelbare, Wandelbare) descend naturally enough from He-
gel’s account of the two sides of the skeptical self-consciousness, which “expe-
riences its own freedom in the Wandel of all that aims to make itself firm for
it” and “has itself the doubled contradictory consciousness of unchangeable-
ness (Unwandelbarkeit) and equality, and of total contingency and inequality
with itself” ([PhdG] ¶205). But I do not think they are derived from the techni-
cal 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. How-
ever, these terms do refer to issues central to classical scepticism: the connec-
tion 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).
44

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). He-
gel is right that this notion of truth is a substantive assumption made by Pyr-
rhonists, 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 necessar-
ily the same (HL 2:379), without noting Parmenides’ view that being is neces-
sarily 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 lime-
twig, 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.)
 45

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, Weis-
haupt, 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 jus-
tify 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 re-
nounced their old system to assert that before the coming of the critical phi-
losophy 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 philosophiz-
ing and of going back to the first principles of reason in order to base a sys-
tem, more or less successfully, upon them, but there had to be many experi-
ments of this kind, each of which made its contribution to present-day philos-
ophy. 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 proposi-
tion. … 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 differ-
ent 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 superior-

ity to all other philosophies as sharply as possible because, he held, the Criti-
cal philosophy supplants all others. Hegel was more charitable toward other
philosophies than Kant because he sought to integrate them into the histori-
cal development of reason and to integrate their insights into his own com-
prehensive 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-evi-
dent first principles, whether rational or sensory (below, §§83–91). Accord-
ingly he recognised that philosophical justification requires detailed criticism
of alternative views. Moreover, he recognised that this criticism must be in-
ternal 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, quot-
ed 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 as-
sumptions?’ (HL 1:181). He contends that there is no genuine problem of asses-
sing 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-prob-
lem 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)
 47

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” an-
other 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 ‘mo-
ments’? 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 con-
ception 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) ‘meth-
odological 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 ratio-
nally. 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-
48

sition’ than, he says, its denial is.27 This ‘axiom’ is one of the most controver-
sial 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 axi-
om’. 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 fac-
ing its possibility. Indeed, Harris’s explicit methodological reflections on criti-
cism 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 sig-

nificantly better than his reflections on method. However, when Harris ad-
dresses the crucial issue of the scientific character of Hegel’s phenomenologi-
cal 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 “abso-
lute 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 histor-
27
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 straight-
forward 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 dis-
cussed by Houlgate (2005), 242–75.
 49

ical and literary sources and references suffice to substantiate Hegel’s com-
mitment 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 con-
scious 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 imagi-
nary) 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 can-

not 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 tremen-
dous erudition and subtlety of Harris’s reconstruction of Hegel’s Phenomenology.
50

Note an important tension between these two passages: The first contrasts
recollection to imagination and appears to stress the importance of recollect-
ing 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 Mic-
hael 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-justifi-
cation 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 show-
ing 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 ‘meta-
physical 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’ ‘me-
taphysical certainty’ (HER 32–3). Recourse to psychological certainty or secu-
rity 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 mo-
ments of the rational community, for whom he is interpreting these tradi-
tions. 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 con-
ception 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 ad-
dress the distinction between what we take to be justified and true versus
what is justified and true. Harris neither recognises nor addresses these ten-
sions, though they are critical to distinguishing historical (or logical) fact
from fiction, and thus are crucial to Hegel’s attempt to reconstruct and trans-
form 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 con-
sciousness 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 com-
plex issues about self-understanding, which is inherently social, historical
and interpretive. A crucial element of rational freedom is involved in assess-
ing 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, de-
spite 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-inter-
pretation as we determine who we are through determining where we have
come from and how we became who we are. Harris states: ‘Unless the mani-
festation of the actual concept of Spirit begins at the level of immediate sensi-
bility, 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 dis-
missal of historical fact or accuracy in connection with recollection cum crea-
31
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.
52

tive imagination (quoted above). However, the selections and kinds of selec-
tion 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 Sex-
tus’s Dilemma of the Criterion. An adequate response is required for the pos-
sibility 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 vici-
ous circularity or petitio principii, quite aside from holistic theories of meaning.
2. Having evidence is conceptually distinct from accepting it; we can have ex-
cellent 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 assump-
tions be submitted to critical scrutiny? Can they be assessed without presup-
posing 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., Chis-
holm, 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 reconstruct-
ing Hegel’s phenomenological science of human experience.33

32
Hence I am unsurprised, yet disappointed, that Harris finds my reconstruction of He-
gel’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).
 53

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 opin-
ions 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 introspec-
tion (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 philos-
ophy) 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 under-
standing 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 ‘jus-
tify’ 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 Phenomenol-
ogy 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 sophis-
ticated sceptic out of being sceptical, and he is pessimistic about convincing
non-sceptical dissenters by argumentative means.35 This, I believe, leads Har-
ris 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 He-
34
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-Hegeli-
ans), 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 ¶.)
54

gel’s brand of logic is optional37 and that Hegel’s Phenomenology remains es-
sential 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 argu-
ments 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 counter-
argument. This defines dogmatism and dogmatic scepticism, and it is funda-
mentally 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 distin-
guishes 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 pes-
simistic 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 Phenom-
enology 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 logi-
cal, non-historical accounts of human thought, knowledge and justification
fail (HER, 18–90), and that all historicist-relativist cum conventionalist ac-
counts 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 “be-
yond 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).
 55

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 be-
low, §§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 Har-
ris’s account of those exigencies, but I submit that I have identified basic the-
oretical problems Harris neglects; these are examined throughout this study.
I believe my interpretation of Hegel’s critique of rational, justificatory judg-
ment, together with Hegel’s epistemology, complements Harris’s reconstruc-
tion of Hegel’s philosophical Kulturkritik. Perhaps Hegel’s solution to the Pyr-
rhonian Dilemma of the Criterion is more complex than needed for address-
ing 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 com-
mentary is an unprecedented landmark in Hegel scholarship, that it is indis-
pensable for determining and assessing Hegel’s philosophical aims and meth-
ods in the Phenomenology of Spirit, but also to show that Hegel’s critical en-
gagement with the history of philosophy and with basic issues in epistemol-
ogy 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).
56

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 ‘justifi-
cation’ 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 intro-
duction to and justification of the Logic (cf. Fulda 1975, Collins 2012).
Second, Harris claims to provide a ‘positive interpretation of the Phenom-
enology as a ‘science of the experience of consciousness’. The ‘other side’, Har-
ris (1998, 626) continues, ‘– the reading of the book as a negative “introduc-
tion” to speculative logic – has been emphasized almost ad nauseam in my
opinion (and Westphal’s reaction shows that it will never lack for skillful ad-
vocates)’. 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 pro-
duced’. This response exhibits precisely what I called (above, §9) Harris’ ten-
der-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 incoher-
ence; 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 noth-
ing 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 identi-
fied within his Critical philosophy. Circa 1800, Tuschling argues, Kant devel-
ops 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 transcen-
dentally 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 self-
positing 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 consti-
tute 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.
2
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 Akade-
mie der Wissenschaften (Potsdam): http://kant.bbaw.de/opus-postumum/bildspeicher/C01_
027b.jpg/image_view_fullscreen.

© 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 inclu-
sion of Hegel in this list of absolute idealists is confirmed by Troxler’s Nach-
schrift 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 Transcen-
dental 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 analy-
sis. Though my analysis is independent of Onnasch’s, the convergence of our
previously independent inquiries is striking. Some issues regarding the ortho-
graphic 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 sec-
ond 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
 59

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 con-
tinuous inscription.3
Adickes (1920, 764, cf. 840) quotes this sentence without further com-
ment, simply citing ‘C 375’. His system of referencing (ibid., V) throughout his
discussion of the first Konvolut (and not only this Konvolut), strongly sug-
gests, 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 ex-
tremely 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-Ar-
chiv, 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 schol-
ars. 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 Phenomen-
ology of Spirit (1807), the Science of Logic (1812–1816, 1832) and the Encyclo-
paedia 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 Transzendentalphil-
osophie in the opus postumum (§18), he critically rejected (ca. 1804) intellec-
tual 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 Transzendentalphiloso-
3
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.
60

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 some-
how 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 construc-
tive 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 develop-
ment 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 re-
sponse to Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Yet the relevant ‘development’ re-
vealed 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 methodologi-
cal 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.
 61

One critical point is this. In the Differenzschrift (1801) Hegel clearly recog-
nised 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-tempo-
ral 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. How-
ever, the causal principle required by the Analogies of Experience is the spe-
cific causal principle that every spatio-temporal, physical event has an exter-
nal physical cause. This latter principle is equivalent to Kant’s law of inertia.
Hegel recognised that Kant’s essentially kinematic premises from ‘Phorono-
my’ 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 Tran-
scendental Idealism cannot deliver its promised justification of causal judg-
ments, 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 phe-
nomena. 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 incapac-
ity to make any judgments at all would in turn preclude our identifying any
objects or events around us and thus preclude our distinguishing ourselves
62

from them. In this case, we would – for reasons provided by Kant’s ‘Transcen-
dental 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 mind-
independent world. The fundamental premiss of Kant’s Transcendental Ideal-
ism 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 exten-
sion. 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 teleo-
logical 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 Cri-
tique (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).
 63

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 struc-
ture 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 ideal-

ism 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’ understand-
ing (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) distin-
guish 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 iden-
tity 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 criti-
cal 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.
64

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 wide-
spread assumption amongst commentators is that Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit (1807) is a failed early work excised by Hegel from his own philosophi-
cal system, and that accordingly the Science of Logic is Hegel’s main philo-
sophical 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 transcen-
dental philosophy. However, it is extremely difficult to understand how a
sound or even a valid argument for his new form of transcendental philoso-
phy could be developed on the basis of his revamped ideas about transcen-
dental 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 main-
tains his allegiance in the opus postumum to the infallibilist-deductivist mo-
del 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 alterna-
tives. Kant realised of course that the relevant first premises for his transcen-
dental 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 ap-
peal to his Transcendental Idealism.
 65

One problem for Kant’s new transcendental philosophy in the later fasci-
cles of the opus postumum is that Kant still adheres to the infallibilist-deduc-
tivist 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 expe-
rience, and whatever satisfies those conditions, must derive from (or be legis-
lated by) the structure and functioning of the human mind. Kant’s adherence
to these two basic premises is reflected in his continued inference, that any-
thing 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 precari-
ous 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 knowl-
edge in accord with the deductivist ideal of scientia. In this regard Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason – along with Descartes’ foundationalism and the em-
piricist attempt to reduce the language of physical objects to the language of
sense-data – are enormously instructive epistemological failures. Their fail-
ures show that the deductivist model of scientia simply is not suited to non-
formal 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 devel-
ops important and central strands of a fallibilist and social (even an histori-
cal) 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.
66

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 re-
quires singular sensory presentation of objects known, and that only such de-
terminate 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 particu-
lars 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 prag-
matic-realist theory of knowledge rooted in his internal critique of Kant’s
Transcendental Idealism, and that Hegel’s pragmatic, social and historical ac-
count 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 He-
gel 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’ knowl-
edge (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 founda-
tionalist 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 ratio-
nal justification Hegel develops in the 1807 Phenomenology. Hegel’s account
of rational justification thus critically rejects the three basic, underlying pre-
mises of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and his new transcendental philoso-
phy in the later fascicles of the opus postumum. This is a very important rea-
son why Hegel’s mature idealism cannot be understood as an outgrowth or
radicalisation either of Kant’s transcendental idealism or of Kant’s Selbstset-
zungslehre 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 devel-
oped in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, the Science of Logic and the Encyclo-

12
See Westphal (2000), (2002–03), (2009b), (2010a).
 67

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 es-
sential to their identity conditions (the conditions that must be satisfied for
something to be what it is) and that their causal characteristics are funda-
mentally relational and hence constitutively interrelate spatio-temporal indi-
viduals. Hence the causal interdependence of particulars, along with the con-
stitutive 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 con-
trast with opposed characteristics of other things and because they are gener-
ated, 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 distinc-
tive regularities or patterns of behaviour, including causal regularities. More
importantly, this concept, Hegel argues, exists only in and as the interconnec-
tion 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 in-
dividually self-sufficient, and thus not ultimately real, where to be ‘real’ re-
quires 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 ex-
pressed, articulated or suggested by Hegel’s early ‘absolute idealism’ ca. 1801.
The sceptical view that things are the unsensed causes of sensory experi-
ence 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 Under-
standing’ 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 ‘phenomen-
ological’ method.) According to such an account, laws of nature are relations
among manifest phenomena. This view was prominent throughout the nine-
teenth century in German and British physics. Very briefly, Hegel contends
68

that nothing more can be attributed to any force or set of forces than pre-
cisely the array of manifest phenomena which they are postulated to explain,
so that ultimately there is nothing more to ‘forces’ than the conceptual inter-
relation of manifest phenomena. These interrelations are, Hegel argues, ob-
jective features of those phenomena, and the aim of conceiving those phe-
nomena is to formulate those interrelations accurately. Because the interrela-
tions among and within natural phenomena are not strictly speaking percep-
tible, but nonetheless are objective features of those phenomena, those inter-
relations 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 con-
nection 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) – pre-
sumably 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 analy-
sis of causal relations clarify and reinforce these points.
Hegel identifies a key equivocation in the traditional concept of sub-
stance. 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 ontol-
ogy. 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 character-
istic. Another sense of the term ‘intrinsic’ in this connection lies in its con-
trast with ‘extrinsic’ or ‘relational’. In view of this contrast, an ‘intrinsic’ char-
 69

acteristic is contained solely within the individual substance; it is non-rela-

tional. These two senses of ‘intrinsic’ have been conflated throughout the his-
tory of philosophy; conflating them generates the standard assumption that
relational properties cannot be essential to individual substances. (Put se-
mantically, the assumption is that relations are expressed by polyadic predi-
cates, whereas only monadic predicates can express the essential characteris-
tics 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 particu-
lar, Hegel contends that this conflation blocks our comprehension of causal
forces and causal relations. Only if we clarify this equivocation can we recog-
nise 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 es-
sential 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 sci-
ence presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics. (Enz. § 246R).

Stated more directly, already in 1807 Hegel contends that any tenable philo-
sophical theory of human knowledge must take the natural sciences into very
close consideration. This finding about Hegel’s analysis in ‘Force and Under-
standing’ is greatly augmented and further supported by Hegel’s taking con-
temporaneous 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 sophisti-
cated account of the explanatory power involved in the integration of physi-
cal 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).
70

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 con-
tends that general scientific laws, such as Newton’s Laws of Motion, are ex-
pressly 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 (be-
cause 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 individu-
als (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, rough-
ly our classifications for or descriptions of particulars.) Consequently, con-
ceptions lack truth-value unless and until they are incorporated into judg-
ments by which they are referred to particulars. This same point holds, analo-
gously, for combinations of conceptions, however complex or specific, in-
cluding 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
 71

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 cogni-
tive component: General laws of nature are not themselves objects of knowl-
edge; they are objects of knowledge only when taken together with the sub-
sidiary 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 gen-
eral 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 develop-
ment 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 sen-
tence 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, appear-
ance, relation, thing, cause) and principles of logic (e.g., identity, excluded
14
Cf. Enz. §246n.; cf. Vorlesungen über die Logik (1831), 72.
15
‘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.
72

middle, non-contradiction, forms of judgment and syllogism). It also analyses

principles of scientific explanation (force, matter, measure, cognition; me-
chanical, 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 He-
gel’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 Sci-
ence 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 Phenomenol-
ogy 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 Na-
ture 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), Re-
nault (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.
 73

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 Transcenden-
tal 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 real-
ised 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 succeed-
ed far more than Kant in granting a proper transcendental role to the integ-
rity of experience within human cognition.20

22 THE COSTS OF NEGLECTING HEGEL’S INTRODUCTION TO THE 1807 PHENOMENOL-

OGY.

These points reveal a further assumption required by the enormous extrapo-

lation 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 re-
sults in part from the longstanding habit of disregarding Hegel’s own Intro-
duction (Einleitung) to the 1807 Phenomenology in favour of the much more
exciting, ambitious and – so it seems – brazenly metaphysical Preface (Vor-
rede), which is a Preface to Hegel’s projected System of Philosophy, not only
to the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. Neglecting Hegel’s Introduction circum-
vents Hegel’s central concern with epistemology, reflected in his exact para-
phrase 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 Aetherdeduk-
tion. Considered in light of his analysis, my account of the ‘Consciousness’ section of
Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology (Westphal 2009b) may suggest a positive answer.
74

and in the body of the Phenomenology (above, §11).21 Neglecting Hegel’s Phe-
nomenology 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 philoso-
phy in terms of Transcendental Idealism, Kant’s Selbstsetzungslehre, intellec-
tual 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-gen-
erating foundation for Hegel’s philosophical system avoid turning Hegel’s de-
cidedly 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 deter-
minately 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, self-
generating 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 phil-
osophical justification more broadly among Hegel’s expositors has occluded Hegel’s cen-
tral and explicit concerns with these important issues and thus distorted our under-
standing and indeed much of our exposition of Hegel’s views.
 75

7. To what extent can viewing Hegel’s Science of Logic as the self-sufficient, self-
generating foundation for Hegel’s philosophical system avoid ascribing to
Hegel the very same fault he claimed to find in Schelling’s systems of philoso-
phy, namely schematising formalism?
Though I cannot foreclose on the prospect of cogent answers to such ques-
tions, 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 ser-
iously distorting our understanding of Hegel’s system of philosophy and en-
tirely occluding one of Hegel’s major achievements: the development of the
first and still the most sophisticated transcendental-pragmatic theory of se-
mantic analysis and of rational justification, which solves the Pyrrhonian Di-
lemma of the Criterion and justifies realism in epistemology and philosophy
of science and also strict objectivity regarding practical norms.23 To under-
stand 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 Trans-
zendentalphilosophie 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 transcen-
dental philosophy and of empirical knowledge. Hence neither it, nor Kant’s
late Transzendentalphilosophie nor his Selbstsetzungslehre, cast much illumi-
nation 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 phe-
nomena, 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).
76

Though convenient, the idea that Hegel’s absolute idealism is an exten-

sion or a radicalisation of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism is ill-conceived and
rests on over-simplifications which can be corrected only by careful system-
atic reconstruction of Hegel’s texts and issues. My surmise is that this conve-
nient idea is the product of lecture halls, in which lecturers had the unenvi-
able task of providing a brief synopsis of Hegel’s extraordinarily compendi-
ous, detailed and intricate philosophy. Hegel’s Entwicklungsgeschichte is fas-
cinating and can be very helpful in understanding his mature views, though
only if it is critically reconstructed and assessed in view of Hegel’s philosophi-
cal 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 wide-
spread 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 mod-
els of intellectual intuition, self-positing or (in some sense) ‘radicalised’ tran-
scendental idealism precludes answering – or even posing – the above ques-
tions (§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-posit-
ing 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 ex-
plicit 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 thor-
ough and mature Hegelian critique. Yet Hegel makes two fundamental criti-
cisms 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 im-
manent and far more significant than they first appear. Both objections were
briefly summarised above (§§18.3, 18.4); here they are considered more thor-
oughly. Together, they constitute the key points of a profound internal cri-
tique 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.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_005

78

in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (MAdN). ‘Special meta-

physics’, 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 under-
standing and reason themselves within a system of all concepts and princi-
ples 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 pos-
sible.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 exam-
ples in Kant’s Analogies of Experience, because the form of the alterations
considered there – the successive states of affairs illustrated by Kant’s exam-
ples – can be explicated a priori according to the law of causality and the con-
ditions 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 indis-
pensable 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.
3
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.
 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 possi-
ble.9 Notice, for example, that after writing the Foundations (1786) Kant
claims, in the second edition Preface of the first Critique (1787), that his tran-
scendental 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 New-
tonian 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 Foun-
dations. 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 dynami-
cal. (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 de-
monstrable; rather, they can only be feigned to explain phenomena empiri-
cally 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 Founda-
tions in terms only suitable to ‘Phoronomy’.12 ‘Phoronomy’ is the quasi-mathe-
9
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).
80

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 pro-
vide 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 tran-
scend 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 Founda-
tions 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 concern-
ing 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.
14
In this regard, Kant’s and Hegel’s criticism of the Foundations echoes Aristotle’s criti-
cism 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.
 81

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 proposi-
tion)’.15 ‘Lessening or destroying’ (vermindert oder aufhebt) are not pure math-
ematical concepts! They are dynamic concepts that make no sense except by
reference to forces: ‘cause’ (Ursache) or ‘resistance’ (Widerstand). Conse-
quently, 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 tran-
scribed this objection onto the first sheet of what became the opus postu-
mum.16 This explains Kant’s reduction of the Foundations to ‘phoronomy’. Be-
cause ‘phoronomy’ is modelled closely on mathematics (though it includes
time and motion) this objection establishes Hegel’s point that Kant’s con-
structions 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 mat-
ter, 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 intensi-
ties 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 attrac-
tion 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 constitu-
tively, 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.
16
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.
82

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 constitu-
tive, 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 be-
tween it and the alleged basic forces of attraction and repulsion that suppos-
edly 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 pur-
ported 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 ei-
ther rest or ‘motion in the same direction’. What does ‘same direction’ mean?
According to Newton, ‘same direction’ meant rectilinear motion, as he explic-
itly 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 direc-
tion’ 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 for-
ward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by forces impressed’ (Newton
1999, 416).
 83

in ‘Phoronomy’ that he cannot treat non-linear motions in that chapter be-

cause Phoronomy must abstract from all forces, and such motions presup-
pose forces (MAdN 4:480.15–18, 4:95.5–12). This may seem to pick nits, but ev-
erything turns on how one understands ‘motion in the same direction’. New-
ton defined it in terms of rectilinear motion. Aristotle would have defined
‘motion in the same direction’ in terms of something moving toward its natu-
ral place. Understood in this way, Aristotle could accept most of Kant’s Sec-
ond Law (except Kant’s claim about constant velocity). In another case, plan-
etary 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 rectilin-
ear motion is the natural state of motion of bodies. At one point Kant recog-
nises that progressive movements might be curved (MAdN 4:483.8–16). How-
ever, 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 cau-
sal 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 de-
pends upon such desire, namely feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and appe-
tite 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 determi-
nations 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 fo-
cuses only on some characteristics of matter, and hence only on some charac-
teristics 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 con-
cept 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 transcen-
dental and metaphysical principles and arguments, whether spatially exten-
ded bodies invested with living forces could violate the laws of physics. An-
other 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 dis-
tinct logical, transcendental, metaphysical and empirical possibility that mat-
ter 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).
 85

gave us full assurances that no detectable external forces influenced that pe-
culiar billiard ball, and that thorough non-destructive analysis of the ball re-
vealed 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 re-
quires this stronger conclusion. Is it plausible to suppose that matter neces-
sarily 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 sub-
ject 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 judg-
ments 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 empir-
ical 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 de-
pends upon such desire, namely feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and appe-
tite 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 defi-
nition; it is a claim about what we know. Unfortunately, Kant gives no rea-
sons to think that this claim to knowledge is transcendental or metaphysical,
rather than empirical. (The same problem infects Kant’s argument in the Am-
86

phiboly against the existence of monads within the phenomenal realm.21) The
only empirical element which is supposed to enter Kant’s metaphysical anal-
ysis 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 can-
not 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 tran-
scend 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 Founda-
tions in Kant’s system, they mark a decisive failure of Kant’s Critique of empir-
ical and scientific knowledge as a whole. Two reasons for this may be indi-
cated briefly.
29.1 Kant’s Table of Categories as a Groundplan for Rational Physics. Burk-
hard 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 under-
standing 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.
 87

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 form-
ulates 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 cate-
gory 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 ne-
gation) requires more than refutation, it also requires identifying and high-
lighting 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 impor-
tant to Hegel’s reconstruction of Kant’s Critical philosophy sans Transcen-
dental Idealism (below, §§43–46).

22
See Guyer (1987), 168, 212–4, 224–5, 228, 239, 246, 274–5; also Edwards (2000).
23
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 sub-
stances is necessary for using the Principles of the Analogies (KTPR, §61).
 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 condi-
tion itself is not incoherent.1 The oddity lies in another transcendental mate-
rial 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 ide-
alism detailed in KTPR, §§15–29.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_006

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 appre-
hension, it would be entirely accidental that appearances should fit into a
connection in human knowledge. For even though we should have the capac-
ity 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 percep-
tions 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 neces-
sity, 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 repro-
duction. 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. Accord-
ing 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 neces-
sary, 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 associa-
tion, 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 neces-
sity of the associability of the manifold of intuition is a conditional necessity,
holding between that manifold and any self-conscious (human) subject. Nec-
essarily, if a human subject is self-consciously aware of an object via a mani-
fold of intuition, then the content of that manifold is associable. The associ-
ability of this content is its ‘affinity’. The fact that affinity is necessary, and
 91

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 resem-
ble 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 tran-
scendental principle [of genera]. In accordance with this latter principle,
homogeneity is necessarily presupposed in the manifold of possible experi-
ence (although we cannot determine a priori its degree); for without homoge-
neity, 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 mani-
fold: 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; conse-
quently 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 experi-

ence exclusively in terms of the nature and functioning of our cognitive appa-
ratus 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.
92

This thesis defines Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.5 Kant argues that this
kind of explanation also holds true of the transcendental affinity of the sen-
sory manifold. This passage is Kant’s most explicit statement of his argument:
I therefore ask, how do you make comprehensible to yourselves the thorough-
going 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 cog-
nition 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 challen-
ges non-Kantians to explain it, and claims it is easy to explain on his Tran-
scendental Idealist principles. Here Kant errs seriously: Transcendental Ideal-
ism 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 our-
selves, 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).
 93

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 experi-
ence) 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 mani-
fold of intuition (or a set of appearances) is the mere consequence of its ‘tran-
scendental 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 imagina-
tion (KdrV A123, 4:90.37–91.2), is equivocal. Like the English ‘consequence’,
the German ‘Folge’ can denote either logical or causal consequence. The affin-
ity 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 lack-
ed affinity. However, this affinity cannot be a functional product (causal con-
sequence) 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 produc-
ing, i.e. generating, a substantial set of associable empirical intuitions. This
would transgress the cardinal tenet of Transcendental Idealism that the mat-
ter 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 sen-
sory 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 con-
sists in regularities among the particularities of the contents of sensations.
94

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 associa-
ble, i.e., unless the (ultimately sensory) representations involved have ‘affin-
ity’ 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 intro-
ducing 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 other-
wise 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 affin-
ity is a contingent function of the specific characteristics of the a posteriori
matter of sensation, namely the (recognisable) similarities and differences a-
mongst those characteristics of that matter. Kant is thus correct that the prin-
ciple 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 princi-
ple 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 tran-
scendental 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.
8
Contra KdrV A101–2, A113–4, A122.
9
Contra KdrV A113–4, quoted above, §32.
 95

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 ‘Transcen-
dental 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 re-
mark 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 prob-
lems 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 con-
tent 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 re-
marks 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 vari-
ety 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.
96

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 mani-
fold, provides the lynch pin that both holds Hegel’s various formulations to-
gether, 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 in-
dicate many of the central problems Hegel addressed in his mature philoso-
phy, they do so within an immature, still developing, often obscure philoso-
phical framework. This is to say, I make no attempt to improve upon Harris’s
(1984) comprehensive reconstruction of Hegel’s Jena writings. I shall una-
bashedly 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 Writ-
ings. 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 sensa-
tions 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, multipli-
city, 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).
 97

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 intel-
lect 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 ab-
straction 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
98

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 posteri-
ori 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 recognis-
able order in the matter (or contents) of sensation if we are to have experi-
ence 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 determin-
ations 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 im-
manent 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 incon-
ceivable. 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 pheno-
mena are left undetermined by our human discursive understanding; so they must be
thought of as determined by another understanding. However, this determination by an-
other 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).
 99

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 tran-

scendental 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 philoso-
phy 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 intellec-
tual 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 ob-
jects we experience must be in space and time because our forms of receptiv-
ity are spatial and temporal in the sense that they are only receptive to stimu-
lation (affection) by spatial and temporal objects.23 In various, often less pre-
20
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 epistemo-
logical 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 mani-
fold, 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 uni-
versality 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-
100

cise forms, this objection was commonplace in Hegel’s day.24

Most important is that this objection stems directly from principles inter-
nal 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 contrib-
uted 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 neverthe-
less be necessary conditions knowable a priori for humanly possible experi-
ence 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. More-
over, 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 construc-
tion’ (GW 4:365.18–367.27). This same high estimation of Kant’s Transcenden-
tal Deduction, together with dismissal of Kant’s Transcendental Idealist ac-
count 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 man-
ifold 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 sen-
sory 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 ex-
perience at all. If so, then there is some sense in saying that there is a com-
mon structure that is instantiated in the world, exhibited (at least in part) in
our experience, and reconstructed in our thought and knowledge. This struc-
ture 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, Brast-
berger, 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 De-
duction. 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-con-
scious system’ in the world, which system can become an object of conscious-
ness and knowledge in our experience of the world.
Because this idea is not merely out of philosophical fashion, but so unfa-
miliar, it deserves further comment. This is especially so, because Hegel first
explored this thesis in connection with intellectual intuition. Hence it is im-
portant 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 consid-
ered 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-Kanti-
26
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.)
102

an, Schelling-inspired view of an intuitive intellect. Though Hegel soon re-

jected 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 intel-
lect 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 arti-
culated 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 ‘ob-
jective’ and ‘subjective’ aspects of Hegel’s ‘concept’ (Begriff), where the objec-
tive 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, sensa-
tions, cognitions, intuitions and all kinds of concepts as species of representa-
tions; hence they exist only if human intellects exist. Hegel takes great pains
in discussing ‘the Concept in General’ to repudiate this psychological under-
standing of concepts. Hegel directly states that such psychological consider-
ations – 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 understand-
ing, 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 spiri-
tual, 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.
 103

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 sub-
jects generating the conceptual conditions that make the objects they experi-
ence 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) mislead-
ing 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-deter-
minations 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 transcenden-
tal 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 recon-
structions 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 com-
monsense 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.
29
The use of Kant’s arguments in the Transcendental Analytic, especially in the Analo-
gies and the Refutation of Idealism, in service of realism is a common theme in Neo-Kant-
ian 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.
104

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-con-
scious experience).
As noted above (§§31), the affinity of the manifold of sensory intuition is a
transcendental condition of the possibility of self-conscious human experi-
ence. 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 appear-
ances 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 ac-
count of the relation between discursive concepts and the particulars sub-
sumed 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.
 105

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 – com-
plex 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 mem-
ber of a complex whole.34 When Hegel finally rescinds the model of intellec-
tual 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, sup-
ported 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 inform-
ing 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 ex-
ternalism, 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 Phenomen-
ology, which first examines and confirms the cognitive competence of philosophy prior to
such detailed epistemological investigations. More important, however, is Hegel’s identifi-
cation and development of a much more exoteric analysis and justification of mental con-
tent externalism to reach the same crucial conclusion; see below, §§83–91.
106

36 APPENDIX: EVIDENCE OF HEGEL’S AWARENESS OF KANT’S ISSUE OF TRANSCENDEN-

TAL 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 con-
cepts. Because I claim that Hegel was aware of Kant’s views on the transcen-
dental affinity of the sensory manifold, though he did not refer to it by this
terminology, these passages bear quotation and careful consideration. Be-
cause 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, substanti-
ality, multiplicity, even actuality and possibility, through the good offices of hu-
man 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 empiri-
cal reality nothing remains but to think that sensation comes from the things in
themselves. For the incomprehensible determinateness of the empirical con-
sciousness 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 sen-
sations is their unity, and this unity is merely the self-consciousness of an experi-
encing 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).
 107

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 them-
selves. 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 judg-
ment cannot be subsumptive but only reflecting. Objectivity and stability derive
solely from the categories; the realm of things in themselves is without catego-
ries; 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 subjec-
tive. 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 ap-
pearances. 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 in-
comprehensible 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 su-
pervenes 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 sophisti-
cated and subtle, though often obscure and nascent.1 Understanding and
learning from Hegel’s early writings requires overcoming wide-spread unclar-
ity about the nature of ‘the’ intuitive intellect. It is widely assumed that, be-
cause 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 com-
mentators, whether sympathetic or critical, followed them in this assump-
tion.2 Yet this is not how Kant understood an intuitive intellect. Gram (1981)
has shown that Schelling and Fichte each have different accounts of ‘intellec-
tual 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 condi-
tions 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 an-
other. 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 na-
ture 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.
2
This assumption is shared, e.g., by Werner Pluhar, whose translation glosses an ‘intui-
tive’ intellect as one that is not ‘discursive, i.e., conceptual’ (KdU 1987, 248).
3
Gram (1981) does not discuss Hegel’s views.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_007

110

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 ev-
erything 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 philoso-
phy (WdL I, 11:31n., 21:46n.). One central task of the present study is to deter-
mine 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 epistemol-
ogy. I argue instead that Hegel drew deeply from Kant’s method of transcen-
dental 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 dis-
4
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 ‘nou-
mena’); 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 sen-
sibility (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 di-
rect 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).
 111

tinguished by Gram) is not aconceptual.

Kant says that if our understanding were intuitive, it would lack both con-
cepts and intuitions – concepts, that is, ‘which concern merely the possibility
of an object’ and intuitions ‘which give us something, without thereby allow-
ing 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 intu-
itions. 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 indeter-
minate particulars then they have characteristics and are of kinds. A discur-
sive 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 im-
mediately 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 sinnli-
che Anschauungen (welche uns etwas geben, ohne es dadurch doch als Gegenstand er-
kennen zu lassen) würden beide wegfallen“ (KdU §76, 5:402.1–5).
8
Most directly: ‘a power of complete spontaneity of intuition … would be an under-
standing 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.
112

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 intel-
lect 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 misunderstand-

ing because their models of intellectual intuition are non-discursive and a-
conceptual. Klaus Düsing has argued very persuasively that Schelling and He-
gel did not hold exactly the same views about ‘intellectual intuition’, ‘specu-
lation’ nor the ‘absolute identity’ that they supposedly reveal.11 Prior to 1801
Schelling conceived ‘absolute identity’ as an absolutely simple, undifferenti-
ated 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 ‘philoso-
phy of identity’. In this view, speculative reason is superior to reflective un-
derstanding; the absolute is completely knowable through reason; this knowl-
edge 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 abso-
lute). 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 phil-
osophy 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.
11
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.
 113

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 con-
stitutive role of reflective thought is restricted to demonstrating (in ‘logic’)
the ultimate inadequacy of finite reflective concepts for grasping the abso-
lute. This demonstration, Hegel claimed, prepares us for speculative knowl-
edge of the absolute via intellectual intuition. Hegel’s account of knowledge
at this time was completely ahistorical. Because intellectual intuition tran-
scends reflective thought, it is non-discursive. Because Hegel conceived the
absolute as internally differentiated, it is possible that he did not view intel-
lectual 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 ac-
count of discursive judgment in articulating the possibility and defending the
legitimacy of a conceptual grasp of the totality of the world. Even if (some-
how) 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 Aes-
thetic. 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
114

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 objec-
tion follows from grounds central to Kant’s first Critique (KTPR §§19–27).
However, we do not know when Hegel first considered or accepted the objec-
tion 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 re-
sults, 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 di-
rect 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 transforma-
tion of Kant’s description of an intuitive intellect is astonishing. The problem

13
G&W, 4:327.6–29, referring to KdrV B160+n..
14
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 re-
sults 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 conse-
quently false. Neither argument recognises that sceptical or Kantian positions are sup-
ported by analysis and arguments which require critique, and not merely rejection via a
contentious modus tollens.
 115

is that the very model of an intuitive intellect is a model of a kind of knowl-

edge 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 tran-
scendental ideality of space and time is not accidental.18 Nor is it accidental
that the young Hegel, like Schelling, shows much more enthusiasm and con-
viction than proof or evidence for the absolute speculative standpoint sup-
posedly 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 pe-
titio principii in general, and to press it against Reinhold;20 and once in pass-
18
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 Philo-
sophie 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 objec-
tivity 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 oc-
casional 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 im-
pressions do nothing to justify Schelling’s claims about intellectual intuition. If my tes-
timony 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.
116

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 substan-
tive 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 ‘spec-
ulation’ (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 mer-
its 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 ontologi-
cal 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 New-
ton’s methods (see below, §§123, 124). In these regards, Hegel’s early dialecti-
cal 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 philo-

21
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.
 117

sophical knowledge, including his own. In his essay on scepticism Hegel con-
tended 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 anonym-
ously his ‘Aphorisms on the Absolute’, a brilliant parody and critique of the
views of Schelling and Hegel.24 Among much else, Schulze showed that Schel-
ling’s and Hegel’s appeal to intellectual intuition is indistinguishable from Ja-
cobi’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 ordi-
nary 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 de-
scription 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 ‘Apho-
risms’ 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 es-
say 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 justi-
fied. 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.
25
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 Ein-
leitung abets this interpretive self-distraction.
118

principii. Schulze’s ‘Aphorisms’ convinced Hegel, rightly, that the main Pyr-
rhonian 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 abso-
lute 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 philo-
sophical opponent. Consequently, the Dilemma of the Criterion is given pride
of place, right in the middle of his methodological reflections in the Introduc-
tion 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 recog-
nised 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 philos-
ophy has only one idea, and this idea must be one and the same at the begin-
ning 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 abso-
lute, 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 char-
acter of his conception of philosophy, and in particular, Hegel’s holistic con-
ception of philosophical justification. This Anmerkung shows Hegel’s recogni-

27
Düsing (1973), Graeser (1985).
28
See „Zwei Anmerkungen zum System“, GW 7:343–347. I follow the dating suggested by
Harris (1983), 580 (entry 210).
 119

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 acknowl-
edges 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 be-
come 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 rela-
tion 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 begin-
ning 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 in-
complete), Hegel acknowledges that of course the ‘reality’ of these two ‘com-
ponents’ (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).
30
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).
120

the CERTAINTY as the knowledge of such a being for itself, but connects the cer-
tainty 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 (enunci-
ated in the first two clauses of the second sentence), and both of his two Re-
marks are dedicated to refuting in principle such cognitively opaque distinc-
tions 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 philos-
ophy 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 Cri-
terion 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 Ge-
wohnheit des gemeinen Erkennens, die Entgegengesetzten zu substantiiren, und ihnen
dadurch den Schein eines besondern für sich Bestehens zu geben, so daß es die GE-
WISSHEIT, 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 expli-
citly 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-
 121

Accordingly, the Dilemma of the Criterion becomes the central methodologi-

cal problem posed in the Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology, where he
develops a very subtle and powerful response to it (above, §§15–17). His re-
sponse involves an unqualified commitment to a discursive, conceptual mo-
del of human knowledge, a commitment he retains to the end of his career.34
Although Hegel’s mature epistemology distinguishes reason and understand-
ing (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 concep-
tually.35 Hegel’s mature account of absolute knowledge repudiates the acon-
ceptual 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 intel-
lectual intuition plays no role in the Phenomenology – other than as a posi-

lute spirit, a kind of view he retains in his mature philosophy. Noting that Hegel’s mar-
ginal 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 appre-
ciate the insights and suggestions found in other philosophies, whilst criticising short-
comings 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 as-
sessment 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 be-
lieve the mature Hegel espoused intellectual intuition.
122

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 con-
trary, they instead confirm my interpretation in all regards. Hegel states:

36
See HER, 164–9. Harris (HL passim) details many of Hegel’s philosophical disagree-
ments with Schelling, and in particular, with his intuitionism. In his attempt to reha-
bilitate 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 assur-
ance, 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 apper-
ception 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 indetermi-
nate, 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 peo-
ples, not for others, it is not in their consciousness. Even more contingently
does this immediate knowledge appear as intellectual intuition of the con-
crete, 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 ap-
pears 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 uni-
versal, for its ground is thought, and through thought human beings are hu-
man. Therefore the principle [of philosophy] is something altogether univer-
sal; though if a determinate intuition or consciousness is required, such as the
consciousness or the intuition of the identity of the subjective and the objec-
tive, 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 (Vernunftanschau-
ung), 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 unmedi-
ated, 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 some-
thing 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 Schel-
ling’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 in-
tuitionism (below, §§92–99). Hegel’s criticisms show that he espouses no
kind of intellectual intuitionism whatsoever; and certainly not the kind es-
poused 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 indetermi-
nate, 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 equal-
ly warrant any claim and also its negation. Any alleged principle of knowl-
edge (or of justification) which can equally warrant any claim and its nega-
tion simply is no principle of knowledge, nor of justification, because knowl-
edge 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 mis-
takenly thinking we have and enjoy it. (Hegel likewise argued that Jacobi’s
intuitionism faced devastating self-reflexive difficulties of this kind; see §98.)
 125

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 peo-
ples. (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 un-
structured event: one places oneself before an object and without further ado
knows that object. This kind of knowledge would only be possible if the fol-
lowing two phrases were equivalent: ‘knowledge of an object x’ and ‘knowl-
edge 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) exam-
ple. The conflation of this subtle but important distinction is a presupposi-
tion of the Modern empiricist tradition. Only if objects were in this way ‘self-
identifying’ would pure aconceptual intuition suffice for knowledge.
Is this the case? Are there such objects and is there such knowledge? In-
sofar as the doctrine of ‘immediate knowledge’ concerns common, if also reli-
gious, objects, which according to Jacobi it does, then there should be uni-
versal agreement about these objects (Enz. §72). Yet there is no such univer-
sal 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 ‘im-
mediacy’. 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 characteri-
sation 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 intellec-
tual 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 objec-
tive, 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 prin-
ciple [of philosophy] is something altogether universal; though if a determinate
intuition or consciousness is required, such as the consciousness or the intu-
ition of the identity of the subjective and the objective, then this is the require-
ment 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 pe-
titio 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 differenti-
ates 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 determi-
nate, ‘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 Enzyclopae-
dia 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 acon-
ceptual or other forms of intellectual intuition (§§41–42), his recognition of
Kant’s problems with defending causal judgments (§25–29) and with tran-
scendental 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 Judg-
ments Kant noted that a proper disjunctive judgment divides up the whole of
a specific range (‘sphere’) of predicates relevant to a particular possible cogni-
tion.1 Denying one predicate of the relevant kind of subject entails that ano-
ther predicate within that range must be true of that subject; conversely, af-
firming a predicate of a relevant subject is tantamount to denying of that sub-
ject 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 dis-
junctive 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 categori-
1
KdrV A73–74/B98–99. For discussion of Kant’s Table of Judgments, see Wolff (2017).
2
Such conjoint judgments seem to be part of Hegel’s understanding of disjunctive judg-
ments 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 rela-
tion amongst the forms of judgment would require extensive commentary on his Logic;
Part III below strongly corroborates this suggestion.) The parallels between Hegel’s treat-
ment 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.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_008

128

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, lo-
cally) 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] possi-
bility’, 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 judg-
ments 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 alterna-
tives to any claim to knowledge (above, §2.1).
In brief, Hegel held that hypothetical and categorical judgments are co-
determined, 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 categori-
cal 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 analo-
gous 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).
 129

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 pos-
sible, 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 sub-
stituting ‘determination’ for Kant’s ‘limitation’, a key Kantian term concern-
ing 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 onto-
logical holism, things in fact are what they are only in and through their rela-
tions 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 al-

4
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.
130

so the ‘standpoint’ of Hegel’s logic.

43.7 Cognitive judgments, whether disjunctive and categorical, require (in-
ter 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 re-
construction of Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction’ and ‘Refutation of Ideal-
ism’ 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 instan-
tiated 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 phe-
nomena 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 He-
gel’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 brief-
ly; they concern the idea of system, the status of necessity, the relation be-
tween 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 sci-
entific reasoning are the same across scientific disciplines, and a rational sys-
tem 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).
 131

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 phi-
losophy 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 lead-
ing idea and the systematic interpretation of the components of any scientific
domain or disc. This insight is fundamental to Hegel’s view of dialectical an-
alysis, proof and development, and grounds Hegel’s pragmatic fallibilist ac-
count of philosophical justification. This development is clearly one from em-
piricism to rationalism to pragmatic realism. We also see that, on this occa-
sion, the history of the philosophy of system itself follows a dialectical devel-
opment 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 (Förs-
ter 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 ap-
parently expressing necessity. Misled by this surface grammar, he took New-
ton’s laws as synthetic a priori propositions, and tried to provide an episte-
mological 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 ‘spec-
7
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 seman-
tics and some basic features of causal judgment and explanation suffice to curb unjus-
tifiable claims about universal causal determinism within nature, without appeal to Tran-
scendental 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.
132

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 founda-
tional 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 presupposi-
tion 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 begin-
ning 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 sci-

10
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 be-
tween 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 distinc-
tion 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 reflec-
tions 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 Frank-
furt period, from which an apparently detailed set of notes is now lost. Hegel’s much ma-
ligned 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).
 133

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 philo-
sophical 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 mean-
ing (above, §26). So doing is required (in Tetens’ sense) to realise Kant’s Cate-
gories. 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 con-
creto 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 Tran-
scendental Idealist justification a priori of our commonsense causal judg-
ments. 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 architec-
tonic 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-Cri-
tical ‘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 sub-
jects 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 deduc-
tion, then this has profound implications for Hegel’s emphasis on ‘the’ tran-
scendental 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 Sinnlich-
keit 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.
134

insight into just what Kant’s deduction in fact achieves: regressive, transcen-
dental proofs can be developed independently of Transcendental Idealism,
and can be used to justify realism. Hegel developed this strategy in the Pheno-
menology (see below, §§54–59, 65–82).
44.6 Hegel’s Post-Kantian Agenda. To refurbish Kant’s regressive, transcen-
dental 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 Ideal-
ism. The acuity with which Hegel identifies and aims to meet these desider-
ata 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 combi-
nations solely of these two kinds of terms. Recently this traditional distinc-
tion 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 con-
ceptions’, because they have a basic role to play in our identifying any experi-
enced 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 expe-
rience of its instances. (This broad definition dispenses with the hopelessly
restrictive, ill-defined requirement of alleged ‘elementary aconceptual sen-
sory experience’.) In the ‘Consciousness’ section of the 1807 Phenomenology of
Spirit, Hegel undertakes to justify the pure a priori status and the transcen-
dental role of our conceptions of space, spaces, time, times, self, other, indivi-
duation, the identity of perceptible objects, and causality (Hegel 2016; West-
phal 2009b). In Part II I contend that several of Hegel’s analyses and proofs of
 135

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, regard-
less of our cognitive activity.
This objection suggests that developing a neo-Kantian realist epistemol-
ogy 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, espe-
cially 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 argu-
ments for this thesis demonstrates cogently that sensibility and understand-
ing 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 bedevil-
ling Kant’s Transcendental Idealism stems from Kant’s distinction between
the transcendental causal principle (every event has a cause) and the meta-
physical 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 co-
gent than John McDowell’s proposals.
136

§§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 pheno-
menological method and his justification of causal judgments in ‘Force and
Understanding’ (PhdG, chapt. III; see below, §§54–59). When Hegel is on tar-
get, 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 natural-
ist; 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 Carte-
sian 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, name-
ly, nothing less than logically necessary truths suffice; sufficient cognitive jus-
tification is infallible (per Tempier). Descartes’ own attempt to justify empiri-
cal 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 pre-
cisely 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). He-
gel’s transcendental analysis purports to show that some such facts are condi-
tionally necessary for the possibility of self-conscious human experience.
18
For Hegel’s views on these, see deVries (1988) and Wolff (1992).
 137

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 reflec-
tion, and just what kinds of features of the world and of our cognitive capaci-
ties 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 knowl-
edge 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 ful-
filled 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-noth-
ing, terms. Furthermore, the lottery paradox requires a closed set of alterna-
tives. 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, cer-
tify with 100% confidence, when in fact we know something, because our jus-
tification 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 as-
sessment of beliefs and their justification. Because the truth of any even mod-
estly interesting empirical claim has implications which transcend any avail-
138

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’. Unfortu-
nately, philosophers too often tend to conflate the ubiquitous possibility of
reassessment of evidence for the sceptical nightmare of the possibility of per-
vasive 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 read-
er, can worry about the possibility of Descartes’ demon, there is no such de-
mon 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 his-
torically 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-
 139

mine whether it indeed handles or avoids the problems Hegel identified in

previous views.
This may seem to make justification impossible; arguments by elimina-
tion require a well-defined, delimited domain of alternatives.19 Hegel’s pheno-
menological 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 legiti-
mise 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 (exhibit-
ing), 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 consid-
ered. 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 cap-
ture what he says, does and achieves in those presentations, whilst also ad-
dressing ‘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 in-
volved 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. Phil-
osophical insight requires focus, which cannot be achieved piecemeal.
140

interpreting his mature philosophy, especially his epistemology. The predom-

inant 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 bi-
assed 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 ne-
glected by Hegel’s commentators, whose interests are rather more metaphys-
ical, historical or exegetical, a problem exacerbated by their general lack of
interest in and familiarity with epistemology. Most fundamentally: develop-
ment or process as such do not, because they cannot, address issues of justifi-
cation, which are normative, not (merely) descriptive. Yes, expounding He-
gel’s views is difficult, but if Hegel starting from 1804 was engaged with epist-
emological 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 philosoph-
ical 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 in-
terests in epistemology, and hence also his responses to scepticism – and
more broadly, his concern not only to expound, but to justify his philosophi-
cal 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, convention-
alist or sceptical. However, the distinctness of Hegel’s epistemology may re-
sult 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. How-
ever, analytic epistemology has followed, more faithfully than often noticed,
Russell’s (1922; CP 9:39) exhortation, ‘Back to the 18th Century!’1 Russell’s re-
turn to Hume’s first Enquiry rooted analytic epistemology deeply in the Carte-
sian tradition which Kant, Hegel and implicitly Hume (in the Treatise) identi-
fied 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 scep-
ticism 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 inves-
1
One of his most devoted followers in this regard is Quine (1969, 72, cf. 74, 76), who main-
tains, ‘on the doctrinal side [sc. epistemological justification], I do not see that we are far-
ther along today than where Hume left us. The Humean predicament is the human pre-
dicament’. See below, §§100–110.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_009

144

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 judg-
ment (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 Pyrrho-
nian 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 scep-
ticism 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 propo-
nents nor critics have recognised Hegel’s engagement with Pyrrhonian scepti-
cism, 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 state-
ment 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 re-
gress which grounds nothing, a circularity which grounds nothing, or a sup-
posed self-justifying claim (Alston 1989a, 26–7). Pyrrhonists then offer further
2
See Düsing (1973), Graeser (1985).
 145

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., non-
foundationalists such as Dretske3). Even more than Kant, Hegel was anti-
Cartesian. 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 recog-
nised 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 sus-
pend judgment and achieve epoché. Hegel criticised (among others) Sextus
Empiricus for being satisfied with mere refutation, with merely ‘abstract ne-
gation’, 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 Sex-
tus could respond to such an Hegelian ‘determinate negation’ by offering mu-
tually 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 ‘soci-
al epistemology’, van Fraassen’s ‘constructive empiricism’, McDowell’s neo-
Hegelian account of our human form of mindedness, and Brandom’s ‘modal
expressivism’ provide their ‘determinate negations’ and so provide consider-
able grounds of proof for Hegel’s own robust pragmatic realism.6 With all re-
spect due Wilfrid Sellars, no other epistemologist has so acutely probed and
3
For discussion of Dretske, see Westphal (2003a), §§25–28; (2017f).
4
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.
146

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 Crite-
rion, share a common solution. This is discussed briefly here, and detailed be-
low (§§60–64, 83–91). Justificatory circularity is a problem, not because a ser-
ies of grounds of proof mutually support each other, but because such a series
appears to offer no independent proof to convince any dissenter. The prob-
lem 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 justifica-
tion 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 justifica-
tory 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 peti-
tio 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 possibil-
ity of productive self-criticism (detailed below, §§60–64, 83–91). If construc-
tive self-criticism is possible, we are not locked into the forced options epito-
mised 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 justi-

7
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).
 147

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 ‘deter-
minate negation’, that an epistemology can only be justified through thor-
ough, 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 var-
iants 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 justifica-
tion of an epistemology, whether Hegel’s or any other. Plainly, Hegel’s episte-
mology 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 methodo-
logically, 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 di-
rectly 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 what-
ever semantic content can be explicated in terms of descriptions of those
particulars or their features which concepts classify. On Hegel’s view, the con-
tent of our concepts is also in part a function of the objects (and their fea-
tures) 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 Put-
nam), 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 re-
jected the key thesis of descriptions-theories of semantic meaning and refer-
ence. 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 sup-
ported 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 ex-
perience 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).
148

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 char-
acter. 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 crit-
ics, 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 scruti-
ny. If we are thorough and scrupulous about this, and if Hegel’s accounts of
constructive self-criticism and ‘determinate negation’ are sound, we can de-
velop 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 writ-
ings is his thorough indifference towards other philosophical views. However,
Hegel identified one key substantive assumption made by Pyrrhonian scepti-
cism. 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 uni-
form, stable and unchanging. If truth requires this, then any human experi-
ence 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 He-
gel’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.
11
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
 149

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 direc-
tion is already clear: Hegel holds a semantic, correspondence analysis of the
nature (not the criteria) of ‘truth’ (below, §63). Hegel’s critique of naïve real-
ism (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 phe-
nomenon 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 philoso-
phy 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 criti-
cally, Hegel had to consider the paradigmatic empiricist, Hume, and that he
did (Westphal 1998a).
49.2 Knowledge by Acquaintance. Characteristic of strong empiricist foun-
dationalism is the thesis that we enjoy concept-free knowledge of sensed par-
ticulars. Although this doctrine was not espoused by most of the Scottish
school – though Hume’s official ‘copy theory’ of ideas and impressions com-
mits 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 re-
sponse 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 dis-
putes 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).
150

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 founda-
tionalism 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 justifi-
cation of derived knowledge in essentially deductivist terms (rooted in the
fundamental foundationalist distinction between basic and derived knowl-
edge, and its basic aim of refuting scepticism), and because it views the justi-
fication 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 gener-
ous 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 re-
alism. One stage of Hegel’s justification of this thesis is the first major section
of the Phenomenology, titled ‘Consciousness’, containing the chapters ‘Sense-
Certainty’, ‘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 dis-
tinguishing it from other (relevant) possible and actual circumstances. Any
one empirical state of affairs can be identified only by differentiating (discri-
minating) 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 circum-
stances. Moreover, these two forms of identification are mutually interdepen-
dent.14 If so, then we can have no allegedly basic knowledge of any one empir-
ical fact independent of our knowledge of other empirical facts. Hence the
justification of human empirical knowledge is weakly holistic: our justifica-
tory grounds for any one empirical claim are interdependent with our justifi-
catory grounds for other empirical claims. (This feature of empirical justifica-
tion 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).
 151

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 le-
gitimate, whilst the concept of ‘cause’ can only be defined in terms of statisti-
cal 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 Em-
piricism 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 ques-
tions 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 over-
looked 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 con-
nection 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 justi-
fying knowledge of two kinds of propositions, namely a priori knowledge of analytic pro-
positions or a posteriori knowledge of synthetic propositions.
17
This way of distinguishing empirical from a priori concepts is too simple; some neces-
sary refinements are indicated in §§44.6, 57.3, 67, 124.1.
152

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 He-
gel, and of rather too much contemporary ‘analytic metaphysics’.18
Hegel argues against concept-empiricism in ‘Sense Certainty’ that any em-
pirical circumstance can be known, because it can be identified, only by our
using pure a priori concepts of ‘I’, ‘other’, ‘time’, ‘times’, ‘space’, ‘spaces’, ‘num-
ber’, ‘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 ‘per-
ceptible 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. Ac-
cording to empiricist principles of generalisation through repeated experi-
ences, 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 cau-
sal belief, ‘Sunshine warms stones’. This is only the first step. Only by compar-
ing many, such particular causal beliefs can we (by those empiricist princi-
ples) 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).
 153

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 in-
stead 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 de-
fends are not and cannot be high-level generalisations from experience, pace
the criticisms of Kant by Schlick and Reichenbach, which are still widely ac-
cepted 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’ ob-
jects, 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 them-
selves be entirely distinct, ‘tis certain we commonly regard the compound,
which they form, as ONE thing, and as continuing the SAME under very consid-
erable 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 propensi-

ties 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 cau-
ses, 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 psycho-
logical propensities are propensities to use a priori concepts, in particular, the
concept of a perceptible thing, i.e., its identity amidst its many perceived
154

qualities and amidst is many perceived changes of qualities.19

In ‘Perception’ Hegel identified and critically analysed precisely this prob-
lem 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, percepti-
ble 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 with-
out 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 He-
gel’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 pres-
ently exist. Hegel regards ‘inductive reasoning’ as an important form of ana-
logical 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 observa-
tions). 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 obser-
vations. 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 impres-
sions 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).
 155

is the problem. No event or state of affairs can be known prior to its occur-
rence: 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 al-
leged universal characteristics of things; or the thought that on a fallibilist ac-
count of justification the truth condition of knowledge may not be satisfied,
are both infalliblist thoughts. Any sober fallibilist account of justification re-
quires that the truth condition of knowledge is satisfied, even if sufficient (fal-
libilist) 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 preoccu-
pation of epistemology, especially in the Twentieth Century. Unfortunately,
most attempted refutations have tried to develop a direct response to Carte-
sian 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 Schel-
ling’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 ‘Self-
Consciousness’ and also in ‘Observing Reason’. Hegel realised that Kant’s ‘Ref-
utation’ receives powerful support from Kant’s doctrine of the ‘transcenden-
tal 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 self-
conscious), simply because we possess complete and intact cognitive capaci-
ties (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
156

sensory intuitions, and on the basis of the twelve basic forms of logical judg-
ment.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 knowl-
edge 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, schema-
tised 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 mani-
fold. 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 cog-
noscendi, 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 reg-
ularity and variety) obtains among the contents of our sensations. Con-
versely, 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 con-
tents 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 suf-
ficiently 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 Empiri-
20
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.
 157

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, whe-
ther Pyrrhonian, Cartesian or Humean, if in fact we already have at least
some genuine empirical knowledge, and so are able (upon reflection) justifi-
ably to reject those sceptical challenges. This is one key to Hegel’s justifica-
tion 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 foun-
dationalism (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 foun-
dationalism, 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 hon-
est epistemologists detect their occasional perceptual errors, exploited by
sceptics, if not by subsequent reliable perception?) Which instances of pur-
ported empirical knowledge are genuine is determinable only through con-
structive self- and mutual criticism. If we had no empirical knowledge what-
soever, sceptical statements would merely beat the ear-drums of unselfcons-
cious human bodies. Recall that Hegel’s response to the Dilemma of the Cri-
terion consists in an account of how constructive self-criticism is possible;
this account extends naturally to the possibility of constructive mutual criti-
cism (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 seman-
tic and mental content externalisms.
158

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 knowl-
edge, 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 ra-
ther 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 ‘transcen-
dental’ reality, namely, about anything that exists, and whatever characteris-
tics it may have, regardless of our human cognitive capacities and acts. Para-
digmatic 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 appear-
ances to us and things in themselves. Considered strategically, Hegel’s re-
sponse in the 1807 Phenomenology to Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and its
attendant scepticism lies in his attempt to validate human empirical knowl-
edge without adopting Transcendental Idealism. In particular, if Hegel’s
justification of our causal judgments in ‘Perception’, ‘Force and Understand-
ing’ 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, He-
gel’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 philo-
22
Beiser (1987), 4–5, 173, cf. 270, 292–3.
23
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).
 159

sophical justification sketched above. Officially, Kant aimed to justify tran-

scendentally 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 mere-
ly ‘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 pro-
vides not only a strategic (§51.2) and a critical (§51.3), but also a direct objec-
tion to Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, and thus to Kant’s sceptical distinc-
tion 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 hu-
man cognitive capacities, not due to mind-independent features of the world.
Hence, Kant argued, only Transcendental Idealism can explain the satisfac-
tion 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 transcen-
dental 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 satis-
fied. However, this line of reasoning does not explain how or why this condi-
tion 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
160

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 mani-
fold, though Hegel’s refurbished refutation holds not only against what Kant
called ‘empirical idealism’, but also against Kant’s own Transcendental Ideal-
ism. 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 com-
plex. Hegel’s transcendental proof of realism and his transcendental justifica-
tion 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 influ-
enced by Aristotle regarding the proper functioning of our cognitive psychol-
ogy 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 con-
tent or even a ‘grand coincidence on a cosmic scale’, amongst other contem-
porary philosophical commonplaces. A common nerve runs through these
examples, taken as sceptical counter-examples, as disproofs of alleged genu-
ine 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 im-
plicit 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 scepti-
25
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.
 161

cism, and this assumption has been used to undermine analyses of knowl-
edge ever since – that is, ever since March 1277! The pervasiveness and appar-
ent persuasiveness of this assumption is indicated by the wide-spread convic-
tion amongst epistemologists that ‘fallible (empirical) justification’ is an
oxymoron and that ‘fallibilism’ is incoherent.26 It is indicated too by the wide-
spread use of the lottery paradox to argue against fallibilism and for 100%
conclusive justification. It is also indicated by the deeply deductivist orienta-
tion 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 play-
ed 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 con-
vince 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 sup-
posed, 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).
162

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 He-
gel’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 epistemol-
ogy, 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 dichoto-
mies. 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 scepti-
cism to rest requires a ‘changed method of thinking’. Genuine such changes
are difficult, and cannot be effected by a few bright ideas. Hegel already con-
tributed 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 concep-
tual categories and principles. Kant’s transcendental method centrally re-
quires identifying sufficient grounds to justify a priori certain synthetic prop-
ositions (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 in-
clude the legitimate use of empirical conceptions of spatio-temporal pheno-
mena. Second, Hegel recognised that determining the legitimate use of fun-
damental 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, in-
tegrate, 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 dis-
tinct 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 them-
1
See Renault (2012); on Dewey, see Shook and Good (2010).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_0�0

164

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 Presen-
tation of all Synthetic Principles of Pure Understanding’ (KdrV A158/B187).
That is Kant’s title for Book Two of his ‘Transcendental Analytic’; Kant ex-
pressly 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 chal-
lenging 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 con-
cern 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 He-
gel’s critical reassessment of Kant’s Critical philosophy, and how Hegel’s reas-
sessment 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 justi-
fied his views, or whether they contribute to the philosophical transforma-
tion 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
 165

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 pro-
found 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 Con-
cept’ (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 Appen-
dix 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 enthy-
memes undergirding Hegel’s critical reconstruction of Kant’s Critical philoso-
phy. Next I summarise some perhaps unfamiliar features of the philosophical
context within which Hegel begins to re-assess and reconstruct Kant’s Tran-
scendental 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 epistemo-
logical. 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, lo-
cated 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.
166

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 wide-
ranging, 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 toge-
ther, Kant’s complementary analyses demonstrate that for any synthetic pro-
position 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 interde-
pendent. Integrating them both is required for predication, not as a gram-
matical or judgmental form, but as a cognitive act: whether for knowledge of,
or error about, that particular individual. Only through singular sensory pre-
sentation 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 osten-
sive 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 specify-
ing 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.
 167

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 iden-
tify either the features of any particular or its region is a further issue; approx-
imations suffice, provided they are sufficiently accurate to discriminate be-
tween 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 judg-
ments; 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 impor-
tantly, 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 accu-
racy of a judgment, statement or claim, and it is necessary to assess its justifi-
cation or justificatory status. ‘Cognitive reference’, so understood, is neces-
sary for any substantive claim, judgment or statement to have cognitive sta-
tus, as a putative truth (in contrast to an arbitrary utterance, sentence or
descriptive phrase).
168

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 dis-
tinction between concepts, particulars and ‘modes of presentation of some-
thing designated’ (»Arten des Gegebenseins eines Bezeichneten«), where „Ar-
ten des Gegebenseins eines Bezeichneten“ are not restricted to conceptual
content or linguistic intension, but may (as especially Evans (1982) empha-
sised) be sensory or perceptual. ‘Modes of presentation’, on Frege’s view, are
ways in which particulars are individuated and presented to us. In mathemat-
ics uniqueness, existence or non-existence proofs may suffice as Arten des
Gegebenseins; within the empirical domain they cannot. Frege’s classic exam-
ple of modes of presentation, ‘The Morning Star’ and ‘The Evening Star’, indi-
cate 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 empiri-
cal knowledge Arten des Gegebenseins des Bezeichneten are required, and nei-
ther ‘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 be-
half of his transcendental doctrine of the power of judgment (transscenden-
tale 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-
 169

tial conditions.6 This suggests that Kant’s ‘transcendental doctrine of the po-
wer 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 dem-
onstrated 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 Analo-
gies 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 determin-
ing 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 di-
rectly perceive time or space, and the mere order in which we happen to ap-
prehend 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, there-
by producing changes of state in one another. Enduring perceptible, causally
interacting particulars are necessary for us to identify specific spatial loca-
tions, 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 non-
spatial 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.
170

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 An-
alogy 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 justi-
fies a transeunt account of causality, according to which a causally active po-
wer 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, unani-
mously elected in 1804 as Assayer to the Jena Mineralogical Society.10 At his
Gymnasium Hegel excelled in mathematics, and so commanded the back-
ground 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 Phil-
osophical Association, March 2005.) I am aware of no evidence that the Classical Prag-
matists 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 un-
til 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,
 171

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 New-
ton’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 pur-
ported 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 (Gali-
leo). 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 math-
ematical function is exhibited in apparently diverse phenomena; e.g., in le-
vers, pendula, hydrostatics, hydrodynamics, collisions and the composition of
forces. These mathematical analogies may be physically significant; so dem-
onstrating requires carefully determining the boundary conditions and physi-
cal factors involved in these different physical phenomena. Pfleiderer de-
voted 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 re-
peatedly and clearly reinforced the lesson only empirical inquiry can deter-
mine which if any mathematical function is instantiated by any natural phe-
nomenon, 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 analy-
sis that we could not be self-conscious if we were not aware of a spatio-tem-
poral world which presents us sufficient, humanly identifiable regularity and
variety amongst appearances both to stimulate and to facilitate our compre-
hending objects and events under general conceptions in cognitive judg-

11:155.29–156.23/21:239.3–240.6). On Pfleiderer see Ziche’s introduction to Pfleiderer (1804).

172

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 Refuta-
tion 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-reduc-
tively) naturalistic basis (above, §§ 30–36).
56.3 Consequently, Hegel recognised that Kant’s distinction in kind be-
tween 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 be-
tween 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 He-
gel’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 Sci-
ence of Logic and philosophical Encyclopaedia, and for Hegel’s pragmatic real-
ist 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 acquain-
tance 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.
 173

is independent of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. In ‘Sense Certainty’ (PhdG,

chapt. I) he justifies this semantics of cognitive reference through strictly in-
ternal 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 detail-
ed, specificity of description (or analogously, specificity of conceptual con-
tent; intension) is insufficient in principle to secure unique reference: Whe-
ther 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 empiri-
cal knowledge simply by description (Westphal 2002–03). Within any non-
formal, 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 instru-
ments). 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 clan-
destine 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 knowl-
edge of some (physical or empirical) particular if one identifies that particular
by locating it within one’s surroundings and discriminating it from its sur-
roundings, 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 boun-
daries of the region a particular occupies only by identifying some of its mani-
fest 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).
174

Accordingly, not only are causal judgments discriminatory, as Kant ar-

gued: 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 altoge-
ther 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’, ‘com-
patibility’, ‘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 pu-
tative 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 justifica-
tion of cognitive claims which are otherwise well supported by relevant evi-
dence. This provides strong, cogent justification for fallibilism about rational
justification in all substantive domains (Westphal 2014). This is a central ten-
et 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 concep-
tions by strictly internal critique and reductio of the concept-empiricist ac-
count of them. Though the classical American Pragmatists eschewed the a
priori, C.I. Lewis (MWO), who understood his Kant much better than they, re-
cognised and argued for the thesis that our conceptual classifications are in
important regards always a priori, insofar as they include not only the con-
cepts just indicated, but also specific descriptive content (intension) which
can never be exhaustively specified or justified by empiricist means (see
Westphal 2010b, 2013a).
 175

57.4 The Binding Problems. The discriminatory character of perceptual

judgments by which we identify, individuate and locate particulars in our sur-
roundings is underscored in Hegel’s brilliant internal critique of Hume’s anal-
ysis ‘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 co-
occurring sensed qualities for some one thing. Hume realised that concept
empiricists must explain how we can construct the concept ‘body’ (or: physi-
cal particular), since it is – by the standards of concept empiricism – an utter
fiction: How is Locke’s ‘inadvertency’ even psychologically possible, if empiri-
cist 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-personal-
ly) 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), dis-
tinct from any others in our surroundings?
Kant addressed these questions with his doctrines of perceptual and judg-
mental 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-con-
cepts ‘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
176

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 iden-
tifying any concrete object, event, structure or phenomenon, so that the dia-
lectical 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 New-
ton’s Rule 4 of Experimental Philosophy and to defend Newton’s causal real-
ism 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, Em-
piricist 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 partic-
ulars. 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 deduc-
tive 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 scepti-
cism, but rather for distinguishing between strictly formal domains and the
substantive domain of empirical knowledge, within which cognitive justifica-
tion 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 Te-
ten’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 philo-
sophy, 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’.
 177

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-Consci-
ousness’, ‘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 re-
sults without appeal to Transcendental Idealism, nor to any similar view (be-
low, §§65–70). Instead, Hegel argues by reductio that one can be solely self-
conscious 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 practi-
cal 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 charac-
ter, 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
178

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, spe-
cies 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 Phenom-
enology in large measure by re-analysing the scope and character of knowl-
edge within the special sciences. Hegel’s concern with the scope and charac-
ter of knowledge within the special sciences is prominent throughout the Sci-
ence of Logic as well. In particular, central to the revisions of the second edi-
tion 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 quan-
tification in the special sciences. Hegel treats them in the Science of Logic
under the heading ‘measure’, extensively revised in the second edition (Ferri-
ni 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 ratio-
nal physics, i.e. the conceptual foundations of physical science, e.g., the cen-
tre 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-lan-

guage, and – like rather too many others – accordingly tend to reduce ‘scien-
tific 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 philoso-

pher, 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 observa-
tions. The mathematical formulae must describe not only possible, but plau-
sible 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’ consider-
ations 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 misunder-
stood by empiricists and rationalists alike, as well as by Kant, and too often is
still misunderstood. In discussing the relevance of the almost purely mathe-
matical 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 possi-
ble to establish an extremely tight network in which observation and theory
advance on and regulate each other’. Borrowing terminology from logical em-
piricism, this may suggest that Newton’s mathematics forms the ‘correspon-
dence 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 Am-
erican 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
180

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 with-
in 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 empiri-
cal 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 cogni-
tive justification. Amongst the pragmatists, such considerations were devel-
oped 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 Encyclope-
dia – 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 Ontol-
ogy’ (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 in-
volved 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 re-
sponse 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 particu-
lar cases of genuine knowledge. Chisholm (1982, 75, cf. 67) favours particular-
ism, 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.
2
Robert Amico (1993, 112-5) proposes to ‘dissolve’ the Problem of the Criterion by show-
ing 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 im-
possible condition, but wrongly ascribes to the Pyrrhonian skeptic a definite position on
the nature of justification (ibid., 114). Thus he converts sophisticated, flexible, and undog-
matic Pyrrhonian skepticism into dogmatic Academic skepticism. Sextus is far more sub-
tle. 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.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_0��

182

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 prin-
ciples 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 par-
ticular persons, even if their principles of justification are not truth-condu-
cive. As his subsequent work reveals, this is much more a capitulation, rather
than a solution, to serious sceptical challenges to knowledge and to our un-
derstanding of it.
Subsequently, Moser (1993, 57) argued for ‘conditional ontological agnos-
ticism’, 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 consti-
tutes 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 dilem-
ma through informative answers to questions about the point and signifi-
cance 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 explan-
atory and evaluative projects is more basic that Sextus’ Dilemma of the Crite-
rion. In part this is because he accepts Chisholm’s formulation of the ‘Prob-
lem’ 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 epi-
stemically justified’ (60). It requires answering the question: ‘What, if anything, consti-
tutes the correctness (at least for myself) of my semantic standards for ‘epistemic justi-
fication’ as an answer to the semantic project regarding what it means to say that some-
thing 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.
 183

sorts of philosophical endeavours. Moreover, Moser’s (1993, 41–57) case for

ontological agnosticism is tantamount to the less sophisticated, more dog-
matic cousin of Pyrrhonian scepticism, Academic scepticism. Most impor-
tant, however, is the fact that Moser doesn’t recognise that direct permuta-
tions of Sextus’ Dilemma and its associated sceptical tropes arise for any
attempt to assess the various explanations and evaluations offered by differ-
ent 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, Wil-
liam 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 discrimi-
nating. Hence the fact that the reliability of sense perception can be estab-
lished 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 ratio-
nally 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
184

other effective practices. The more such self-support a doxastic practice gen-
erates, the more that counts in its favour. The failure to generate such ‘self-
support’ 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’ philoso-
phical 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 circular-
ity, 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 Pyrrho-
nian 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 Pyr-
rhonian 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 re-
quires 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 Foge-
lin I believe that our epistemological situation is good, not dire. The surprise
is that the proper response to Pyrrhonian scepticism is provided by a philoso-
pher widely supposed to have had no theory of knowledge at all: Hegel. Hegel
is an enormously sophisticated epistemologist whose views have gone unre-
cognised because his problems have gone unrecognised. Placing the Di-
lemma 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.
7
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) recog-
nises 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 accep-
ting it by an epistemically circular argument.
 185

conceptualisations from inferior alternatives (Moser), or to distinguish genu-

ine from sham self-support (Alston). Though not widely recognised, the real
problem raised by Sextus’ Dilemma is to understand how self-criticism is pos-
sible for us. Hegel recognised this problem and developed a very sophisti-
cated 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 as-
sumptions inform a philosopher’s entire approach to epistemology and con-
dition if not determine what, if anything, a philosopher will accept as credi-
ble. Because a philosopher’s assumptions inform his or her theoretical formu-
lations and his or her judgments about credibility, there is conceptual inter-
dependence amongst the assumptions, principles and paradigm examples
comprised in any philosopher’s basic approach to epistemology.8 Philoso-
phers take many different assumptions as points of departure; not all are
equally credible. Can we distinguish more from less credible basic assump-
tions? 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 evi-
dence 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 epistemolo-
gists, is to align them, both in principle and in practice.
With these points in view, both the importance of and the difficulties in-
volved 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 genu-
ine evidence; and the distinction between these two distinctions – can phi-
losophers’ 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 ad-
duced 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.
186

they be assessed without petitio principii? If so, how – and how well?
Hegel’s solution to the Dilemma of the Criterion provides a very sophisti-
cated 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 princi-
ples 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 princi-
ples 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 episte-
mologists. 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 theoreti-
cal 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 solu-
tion does involve epistemic circularity, which is inevitable in any critique of
reason, but through ‘determinate negation’ (i.e., the internal critical assess-
ment) 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 concep-
tion 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 recon-
struction 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.
 187

‘insight into what knowing is’.10 Because there is severe and sustained disa-
greement 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 in-
deed 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 se-
cond-order dispute about what knowledge, truth or justification is can quick-
ly 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, re-
quire assessment or warrant. Thus the problem of adjudicating among diver-
gent claims to first-order knowledge recurs on a higher level as a problem of
adjudicating differing claims to second-order knowledge about what knowl-
edge 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 prin-
ciples warranting those first-order claims, and claims warranting these se-
cond-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 recognis-
ing that the dilemma arises and must be met at the second level of episte-
mological 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 de-
fending 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 any-
thing like the way we perceive tables or chairs. Justifying a theory of knowl-
edge 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.
188

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 the-
ory.11 This is a powerful condition. However, this condition does not distin-
guish 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 analys-
ing these abilities must be granted in order to have a problem and a discus-
sion 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 self-
critically 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 deter-
mining 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 speci-

11
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 in-
ferential 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).
 189

fies the kind of empirical knowledge of which a form of consciousness pre-

sumes 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 consci-
ousness’ ‘certainty’ (Gewißheit). Idiomatically expressed, these principles spe-
cify 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-con-
ceptual) knowledge is humanly possible, or whether an ontology of sensa is
adequate. In the body of the Phenomenology, Hegel specifies a form of con-
sciousness’ principles by describing its ‘certainty’. Part of Hegel’s point in la-
belling this pair of conceptions a ‘certainty’ is to argue that, assurances to the
contrary not withstanding, ‘certainty’ is no infallible, indubitable or incor-
rigible 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 under-
mined and superceded through Hegel’s examination and assessment.
Considering these principles as a ‘form of consciousness’ is neutral be-
tween a particular individual’s consciousness and a group’s collective out-
look. 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 in-
stances of, the forms of consciousness scrutinised in the Phenomenology. This
is because both forms of consciousness, and also historically identifiable posi-
tions, all devolve from genuine (if non-evident) characteristics of conscious-
ness. 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 se-
quence 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 ob-
jects 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 rea-
sons, 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,
190

cognition requires inferences based on judgmental use of causal concepts

and laws of nature, and that the world contains causally interacting sub-
stances structured by forces.
To take a pair of epistemic and ontological principles as a form of con-
sciousness allows latitude for developing from less to more sophisticated ac-
counts 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 concep-
tion 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 im-
portant issue of the principles themselves in connection with their putative
domains of use.
The most general conceptions Hegel proposes to examine in the Phenom-
enology 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 con-
sciousness. Hegel’s defence of his own views about knowledge rests upon
their resulting from an internal, self-critical assessment of every form of con-
sciousness and on that basis rejecting all alternative accounts of knowledge
and its objects, whilst gleaning their genuine insights. (I comment on his pro-
blematic claim to completeness in §64.) Noting the proficiencies and defi-
ciencies of each form of consciousness, and through that of each more spe-
cific 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 consci-
ousness itself appears in relation to them’ (PhdG, 9:61.33–36/¶89).
 191

First, being conscious is fundamentally a cognitive relation to the world, whe-

ther 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 ap-
parent 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 exam-
ining a form of consciousness which adopts precisely this position, ‘sense cer-
tainty’ (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-criti-
cism 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 sub-
ject 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 be-
tween 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 compar-
ing 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 be-
tween 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 can-
not simply compare one’s putative knowledge with an unconceptualised ‘ob-
ject 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’.
192

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 constructive-
ly 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 ‘in-
itself’) 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 differ-
ent grammatical cases. (Here I shall be brief about these arguments.) Catalo-
guing these distinctions generates a list of four aspects of knowledge as a rela-
tion 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-knowl-
edge, 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. There-
fore, 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-
 193

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 impor-
tant; 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 stan-
dard 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 inclu-
sion 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 con-
sciousness 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 Ob-
ject 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.
194

63.2.2 A Grammatical Case Distinction. In half a dozen passages in the Intro-

duction 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 con-
sciousness 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 Cer-
tainty’). Accordingly, there is no knowledge of an object without using con-
ceptions to identify, discriminate and localise it. The object’s being some-
thing 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 ob-
jects. 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. Conscious-
ness’ 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 ‘inci-
dental’ features of an object itself are the first consciousness confronts in dis-
covering the inadequacy of its conception of objects. This aspect of knowl-
16
PhdG, 9:58.24–31, 59.8–10, 59.21–22, 59.27–28, 59.31–34, 59.38–60.3/¶¶82, 84, 85.
17
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.
 195

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’ con-
ception 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 ob-
jects does consciousness putatively know? In general, two: the world as an
object of empirical knowledge, and empirical knowledge as an object (or as-
pect) of self-knowledge.19 Self-knowledge is important to Hegel’s method be-
cause 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 con-
strains 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 consci-
ousness, 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).
196

‘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 re-
peat 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 A. Consciousness’ conception of
world: The World ACCORDING TO knowing: Knowing ACCORDING TO
Consciousness. Consciousness.
2. The world taken as instantiating B. Knowing taken as instantiating
consciousness’ conception of the consciousness’ conception of
world: The World FOR Conscious- knowing: Knowing FOR Conscious-
ness. ness.
3. Aspects of the world closely rela- C. Aspects of knowing closely related
ted to, yet not included in, consci- to, yet not included in, conscious-
ousness’ conception of the world: ness’ conception of knowing:
The World TO Consciousness. Knowing TO Consciousness.
4. The world as it actually is, with all D. Knowing as it actually is, with all
its features known and unknown: its features known and unknown:
The World ITSELF. 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 Introduc-
tion. However, distinctions are to be found in his text, and only by making
these distinctions can one construe the difficult remainder of Hegel’s Intro-
duction (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 in-
tentional 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 sig-
nificantly augments and supercedes Tugendhat’s (1979, 325) suggested alter-
native!
 197

Some readers may in this regard think of recent distinctions between ‘nar-
row’ 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 phe-
nomenological analyses and assessments – aim to highlight how such appar-
ently 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 im-
portant 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 his-
torical philosophy (see below, §§100–110).
63.3 Hegel’s Criterial Inference. The crucial question now is: Can an ob-
served 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 ob-
served 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 corre-
spondence 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 conscious-
ness (aspects 2, B) result from consciousness’ use of its conceptions of the
198

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 con-
sciousness (i.e., the world itself and knowing itself are apparent for conscious-
ness), if the world and knowing for consciousness coincide with conscious-
ness’ 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 con-
ceptions 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 consci-
ousness 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 inade-
quate, 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 previ-
ously 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 ‘per-
ception’ 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 ob-
servation 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
 199

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 consci-
ousness.21
There is, of course, an important distinction between the actual incoher-
ence 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 con-
tend that meeting the negative condition of the absence of detected incoher-
ence 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 sophisti-
cated 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’).
200

even if that object is misconstrued; and the object itself is an object to consci-
ousness 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 mani-
fest cognitive activity), this pair of reconciliations must be mutually compati-
ble; indeed, they must mutually support one another. It does not suffice to
eliminate discrepancies between one’s account of knowing and one’s cogni-
tive activity only to wind up unable to justify claims about the kinds of ob-
jects 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 gen-
erated 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 vice-
versa. 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.
 201

Hegel’s criteria of adequacy for any philosophical view or account of hu-

man experience or knowledge, starting with his sophisticated criterial infer-
ence based upon the complex of required mutual correspondences and cor-
roborations (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 con-
joined 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., evi-
dently, and to do so without relapsing into scepticism, conventionalism, rela-
tivism, 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 exer-
cises 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 doc-
trines, 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 possibil-
ity of responding to the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion; rejecting He-
gel’s criterion is to succumb to Sextus’ scepticism at the second level of epis-
23
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.
202

temological inquiry. Hegel’s refutation of scepticism at the first order of em-

pirical 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 (rele-
vant) alternatives. Certainly Hegel has not considered every logically possible
position, and has provided neither proof nor claim that he has. What plausi-
bility can Hegel give to his claim to completeness? Three points may be brief-
ly mentioned on this topic.
Perhaps Hegel’s main support for his claim to completeness is his teleo-
logical philosophy of history, according to which the series of forms of con-
sciousness he recounts is the series required to complete the principal devel-
opment of the world-spirit, by which the world-whole achieves self-knowl-
edge through our achieving knowledge of it, and of ourselves within it. If He-
gel 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 consci-
ousness 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 insis-
tence on what knowledge and its objects are like for us (aspects 2, B) in addi-
tion 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 spe-
cies 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 mate-
rial 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, be-
cause possible for, members of our species. By examining and assessing
‘knowing as a phenomenon’ as it appears in cultural and intellectual history
 203

and within our contemporary world (PhdG 9:55/¶¶76, 77), Hegel develops an
alternative strategy to inventory our most basic (apparent, manifest, candi-
date) 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 com-
petently. 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 Phenomenol-
ogy and its proof-structure are charted in Westphal 2009b, 28–29.)
Even if we grant that the adequacy of any epistemology requires its plausi-
bly 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 do-
main of plausibly human accounts of knowledge. However, because Hegel
proceeds by showing, where we are supposed to reap the philosophical bene-
fits 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 indi-
cated 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 appar-
ent 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 Chiere-
ghin’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 abso-
lute 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 seman-
tics 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 re-
ceived 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-Con-
1
PhdG 58.13–14/¶81; cf. PhdG 25.16–17/¶29.
2
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 reser-
vations about Beiser’s analysis are developed below, §§76–77.

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206

sciousness’, to focus on Hegel’s concept of thought and his cognitive seman-

tics. The present conspectus, I submit, becomes much more telling when con-
sidering 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 contemporane-
ous, anti-naturalistic epistemology, which rested entirely upon conceptual
analysis and dismissed concerns about our actual cognitive functioning, ana-
lytic philosophy has developed a host of significant criticisms of Cartesian-
ism. 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 disregard-
ing that the first great anti-Cartesian was Kant, who already recognised that
resolving key epistemological issues requires a sound semantics of specifi-
cally 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 in-
stead 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 particu-
lars 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 the-
ory within Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
 207

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. Locat-
ing 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) predi-
cates is only possible by specifying the region relevant to the manifest charac-
teristic in question, and vice versa, where this region will be either co-exten-
sive 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 designa-
tion of, and ascription of manifest characteristics to, any particular are con-
joint, 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 guid-
ed in part by competent use of a priori concepts of ‘time’, ‘times’, ‘space’, ‘spa-

4
In the second edition Deduction (§26) Kant stresses identifying the spatial ‘form’ (Ge-
stalt), hence the boundary, of a perceived house (KdrV B162); see below, §112.7.
208

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 ideal-
ism. 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 con-
ception 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 nei-
ther a commonsense nor a tenable view. Because its cognitive claim is so ab-
stract, it is falsified by the passage of time, during which either sensed partic-
ulars themselves change or we shift the focus of our sensory attention. Obvi-
ously we all know how to distinguish between and to designate various parti-
culars and our various sensory experiences of them. So doing, however, re-
quires 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, includ-
ing 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 seman-
tics 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 sup-
port 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.
 209

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 desig-
nate 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 per-
son 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 van-
ishes in the other’ (PhdG 9:66.21/¶101). Why? These two claims are only in-
consistent with each other if one fails to distinguish between subjects of
knowledge who make various claims. This is Hegel’s point: the strictly acon-
ceptual, entirely sensory model of knowledge of particulars espoused by
Sense Certainty provides neither an account of, nor even a basis for, our do-
ing what we all commonsensically do, namely, to distinguish our own percep-
tual 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 capa-
city 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 knowl-
edge is significant and can be understood only by recognising that its use pre-
sumes that the speaker serves as the point of origin of an implicit spatio-tem-
poral framework, reference to which is required to identify the relevant spa-
tio-temporal region designated by the speaker when designating sensed par-
ticulars, 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 aconceptu-
al sensory knowledge of any particular is possible only within any one spe-
cific cognitive episode in which it senses that particular, which can be desig-
nated solely by ostensive gesture, without using token demonstrative terms
210

(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, im-
mediate 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 imme-
diate, 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 nei-
ther contains nor specifies any sensed particular, whilst any extended here
and now which can contain or designate a sensed particular requires specify-
ing 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 indef-
inite plurality of punctual ‘heres’ and any period of time contains an indefi-
nite 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 frame-
work within which the cognisant subject occupies the point of origin.8
In conclusion Hegel considers one last, desperate effort by exponents of a-
conceptual 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-tem-
poral 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 de-
scribing 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 particu-
lar (e.g.) bits of paper. To resolve this problem, the consciousness under ob-
8
How one can understand something both implicitly and yet conceptually appears puzz-
ling on the nominalist presumption that concepts and their understanding can be exhaus-
tively 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).
 211

servation finally combines its linguistic descriptions with demonstrative re-

ference, thus conceding that both are required for, and both are integrated
within, any actual instance of sensory knowledge of spatio-temporal particu-
lars (PhdG 9:70.21–29/¶110). Once it recognises the roles of both sensation
and conception (including both demonstrative reference (deixiH) and de-
scriptive attribution of sensed qualities) in our sensory knowledge of particu-
lars, the observed consciousness admits the ineliminable roles of concepts
and of predicative ascription or classification and spati0-temporal delimita-
tion, within sensory knowledge and advances to Perception.
Hegel’s examination of Perception further supports his semantics of sin-
gular cognitive reference by showing that the relation ‘thing-property’ is
distinct and irreducible to the quantitative relations ‘set-member’ and ‘one-
many’, 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 uni-
fies a plurality of properties, and conversely: Something is a plurality of prop-
erties 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 ‘bind-
ing problem’: How do we determine whether one and the same particular (in-
stead 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 (as-
criptions of features), which are required for perceptual knowledge in the
ways identified by Kant, Hegel and Evans, who show that predication re-
quires distinguishing any one sensed particular from its surroundings by
identifying its spatial boundary by discriminating some of its manifest char-
acteristics 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 vari-
ous 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,
212

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 con-
text, 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 combina-
tion) 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 par-
ticulars. I stress ‘localised’ to recall that the presumptive judge, some cogni-
zant 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 philoso-
phers should take very seriously Kant’s and Hegel’s semantics of singular cog-
nitive reference.
In ‘Force and Understanding’ Hegel makes two key points which are bas-
ed, 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 determin-
ing 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 con-
cerned, 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 indi-
cates, as nothing else can, that something within that phenomenon is struc-
tured 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 phenom-
9
PhdG 93.7–94.28/¶¶152–4; see Westphal (2015a).
 213

ena, this is a matter to be determined by empirical investigation, not by meta-

physical 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 ob-
jections 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 justifica-
tion (purportedly) provided by that scientific reasoning. This prevalent pre-
miss faithfully if unwittingly follows Tempier (1277). Hegel’s point to the con-
trary is that treating logical gaps as cognitive, justificatory gaps presumes in-
fallibilist 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 do-
mains mere logical possibilities have no cognitive status because they lack re-
ference 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 cogni-
tive-semantic component. Hegel contends that statements of general scien-
tific laws, such as Newton’s three laws of motion, are expressly and necessar-
ily abstractions. As abstractions, they lack determinate semantic and cogni-
tive content or significance because they lack determinate reference to local-
ised 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 pa-
rameters, initial conditions, instrumentation and observational or experi-
mental techniques. This important conclusion is a direct implication of He-
gel’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. In-
stead, only by integrating conceptual content with contextualised use of to-
ken 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.
214

addressed properly only after Hegel demonstrates, in the 1807 Phenomenol-

ogy, that philosophy is cognitively competent to comprehend truth; see be-
low, 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 instan-
tiated 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 al-
ready 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 estab-
lished 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 sin-
gular 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 re-
quires considering Hegel’s transitions from ‘Consciousness’ to ‘Self-Consci-
ousness’ and from there to ‘Reason’. In the penultimate paragraph of ‘Force
and Understanding’ Hegel states the following about consciousness and self-
consciousness:
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 self-
consciousness 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 cogni-
tive reference can be addressed properly only after Hegel demonstrates, in the 1807 Phe-
nomenology, 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.
 215

of objects. He also claims that the observed form of consciousness now to be

introduced as Self-Consciousness does not recognise that human self-con-
sciousness requires consciousness of objects. This suggests that Self-Consci-
ousness 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-Con-
sciousness.
When introducing Self-Consciousness as an observed form of conscious-
ness 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-conscious-
ness 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-deter-
mination. Hegel’s method involves establishing his own positive claims
through strictly internal, phenomenological critique of forms of conscious-
ness 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-Insuffi-
ciency 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 Bonds-
man, 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-Con-
sciousness.15
13
Cf. Bykova (2009a), 267–9, 275–7.
14
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.
216

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-conscious-
ness with itself; and herewith it [sc., the entire sensible world] is for self-con-
sciousness something persisting, but which is only appearance, or a distinc-
tion 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 self-
identity (PhdG 9:104.24–31/¶167), which it presumes to require its independ-
ence 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 ‘Self-
Consciousness’ (Chitty 2007, Redding 2008), only in his earliest writings did
Fichte venture anything so strong as this Self-Sufficiency Thesis.16 This indi-
cates that Hegel sets his own agenda in the Phenomenology of Spirit; other
philosophical views are arrayed as exemplary forms of consciousness espous-
ing the opposed views Hegel critically examines. Even when Hegel shares
some of Fichte’s issues and aims, most centrally, to demonstrate that theoret-
ical 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 inde-
terminately 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).
 217

Consciousness’ from §B of ‘Self-consciousness’ (Chiereghin 2009), the self-

sufficiency 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 self-
assurance 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 individ-
ualism 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-Gi-
ving 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’. Not-
ing 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-Conscious-
ness is self-sufficient because it ‘is enclosed within itself, and contains noth-
ing 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 re-
states 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 individ-
ual. Whatever other object is for it, is as inessential, marked with the charac-
ter 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 demon-
strate 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).
18
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.
218

conscious of independently existing particulars (and, ultimately, of other ra-

tional agents; below, §89); I shall call this the ‘General’ Self-Sufficiency Thesis.
The relevant range of versions of this General Self-Sufficiency Thesis is sug-
gested 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 natu-
ral 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 jus-
tify) his own conception of thought by the beginning of §B of ‘Self-Con-
sciousness’, 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-Con-
sciousness 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’ ex-
amines 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 Self-
Consciousness, but only once we attain the level of Spirit, indeed, the devel-
oped, ‘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, experi-
enced particulars appear to exist and have their own characteristics regard-
less of anyone’s self-conscious awareness of them. In view of their apparent
independence, Self-Consciousness desires to substantiate its General Self-
Sufficiency Thesis. Second, at the outset we altogether lack an account of Self-
Consciousness’s capacities or abilities. Because Self-Consciousness has a task,
namely: to substantiate the General Self-Sufficiency Thesis despite the appar-
19
See Ferrini (2009a), 72–5; Harris, HL 1:447–73.
20
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 ob-
jects] 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).
 219

ent independence of the world it experiences, it must be practical. Desire is

the most elementary practical structure of human agency. Hegel’s pheno-
menological 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 phenomenolo-
gical 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 ap-
peal 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 ade-
quate theory of knowledge must be true of us; we seek and need to under-
stand 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 differ-
ent ways) to identify our basic cognitive capacities and their attendant inca-
pacities 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 va-
lidity with issues merely of process; it is quite another to reject altogether
philosophical consideration of cognitive psychology, physiology or our cogni-
tive 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 predica-
ment, 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 concep-
tualisation 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).
220

teaches a rudimentary lesson in realism: Objects satisfying desires are not

conjured up simply by desiring them. Those objects exist and have character-
istics (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 sus-
tain 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 es-
sence of self-consciousness, as initially conceived in accord with the Self-
Sufficiency 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, phe-
nomena. 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
 221

use the Bondsman to grapple with recalcitrant objects whilst denying his self-
sufficiency; 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 de-
sire: by using the Bondsman he evades the independence of desired objects
from his desires for them. He doesn’t solve the problems that desiring de-
pends 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 ‘be-
ing for himself’) thus depends both upon the recurrence of his desires and up-
on 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 self-
sufficiency.
The Bondsman must work on independent objects, some of which he can-
not 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 de-
signs and efforts are permanent, relative to the transitory character of objects
used as raw materials (PhdG 9:115.14–19/¶196). He becomes genuinely self-
directing by developing and exercising his control over antecedently inde-
pendent objects as raw materials. He finds his initial designs actually embod-
ied 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 con-
scious 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 Self-
Sufficiency Thesis (PhdG 9:116.3–5/¶196).
At the start of §B, ‘Freedom of Self-Consciousness’, Hegel expressly con-
trasts the outcome of the Lord’s experience with that of the Bondsman by
crediting the Bondsman with attaining – genuinely, if implicitly and immedi-
ately – 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
222

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-Con-
sciousness remains within itself whilst having that particular for itself al-
though 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 Un-
happy 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 na-
ture’ 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 prob-
lem, 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 Scepti-
cism, 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 at-
tacking any and all claims to know reality, purporting (inter alia) that particu-
lars lack reality, being, truth and knowability because they are neither self-
sufficient nor stable. By appealing to the diversity of opinions on any topic
and to the Dilemma of the Criterion (above, §§12, 60–64), Pyrrhonists pur-
port 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.
24
Hegel’s present discussion directly concerns Pyrrhonian, not Cartesian scepticism (on
which see infra §§60, 69, 86).
 223

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-iden-
tical (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 Bonds-
man’s artisanship, and appears to substantiate its independence from and its
superiority over the world of appearances, both natural and social. If particu-
lars 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-for-
self (PhdG 9:120.7–9/¶204). Sceptical ataraxia (unperturbedness) is to pro-
vide ‘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 instanti-
ated within its experience of its purported objects.)
For present purposes the most important problems facing Pyrrhonism de-
veloped 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 He-
gel’s distinguishing between them and our point of view on them as phe-
nomenological observers (HER, 103–8). Hegel notes that rather than exhibit-
ing an ‘unchangeable and truthful’ form of self-consciousness, by its own Par-
menidean conception of truth as unchangeable being, the Pyrrhonist him- or
herself is utterly changeable and hence untruthful because s/he unhesitat-
ingly states ‘not-A’ when counter-balancing ‘A’, and just as readily proposes
‘A’ when counter-balancing ‘not-A’, for any claim ‘A’ whatever. Though Pyr-
rhonists purport dispassionately to continue seeking the (Parmenidean)
truth, they conduct their lives – non-committal though they may be – accord-
ing 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, Pyrrho-
nism’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 scep-
tical practice exhibits repeated, unquestioning and constant reliance upon
224

the Parmenidean conception of truth, the Trope of Relativity and the Dilem-
ma 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 them-
selves, 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 undif-
ferentiated 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 experi-
ence nor to any of our experiences, and thus has no legitimate cognitive signi-
ficance. For this reason Pyrrhonism fails to achieve genuine thought because
it fails to refer any of its own ideas (representations, Vorstellungen) to particu-
lars; it fails to realise any of its presumptive concepts. In this regard, like Sto-
icism, Pyrrhonism fares worse than the Bondsman. Thus Pyrrhonism too can-
not 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 presump-
tions 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 appear-
ances, 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 Conscious-
ness advances beyond Scepticism because it is expressly, admittedly aware of
both of these poles within itself, though it does not know how to integrate
 225

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 Con-
sciousness ascribes self-sufficiency to a transcendent, alien ‘unchangeable be-
ing’, 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 be-
ing, who thus acquires the particular characteristics of the individual devout
self-consciousness, to whom in principle it is thus no longer alien or transcen-
dent (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 pre-
sents this point symbolically: to the Unhappy Consciousness this implicit re-
conciliation 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 representa-
tion 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 He-
gel’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 ‘Rea-
son’ 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 practi-
cal 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).
26
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).
226

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-Suffici-
ency 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 ego-
centric predicament. Yet if Hegel does not complete his case for this Kantian
thesis by the end of ‘Self-Consciousness’, what bearing does ‘Self-Conscious-
ness’ 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 up-
on it are cognitively transcendent, idle speculations with no cognitive stand-
ing which cannot justify rejecting (or ‘defeating’) any actual evidence or justi-
fication 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 partic-
ular objects, events, structures or processes. This point holds mutatis mutan-
dis 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 per-
ceive 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 tru-
ism is relevant to our perceptual knowledge presupposes that empirical justi-
fication must conform to the deductivist requirements of infallibilism, accor-
ding 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 do-
mains such as empirical knowledge. This idea, like Cartesian scepticism gen-

28
Westphal (2003, §§16–20) examines Hegel’s case against some still-standard Enligh-
tenment views about individual cognitive self-sufficiency.
 227

erally, presumes that mere logical possibilities suffice to block cognitive justi-
fication, even in non-formal domains. This presumption assimilates logical
gaps to cognitive gaps in any justificatory evidence or reasoning. Thus Carte-
sian scepticism assimilates all non-formal domains of knowledge to the de-
ductivist, infallibilist model of pure axiomatics. However, this model of justifi-
cation – like the notion of ‘provability’ – is only definable, and thus only de-
fensible, within purely formal domains of knowledge.
In contrast to this, Hegel (like Kant and Gettier) is a fallibilist about em-
pirical 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 strin-
gent’, as is often claimed. Rather, they are entirely inappropriate, altogether
irrelevant, to the non-formal domain of empirical knowledge. At most, deduc-
tion may be necessary, though it cannot be sufficient for justification in non-
formal domains, because all such domains are in part constituted and speci-
fied 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-argu-
ments or counter-examples to justificatory evidence or reasoning in the non-
formal domain of empirical knowledge require, not mere logical consistency
(logical possibility), but positive, identified counter-evidence or counter-in-
stances, where such evidence or instances requires cognitive reference to spa-
tio-temporally localised particulars (which alone can be the source of rele-
vant evidence). Hence the deductivist, infallibilist ideals of justification pre-
sumed by Cartesians – and in this, empiricism in the analytic tradition, in-
cluding 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 sci-
entia can neither refute nor evade Pyrrhonian scepticism in non-formal do-
mains 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 deduc-
tivist 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.
228

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. Coher-
entist accounts of justification, including ‘reflective equilibrium’, cannot dis-
tinguish credibly, in theory or in practice, between a maximally comprehen-
sive 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 await-
ed most patiently.
The Cartesian ego-centric predicament presupposes both the foundation-
alist, deductivist model of infallible justification and its appropriateness to
non-formal domains of knowledge. All this is symbolised by Descartes’ mau-
vais 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 Cartesian-
ism in epistemology. Hegel’s explication of thought and his cognitive seman-
tics provide the basis for introducing and developing ‘the category’ (in ‘Rea-
son’), which then forms the point of departure for ‘Spirit’.30 Against the Self-
Sufficiency Thesis that all our awareness of particulars is nothing but modes
of our self-awareness, Hegel argues in ‘Observing Reason’ that after the scien-
tific 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 de-
pends 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.
 229

conceptually structured thought in the form of categories.31 ‘Observing Rea-

son’ 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 Self-
Consciousness and of Reason. These conclusions suggest some of the impor-
tant ways in which Hegel seeks to show that scepticism and subjective ideal-
ism 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 Del-
phi: ‘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, al-
though the bases of rational judgment identified by Hegel are consistent with
realism about the objects of knowledge and with strict objectivity about mo-
ral 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 con-
structive 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 capac-
ity 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 jus-
tification in moral philosophy justifies this last aspect of autonomy (4.) by
showing that sufficient justifying grounds for a proscribed action cannot be

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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 Phenomenol-
ogy of Spirit (1807), and in particular, that this kind of theory affords an ade-
quate, proper and illuminating account of Hegel’s ‘Thesis of Mutual Recogni-
tion’ (§§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’) individu-
alism 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 philoso-
pher. 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 represen-
1
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).
 233

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 typi-
cally 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 under-
stand 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-Con-
sciousness’ 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 under-
scored 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 commu-
nity 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-individu-
alism’ to designate his anti-Cartesian case for mental content externalism. I use ‘individ-
ualism’ 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.
234

rational justification (§81). Hegel’s account thus ‘saves the phenomena’ of

rational assessment and justification, while avoiding obfuscating over-simpli-
fications (§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-con-
scious 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 re-
cognition 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 ‘Rea-
son’, 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’ con-
cerns ‘Stoicism’, ‘Skepticism’ and the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’, it seems He-
gel must justify the Thesis of Mutual Recognition in the first half of ‘Self-Con-
sciousness’, 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 West-
phal (2009a), 28.
 235

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 Recogni-
tion. 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 Fich-
te’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 develop-
ing a much more sophisticated and illuminating Thesis of Mutual Recogni-
tion 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 ‘con-
cept’ of spirit announced at the beginning of ‘Self-Consciousness’, Hegel ulti-
mately 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 self-
aware persons. Part of why it appears implausible is due to our Cartesian in-
heritance, according to which to be conscious at all involves being conscious
that we are conscious, so that consciousness of whatever we may sense, imag-
ine 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.
236

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, lin-
guistically or otherwise explicitly articulated by the (organic) subject of those
states. According to Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, the explicit propositional artic-
ulation 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 achieve-
ment. This is not the place to examine the merits of these two different views;
though the distinction between mere sensory perception and explicit, con-
ceptually 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 stra-
tegy may ultimately succeed,8 it is plainly not the kind of analysis Hegel pro-
vides 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 self-
awareness than mere self-awareness of what one perceives. If one were to ar-
gue 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).
8
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, Wittgen-
stein’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).
 237

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 transcen-
dental ‘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-knowl-
edge only by witnessing our own kinds of character traits as they are exhib-
ited by our closest friends, who typically share some of our important, defin-
ing 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 He-
gel develops this theme in the Nürnberger Propädeutik,11 the 1807 Phenomen-
ology 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 chap-
ter.12 Beiser then introduces the Rousseauian-Kantian theme that genuine ra-
tionality lies in self-legislating universally valid laws, ultimately claiming that
‘The master proves his freedom not by dominating this slave, … but by treat-

10
Aristotle EN, Bk. 10; cf. Cooper (1980).
11
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.
238

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’, be-
cause, 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 Phenomenol-
ogy. Beiser likewise disregards the significance of the different contexts of
Hegel’s analysis in the 1807 Phenomenology and the Encyclopaedia. One im-
portant 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 philo-
sophical system, which presupposes that philosophy is cognitively compe-
tent. 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 demon-
strate by justifying, inter alia, that free rational action requires Kantian self-
legislation, or that mutual recognition is constitutive of our individual self-
consciousness. Finally, Beiser does not consider why Hegel’s summary discus-
sions of mutual recognition in the Nürnberger Propädeutik and in the Ency-
clopaedia 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 Phenomen-
ology does not lead directly to this (purported) result. Instead, individualist
views of thought, reason and action persist through the remainder of ‘Self-
13
Beiser (2005), 190; he cites Enz. §433R for support.
14
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 sys-
tematic 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 Phe-
nomenology. This serious oversight reflects general lack of attention by Hegel’s commen-
tators to issues of justifying, not merely expounding, Hegel’s (purported) views.
 239

Consciousness’,16 through the entirety of ‘Reason’, are only implicitly replaced

by social conceptions of thought, reason and action at the beginning of ‘Spi-
rit’, 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 individual-
ist views.17 Beiser’s fine summary misses much of Hegel’s point due to insuffi-
cient 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 tran-
scendental 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 recog-
nising 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 gener-
ally 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 anal-
ysis 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. Regret-
tably, 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); Houl-
gate (2003); Westphal (2003a), §13.9–11; Neuhouser (2009); below, §§83–91.
240

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 them-
selves, ‘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-conscious-
ness’, ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ (PhdG chapt. IVB), Hegel contends that the
Unhappy Consciousness rejects entirely the original claim of Fichtean Self-
Consciousness, that it self-sufficiently constitutes the entire world we experi-
ence (PhdG, 9:130.25–31/¶229). Rejecting this thesis, within the context of He-
20
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 other-
being. 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 bisher-
igen Gestalten des Bewußtseyns […] drückt eben dies aus, daß nicht allein das Bewußt-
seyn 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).
 241

gel’s reductio ad absurdum argument, justifies inferring, by disjunctive syllo-

gism, 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 (appercep-
tion), 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-Conscious-

ness’ (§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 histori-
cal 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 pre-
sentation, 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-Conscious-
ness’ 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-conscious-
22
‘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’.
242

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 por-
tentous 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 ini-
tial 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 self-
sufficient, 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 cru-
cial to notice that Hegel continues to discuss this issue throughout the Pheno-
menology.27 After disappearing from ‘Lord and Bondsman’, the issue of mu-
tual recognition (though not the term) first reappears in ‘Unhappy Consci-
ousness’ (PhdG chapt. IVBc). The recognition considered there is a highly
asymmetrical, putative recognition of the ‘changeable’ unhappy conscious-
ness of the devoutly religious (Augustinian) individual by the (divine) ‘un-
changeable’, which is projected by that devout individual (PhdG, 9:122.7–10,
130–31/¶¶207, 227–230). In the Phenomenology, Hegel first mentions a genu-
26
Cf. Redding (2005). Hegel’s substantive argument in the first part of ‘Self-consci-
ousness’ (i.e., ‘the Battle unto death’ and ‘Lord and Bondsman’) may be summarised brief-
ly: Hegel’s analysis of ‘Self-Consciousness’ provides an internal critique of Fichte’s philo-
sophy, which purported that ‘self-consciousness’ (‘I = I’) is a self-sufficient principle for ex-
plaining 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 de-
monstrate 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 hu-
man beings, because these provide clear counter-examples to the claims of self-suffici-
ency required by Fichte’s theoretical (‘transcendental’) idealism. The second strand of ide-
alism in Fichte’s philosophy is practical; it recognises that the first, theoretical strand can-
not 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.
 243

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 unde-
veloped, literally immature form of mutual recognition. The first fully devel-
oped 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 indi-
vidual 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 philo-
sophical 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 genu-
ine inquiry and debate instantiates (more or less adequately) this strong
sense of the term. Kant’s analysis aimed to uncover the transcendental condi-
tions 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 Cate-
gories’ or his ‘Refutation of Idealism’ or any other piece of substantial philo-
sophical reasoning. In this important regard, a critique of philosophical self-
consciousness 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 pas-
sage is crucial, though none recognises its significance for rational judgment per se. Beiser
(2009) epitomises Hegel’s analysis of ‘Morality’, including ‘Conscience’, though he ne-
glects much of the philosophical significance of the final reconciliation among the contes-
ting agent and observer.
244

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 evi-
dence and of principles of reasoning. If judgment, as a physiological or psy-
chological 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 fol-
lowed suit. Kant contends that freedom is a rational idea which is constitu-
tive – indeed definitive – of our conceiving of ourselves as agents (Allison
1997). Only rational spontaneity enables us to appeal to principles of infer-
ence and to make rational judgments, both of which are normative because
each rational subject considers for him- or herself whether available proce-
dures, evidence and principles of inference warrant a judgment or conclu-
sion. In the theoretical domain of knowledge, having adequate evidence,
proof or (in sum) justification, requires taking that evidence, proof or justifi-
cation to be adequate; in the practical domain of deliberation and action,
having adequate grounds for action requires taking those grounds to be ade-
quate. 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 – appro-
priate and adequate grounds of action. Otherwise we abdicate rational con-
29
Kant, Rel., 6:24; Allison (1990), 5–6, 39–40.
 245

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 (liter-
ally) ‘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 transcen-
dental idealism and to his attempt to provide a priori metaphysical founda-
tions for natural science (KTPR, 173–204).

30
I do not claim that taking evidence to be adequate suffices for that evidence to be ade-
quate! 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 cer-
tain 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 Out-
lines 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 ‘philoso-
phy’ sharply from ‘history of philosophy’, relegating the latter to mere scholarship.
246

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 ex-
posed by Sextus Empiricus to be hopelessly dogmatic and prone to petitio
principii, because neither kind of justificatory foundations can offer any justi-
fication 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 foun-
dationalist 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 founda-
tionalist model itself are inevitable, whilst in principle the foundationalist
model of justification offers nothing to settle such disputes because it analy-
ses justification solely in terms of derivation from some privileged set of foun-
dations. Pure externalist accounts of cognitive justification, such as reliabil-
ism or information-theoretic epistemology, are designed to scuttle such inter-
nalist 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-for-
mal 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.
 247

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 prob-
lem; 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 justifica-
tion of rational principles (§75). Hegel’s solution to the Dilemma of the Crite-
rion 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 under-
taking, 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 im-
portant, 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 construc-
tivism 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.
35
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.
248

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 ex-
tends Kant’s model to account for rational justification generally (§79).
Instead of consent, Kant’s theory of normative justification relies on possi-
ble consistency of human maxims or forms of outer action. Kant’s basic crite-
rion 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 for-
mulated 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 contrac-
tualist analyses (Westphal 2016a, §§29–34). Kant’s universalisation tests rule
out any maxim which cannot possibly be adopted by others; it does not con-
cern 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 share-
able 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 behav-
iour 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).
 249

latter information is brought into Kant’s universalisation tests by using the

Principle of Hypothetical Imperatives, ‘Who wills the end, wills also (neces-
sarily, 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, decep-
tion, fraud and exploitation. In principle, such maxims preclude offering to
relevant others – especially victims – reasons sufficient to justify their follow-
ing 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 ratio-
nal agents, i.e., as agents who can determine what to think or to do by ratio-
nally 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 Mod-
ern 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 construc-
tivist 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, insti-
tution 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.
38
Schneewind (1998); regarding Kant see Westphal (2016a), §§18–23; regarding Hegel see
Westphal (2017e), (2018a).
250

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 fundamen-
tally social, it is fundamentally intersubjective, because it addresses all con-
cerned parties. The nerve of Kant’s strategy is to show that this modal capac-
ity to provide justifying reasons to all relevant others is a very stringent re-
quirement 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 articu-
lates the content of a natural law theory, though it moots the issues of ontol-
ogy (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 com-
municate in accord with the requirements of an ‘ideal speech situation’ (Ha-
bermas), 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 constructiv-
ism, 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, requir-
ing consent to establish basic norms too easily allows for negligence or back-
sliding 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, socio-
historical, textual or personal.
Saying that Kant’s constructivism does not appeal to moral facts may
invite a misunderstanding. Unlike most contemporary ‘constructivist’ pro-
grammes, Kant’s constructivism is not committed to generating or ‘con-
structing’ the entire moral domain by appeal solely to non-moral facts and

39
O’Neill (1989, 1996, 2000, 2002b, 2004a, 2004b).
40
See Westphal (2016a), §§18–34.
 251

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 constructiv-
ism 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 justifi-
cation 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 criteri-
al 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 re-
quires 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 princi-
ples 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.
252

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 justifica-
tion, 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 He-
gel’s account of the possibility of constructive self- and mutual criticism. Mu-
tual 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, princi-
ples of inference and its use of each of these, we can revise, replace or re-af-
firm 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, He-
gel’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 exter-
nalist theories or principles of perceptual knowledge escape. Externalist theories of per-
ceptual knowledge do not escape social dimensions of human knowledge, due to the soci-
al 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 di-
mensions 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 He-
gel’s rejection of descriptions theories of reference, his transcendental proofs of exter-
nalism about mental content and his endorsement of some externalist aspects of cogni-
tive justification, e.g., regarding sensation and perception (Westphal 2003a), and his
(Kantian) semantics of singular cognitive reference; above, §§65–70, Westphal (2014).
 253

realised that fallibilism about justification is consistent with realism about

the objects of empirical knowledge and with objectivity about practical prin-
ciples.46
79.1 Hegel’s is no Coherence Criterion. It is important to understand why He-
gel’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 jus-
tification. 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 princi-
ples of justification and justifying links amongst them, must be such that the
relevant person (S) is or can easily become aware. Consider this point (brief-
ly) in connection with some central characteristics of Nineteenth and Twen-
tieth Century coherence theories.
Nineteenth-century coherence theories of justification were conceived
and written in what was later called the material mode of speech, and inclu-
ded experiences along with statements and principles amongst which coher-
ence was to be sought. One persistent problem with such views is that, in the
attempt to distinguish coherence from foundationalist theories of justifica-
tion, 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 co-
herent 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 re-
instated. 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 cir-
cles’ or ‘stances’, but it must be said that Hegel is the philosophical past mas-
46
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).
254

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 empiri-
cal 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 transcenden-
tal proofs of (not ‘from’) mental content externalism, the thesis that some of
our mental contents can only be specified by reference to extra-mental ob-
jects 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 dif-
ferences 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 (in-
deed, ‘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 disjunc-
tive 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).
 255

No extant coherence theory of justification provides proof of mental con-

tent 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 justi-
fication involves coherentist elements, it is not a coherence theory of justifi-
cation. Furthermore, extant coherence theories of justification neglect the Di-
lemma of the Criterion, they attempt no analysis of the very possibility of self-
criticism and they lack sufficient procedures or criteria for distinguishing be-
tween vicious circularity and constructive criticism and revision to identify
positive increases in the ‘truth content’ of the most coherent account availa-
ble 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 accoun-
ting 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 in-
tuitions are insufficiently well-ordered to ground stable equilibria (Perlmut-
ter 1998) and because there are deeply and apparently irreconcilable ‘intui-
tions’ (if that be what they are) amongst (schools of) philosophers.51 Reflec-
tive equilibrium can hardly avoid (sub-)cultural or historicist relativism; in-
deed, it may instead be a source (if not a version) of it. Goodman’s formula-
tion expressly concerns what we do, namely, that we trim data to fit our theo-
ries, 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 di-
rect (not representational) theory of perception rooted in the proper func-

50
Davidson provides no coherence theory of knowledge because, inter alia, his semantic
theories omit considerations of cognitive justification, which is the key bone of conten-
tion 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.
256

tioning of our neuro-psychology of perception, a mixed internalist-externalist

theory and ‘a better understanding of the difference between legitimate mu-
tual support and vicious circularity’.53 Yet Hegel greatly augments Haack’s
Foundherentism with his transcendental proofs of mental content external-
ism, his solution to the Dilemma of the Criterion via his account of the possi-
bility 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 in-
to Hegel’s explication of the possibility of constructive self-criticism is built
into Kant’s constructivist strategy for rational justification. Because construc-
tivist 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. Infalli-
bilist 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 (unwar-
rantedly) to be true and self-evident.
Precisely because constructivist rational justification is fallibilist, it under-
scores that to judge rationally is to judge matters thus:
To the best of my present abilities, understanding and information, this con-
clusion 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 (‘per-
spectival’, 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 self-
critical and mutually critical assessment of each and everyone’s judgment.
Any consensus thereby reached is and remains justified – and remains justifi-
catory 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 facili-
tates self-criticism and makes it a social phenomenon by facilitating the iden-
tification 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).
54
See Longino (1994) and Haack (2003), 57–91, on the social dimensions of human knowl-
edge. Regarding coherence theories, see Bender (1989), Meyers (1988).
 257

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 self-
criticism 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. Conse-
quently, 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 it-
self, 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 analy-
sis, 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, Wittgen-
stein’s scepticism about rule-following makes the same point, that principles are not al-
gorithms, 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).
258

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 recon-
ciled to each other, and to the fundamentally social dimensions of genuine
rational judgment.
Expressly, this is the first instance of genuine and equal mutual recogni-
tion 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 oppo-
site, 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 understand-
ing 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 Recogni-
tion 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 assess-
ment 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 can-
not 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.
58
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 Aner-
kennen, welches der a b s o l u t e Geist ist“ (PhdG, 9:361.22–25/¶670); cf. HER, 182–3.
 259

over-estimate our own individual rational, though fallible and limited powers
of judgment. Thus recognising our own fallibility and our mutual interdepen-
dence 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 recognis-
ing 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 accept-
ing the crucial roles of charity, tolerance, patience and literal forgiveness in
our mutual assessment of our rational judgments and those of others, to ac-
knowledge 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 charac-
ter (à la Aristotle on friendship), but of our shared fallible and corrigible ratio-
nal 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 consci-

60
Details are examined below, §§83–91; cf. HER, 160–4, 181–3; Westphal (2003a), §13.9.
61
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.
260

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 con-
sciousness 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 in-
troduce 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 commu-
nity to any transcendent religious diety. Though Hegel was Christian, if the-
ism 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 sin-
gular 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 rele-
vant 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 develop-
ment. One key task Hegel faces in ‘Religion’ (PhdG chapt. VII) is to demon-
strate 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 Forgive-
ness’ that in principle God = Spirit = the mutually recognitive human commu-
nity, where this thesis is actualised by our recognitive community becoming
adequately self-knowing through Hegel’s philosophical system and its mani-
fold 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 entgegenge-
setzten 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.
 261

and one another accountable to what morality requires of us, and yet to be
tolerant and forgiving of understandable human shortcomings, whilst maint-
aining 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, so-
cially: 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 spir-
it’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 Phenomen-
ology 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 rele-
vant issues. Yet such training does not suffice to assess the reasoning in ques-
tion. 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 ad-
dress 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, contem-
porary or possible. This is built into Hegel’s concept and method of ‘determi-
nate 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 justifica-
tion 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 Gio-
vanni (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.
262

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 ratio-
nal 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 justifica-
tion 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 justifica-
tion for non-formal domains and by arguing that, uniquely, Hegel’s theory of
rational justification solves this Dilemma. Because rational justification in-
volves 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 ra-
tional 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 self-
assessment 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 condi-
tions 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.
 263

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 gen-
era 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 express-
ly 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 ‘justi-
fication’ and ‘deduction’, in part because his system is justifiable only if He-
gel’s 1807 Phenomenology succeeds, inter alia, in refuting or dissolving philo-
sophical 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 with-
in 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).
68
PhdG 9:475, WdL I, 21:9.14–18. Unfortunately, these crucial philosophical issues are neg-
lected 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 con-
tent externalism, but also on social aspects of mental content. Hostile critique by other
264

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 inter-
locutors. (Teller 2001, 125)

Teller suggests this modest contextualist view for the sake of discussion, not-
ing 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 domi-
nates 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 mani-
festo, The Empirical Stance (see below, §119). Retreating into groups of like-
minded 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 alterna-
tive Critical account of rational justification developed by Kant and Hegel.72
This chapter has been primarily explicative and expository; the next re-
examines the core issues and argues that Hegel’s explication of the self-criti-
cal 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 do-
mains (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 conse-
quently also recognising our mutual interdependence for assessing our own
and one another’s’ judgments and their justification. This explication pro-
vides 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 assess-
ment 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 substan-
tive domains.

84 THE PYRRHONIAN DILEMMA OF THE CRITERION.

84.1 The Dilemma. The most fundamental challenge to rational justifica-

tion, 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 (quo-
ted above, §8). Pyrrhonian skepticism has pervasively influenced philosophy
(Popkin et al. 1980, 1993, 2003; Ramão 2007), though only recently have ana-
lytic epistemologists much discussed it. Fogelin (1994) is an exception, yet he

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_0�4

266

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 Dilem-
ma of the Criterion refutes two standard accounts of justification: coheren-
tism and foundationalism. Against coherentism, the Dilemma raises the
charge of vicious circularity. Coherence alone cannot distinguish in any prin-
cipled 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 state-
ments, ‘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 mo-
dels of justification typically distinguish between historia and scientia. Experi-
ential knowledge (historia) derives from sensory and memorial data; rational
knowledge (scientia) is deduced from first principles.2 This distinction re-
mains common, e.g., in the distinction between ‘conceptual’ and ‘empirical’
issues. Both models involve justifying conclusions by deriving them unilater-
ally 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., induc-
tion, abduction) or weaker forms of basing relations (e.g., ‘probabilification’,
‘self-warrant’).
The Dilemma of the Criterion exposes foundationalist models of justifica-
tion 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, accord-
1
The Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion is omitted by Bett (2010), Vogt (2011) and Bor-
chert (2006), including Comesaña (2006); it includes Chisholm’s ‘Problem of the Criter-
ion’ (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).
 267

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 foundation-
alist theories of justification, not simply the justification of any particular
first-order claim(s). In this important regard the Dilemma of the Criterion dif-
fers from and is more challenging than what Williams (1996, 60–8) calls ‘Ag-
rippa’s Trilemma’, which challenges first-order claims by noting that any
mere claim is neither more nor less justified than any other, and that justify-
ing 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 jus-
tification.3 They thus neglect the second-order, the reflexive and the fully gen-
eral character of the Dilemma of the Criterion. The Dilemma of the Criterion
raises not only the second- or third-person question, How might a philoso-
pher justify his or her second-order analysis of first-order justification, toge-
ther 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 suspen-
sion of judgment: the Pyrrhonist does not argue, but remarks how the dialec-
tical 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 Pyrrho-
nian problematic’ dogmatically and so reverts (in effect) to Academic scepticism, as does
Alston (2005, 217). Williams formulates ‘Agrippa’s Trilemma’ whilst highlighting ‘skepti-
cism 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 pro-
vide justification, see Stephen Wright (2013).
268

claim to know something either to meet or to dissolve the challenges appar-

ently raised, inter alia, by the Dilemma of the Criterion. Unlike both Chis-
holm’s ‘Problem of the Criterion’ and Williams’ ‘Agrippan Trilemma’, the Pyr-
rhonian 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 de-
rives historically from the Ancient Greek model of scientia, in which rational
first principles afford the derivations of more specific corollaries. How, whe-
ther or to what extent this model (or family of models) might be fitted to em-
pirical domains has been, in the wake of Tempier (1277), a philosophical pre-
occupation from Descartes and Hume to contemporary efforts (e.g., by logical
positivists) to use axiomatic systems within natural sciences, especially phys-
ics (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 knowl-
edge in accord with an infallibilist model of scientia are Descartes’ Medita-
tions, 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 pos-
sible human experience and knowledge (KdrV, Axv). However, Transcenden-
tal 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 re-
place 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 cogni-
5
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).
 269

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 func-
tion 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 justi-
ficatorily vacuous can mere seemings be infallible. When more substantive
claims are made, appeals to self-evidence are challenged to distinguish reli-
ably 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, in-
fallible 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 pur-
ported truth.
This distinction holds regardless of the truth or falsehood of the claim in
question; it is a cognitive distinction marking a crucial justificatory differ-
ence. No advocate of self-evidence has devised plausible criteria for distin-
guishing reliably between them, in connection with claims sufficiently sub-
stantive 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 re-
alism in (MWO), under pressure from resurgent empiricism he relapsed into
the infallibilist-foundationalist fold founded by Tempier by asserting ‘If any-
thing is to be probable, then something must be certain’, where these cer-
tainties 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 do-
mains. 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 predic-
ament’ betrays a fundamental incoherence in Quine’s semantics (Westphal 2015b).
270

for knowledge. Infallibilists have condemned fallibilism as capitulating to

scepticism. Clarifying why this is not so requires distinguishing between for-
mal 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 non-
formal domain of its application requires further justificatory resources, not
limited to formal deduction. This holds too for the use of that system in justi-
fying any particular claim within its domain of application. Within any sub-
stantive domain, fallibilism is no sceptical capitulation, not because infallibil-
ist standards of justification are too stringent, but because in principle they
are inappropriate, indeed they are irrelevant to substantive domains. Con-
versely, 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 Criti-
cal philosophy, and only partly undertaken by post-Gettier analytic epistem-
ologists (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 non-
8
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.
 271

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 re-
quires accepting justificatory externalism, the thesis that some aspects of jus-
tification 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 external-
ist; 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 ac-
count of rational justification in substantive domains, and a tenable solution
to the Dilemma of the Criterion, require recognising and integrating both in-
ternalist and externalist aspects of cognitive justification (per Alston 1989,
227–45).
86.4 Distinct Levels of Epistemic Analysis. Solving the Dilemma of the Criter-
ion 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 jus-
tifying the epistemology which shows why those kinds of reasons suffice.
These distinctions are highlighted by the Dilemma of the Criterion by its ex-
press 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 re-
cognising that not all forms of justificatory circularity are vicious (Alston
1989a, 319–39; 1993). For example, if many simple perceptual beliefs are typi-
cally generated by suitably reliable and informative psycho-physiological pro-
cesses, these may count as perceptual knowledge. On the basis of such per-
ceptual knowledge, we may then be able to formulate and to justify the cog-

9
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 knowl-
edge be met; it denies that the satisfaction of the truth condition need be proven to be
satisfied. On McDowell, see below, §107.
272

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 cir-
cularity, but this circularity is not in principle vicious. Having reliably formed
perceptual beliefs which thereby count as knowledge may settle one impor-
tant 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 con-
struction, 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-re-
cord’ arguments must be carefully assessed in order to identify genuine cases
of non-vicious, positive justification of principles of justification, and to dis-
tinguish 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 con-
structive mutual assessment. Before considering these topics (§§88, 89), re-
call 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 falli-
bilist account of rational justification requires identifying and assessing our
basic cognitive and practical capacities, together with their attendant inca-
pacities. 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-assess-
ment whilst avoiding petitio principii, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) ex-
amines a wide range of principles of justification, both cognitive and practi-
cal, as used by their paradigmatic exponent within their intended domains.
Each candidate set of principle, exponent, use and intended domain is pre-
sented as a ‘form of consciousness’. Each candidate set is relevant because it
plausibly highlights one or another of our putative cognitive or practical ca-
pacities or abilities.
Hegel holds that, to avoid petitio principii, cogent refutation must be inter-
nal, and that each candidate principle of justification can be assessed strictly
internally to each proponent form of consciousness: thorough internal cri-
tique enables us to understand both the insights and the oversights of the as-
sessed principle and its paradigmatic use. Deepening our understanding of
10
For details regarding the points summarised in §83, see above, §§60–64.
 273

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 suc-
cessor 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 un-
derstand 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 be-
tween ‘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 cri-
tique (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 un-
dermines the justification of a view, but provides no constructive steps to-
wards a superior alternative. Determinate negation via thorough internal cri-
tique 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 precon-
ditions for it are satisfied (e.g., possession and competent use of the concep-
tions ‘time’, ‘times’ and ‘individuation’). These preconditions are thus neces-
sary 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 practi-
tioners. One of Hegel’s main arguments for this conclusion is examined be-
low, §§89, 90. (Hegel’s non-reductive view is that individuals and their soci-
eties 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 circu-
larity from permissible instances of epistemic circularity require that we are
274

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 incap-
able 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, aug-
ment 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 anal-
ysis of the possibility of constructive self-criticism explicates our conscious-
ness 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 con-
ception of the object itself. Likewise, he distinguishes ourselves as actual cog-
nitive agents in our actual cognitive and practical engagements from our self-
conception as engaged cognitive and practical agents. Making these basic dis-
tinctions 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 sub-
jective idealism generally (above, §§68, 69, 75–80).
 275

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 (cen-
trally) within our conceptions and may not be explicitly experienced (c, 3);
these Hegel marks using dative grammatical constructions. What sorts of fea-
tures these may be, and how they may be related to our experience of our-
selves and of our objects, depends upon the specifics of the form of consci-
ousness in question. For the practical context, these distinctions are as fol-
lows; primes indicate the practical counterparts to the aspects of cognition
detailed previously (§63):

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)
276

Conscious Acting as a Relation and as Self-relation

1N) Our conception of our context of AN) Our self-conception as agents who
action, our aim and expected can and do act intentionally:
consequences: Our context, aim Our agency ACCORDING TO us.
and act ACCORDING TO us.

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

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

4N) Our context of action as such, and DN) Our capacities, abilities, skills as
what it enables or disallows us to agents and our actual behaviour
effect: as such:
Our context and results AS SUCH. Our agency AS SUCH.

On this account, our experience of the situation and the execution of our in-
tention (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 self-
conception 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 ei-
ther 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 dis-
allows 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 capa-
cities, 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 corre-
spond 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-
 277

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 con-
text 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, explicit-
ly 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 corre-
spond 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 con-
ceived 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 self-
experience (BN) intelligible, and our practical self-conception (AN) must ren-
der 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
278

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-con-
ceptions (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 substan-
tial 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 conse-
quences, and between our self-conceptions as agents and our actual behavi-
our, 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 counter-
parts to those identified above regarding empirical knowledge (§63).
The key points of Hegel’s account of the possibility of constructive self-
criticism 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 construc-
tive self-criticism is humanly possible, that we are not condemned in princi-
ple 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 evi-
dence, principles of inference and its use of each of these, we can revise, re-
place or re-affirm as need be any component and any link among compon-
ents within the justificatory reasoning in question (see below, §89.5). Because
self-criticism and constructive mutual assessment are both fallible and corri-
gible, 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).
 279

principles (Westphal 2016a). This account provides for telling critical assess-
ments of theory types, of the views espoused by various ‘cultural circles’ and
of philosophical ‘stances’. Hegel’s method of internal critique generates signi-
ficant, constructive results.15 Here the merits of this account can be highlight-
ed 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 impor-
tant 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 evi-
dence 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 practi-
cal; they are crucial to philosophy; and they are central to any intelligent
inquiry in any of life’s many activities, whether professional, commercial, pol-
itical 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 estab-
lished through mature judgment. Likewise, we can only distinguish vicious
from benign epistemic circularity through mature judgment. We are not con-
demned 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 ex-
plication of the self-critical structure of human consciousness. Recognising
that mature judgment involves this complex of factors helps to show that ra-
15
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).
280

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 empiri-
cal knowledge, two externalist aspects in this theory of justification are relia-
bilism 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-scepti-
cal arguments which appeal to mental content externalism as a premiss com-
mit 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 can-
not be self-conscious unless we inhabit a natural world which provides us a
sufficient minimum degree of identifiable similarities and differences a-
mongst the contents of our sensations and (analogously) amongst the spatio-
temporal 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 environ-
ment, 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 men-
tal content externalism. Additionally, the social dimensions of rational justi-
17
In morals this account of rational justification also provides a mixed internalist-exter-
nalist 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 in-
stances 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 langu-
age can supplement, though not supplant, epistemology.
 281

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 inter-
nalist-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 expli-
cation 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 inher-
ent 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, fan-
tasies 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’ episte-
mology in this sense: epistemology must take the natural sciences into very close consi-
deration; see below, §§127–131.
22
Recall §83.3, on mixed internalist-externalist accounts of cognitive justification.
282

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 con-
clusion 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 ren-
ders 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 exper-
ience of our own cognitive constitution and activities, and analogously for ac-
tion, regarding either intended and actual consequences or purported and ac-
tual 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 judg-
ments cannot rule out that objects may behave very differently than we ex-
pect, 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, histori-
cally 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 mat-
ter as ‘a permanent possibility of sensation’ (cf. ibid., 181–9, 202–12).
 283

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 al-
chemical 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 con-
ceive 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 bio-
logical organisms which require nutrients in their soil, water, sufficient car-
bon 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 mat-
ter of conceptual stipulation, but of conceptual understanding of plant physi-
ology 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 his-
torical bases of our plethora of commonsense conceptions and beliefs by ap-
pealing 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 re-
sulting from our use of our conceptions for comprehending our putative ob-
jects (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.
25
For systematic examination of these points within the context of natural science, see
Bartels (1994), Conant (1957), DiSalle (2002).
284

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 man-
ual 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 re-
sources by being taught them as the best-available and best justified resour-
ces for the domain at issue (cf. Burge 1989, 2003). Through using these resour-
ces, 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, de-
fects 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 cul-
tural history than it merits, yet it lives on in contemporary philosophical ap-
peals to ‘Crusoe cases’, in which internalists neglect Robinson Crusoe’s hav-
ing 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 trans-
cend anyone’s present situation and indeed one’s entire purview. These in-
clude 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 as-
sessment of others who are engaged in other activities and concerns, both
directly and indirectly related to our own, because they can identify impli-
cations of our judgments and the justifying grounds of our judgments which
we cannot. None of us can adequately simulate for ourselves the confron-
tation 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 indi-
cators of justificatory status (Westphal 2014, 2015b).
 285

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 judg-
ments 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 exten-
sive 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 achiev-
ing 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 ignor-
ance 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 system-
atic 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 do-
mains. This methodological implication of Carnap’s semantics was highligh-
ted 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 ex-
tent 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,
286

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 as-
sessment 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 non-
contradiction, 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 justifi-
cation 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 infal-
libilist 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 perni-
cious 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). Internal-
ism about mental content or about justification may be consistent with real-
ism 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 in-
nocuous 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 West-
phal (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 tran-
scendentally requires abstracting from the empirical features of collective scientific re-
search to which they rightly draw attention.
29
All of this is entailed by the project of defeating Descartes’ evil deceiver.
 287

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 inap-
propriate 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 main-
taining 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 re-
identify 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 influ-
ence 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 Mül-
ler-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 ger-
mane 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 sub-
stantive domain (putative empirical knowledge) to which it in principle can-
not 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-
288

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 ac-
counts nevertheless remain subject to the Dilemma of the Criterion; satis-
fying 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 ob-
tain 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 predi-
lections to focus on some activities, issues or inquires rather than others, the
division of cognitive labour this naturally generates, and the manifold impli-
cations 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 justifica-
tion 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 judg-
ments, in order to scrutinise and thereby maximally to refine and to justify ra-
tionally our own judgments.

30
It can be shown within Descartes’ Meditations that narrow content and justificatory in-
ternalism are the basic, self-deceptive fallacies of Cartesianism; see below, §144.1).
 289

This rich and philosophically crucial form of rational self-consciousness re-

quires our correlative consciousness of others, that we are all mutually inter-
dependent for our capacity of rational judgment, our abilities to judge ration-
ally and our exercise of rational judgment. This requirement is transcen-
dental, for unless we recognise our critical interdependence as fallible ration-
al judges, we cannot judge fully rationally, because unless we acknowledge
and affirm our judgmental interdependence, we will seriously misunder-
stand, 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 com-
petence. This recognition involves recognising the crucial roles of charity, tol-
erance, patience and literal forgiveness in our mutual assessment of our ra-
tional judgments and those of others, to acknowledge that oversights, whe-
ther 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 di-
mensions of rational justification in non-formal, substantive domains by ex-
plicating the character of fully rational judgment. The extent to which any
individual or any group exercises rational judgment on any particular occa-
sion is a further question, though considering it, too, requires exercising ratio-
nal 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.
290

(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 cir-
cumstances, rational justification is fallible and inherently provisional. Con-
sequently, rational justification is fundamentally historical, because it is
based upon the current state of knowledge, because it is fallible and thus pro-
visional 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 pre-
sent 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 Strass-
mann bombarded uranium salts with neutrons. Yet after exacting re-examin-
ation of their procedures, theories and explanations, they could not resolve
equivocal results. They reported that chemically, the products of their exper-
iment were barium, which contradicted everything they then knew about nu-
clear physics. Shortly after learning of their results, Lise Meitner devised an
alternative interpretation of their results which achieved consistency by mak-
ing 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 re-
thinking 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 indi-
viduals can contribute to social institutions (in this case, scientific institu-
tions, 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 engin-
eering. To devise a solution to an assigned problem, engineers routinely use
32
This example is from Will (1997, 102); cf. DiSalle (2002).
 291

established kinds of devices, designs and materials, tailoring them to the spe-
cific parameters of the current problem, in order to plan and assemble the re-
quired works or device. Significant engineering problems arise when avail-
able 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 innova-
tion. There are no algorithms for innovation; innovation is required precisely
when standard procedures are insufficient. Yet the history of engineering re-
peatedly shows how innovative engineers can be. Of course, prior innovation
– beginning in pre-historic times with the simple machines – is what pro-
duces today’s stock of available designs and techniques, for any ‘day’ we se-
lect. 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 tradi-
tions we now have (for any relevant ‘now’) generally are the product of intel-
ligent, rational activities guided by our manifold efforts to cope with our-
selves, our neighbours or societies and the natural and social world we inha-
bit. Current practices and procedures may not have been devised by particu-
larly sound, effective or durable reasoning, yet it is reasoning; such are pre-
cisely 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 ra-
tional 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 ra-
tional justification. Sextus’ Dilemma of the Criterion has received scant phil-
osophical attention since the early Nineteenth Century; recent attempts to
solve it tend to over-simplification (above, §61). That we often engage in con-
structive 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 (West-
phal 2016a, §§10, 11).
292

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 pos-
sible, 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 histor-
ical aspects of rational justification in substantive domains are consistent
with, and ultimately require realism about the objects of empirical knowl-
edge and strict objectivity about basic moral norms. It is widely supposed
that ‘pragmatic realism’ is oxymoronic. This supposition, Hegel rightly ar-
gued, 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. Philoso-
phy itself, as a rational examination of substantive issues within substantive
domains, is essentially historical and social. Hegel elevated the history of phil-
osophy to a specifically philosophical discipline because he recognised, and
argued in detail in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, that comprehensive, cri-
tical, 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 ad-
dressed by any tenable account of rational justification in non-formal, sub-
stantive domains, and that the present fallibilist account of rational justi-
fication 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 sol-
ving the Dilemma of the Criterion.
The present account augers a fundamental change in philosophical orien-
tation. 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, sub-
stantive domains), in part because conceptual analysis must be replaced by

34
Notable exceptions include Longino (1990, 1994, 2001) and Haack (2003), 179–202.
35
As noted above (§5), Harris (HL) argues in detail that Hegel’s history in the 1807 Pheno-
menology is far better than has been recognised, and that the Phenomenology contains
Hegel’s genuine philosophy of history.
 293

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 theo-
ries 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 mind-
ing 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 inter-
locutors. 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 Enligh-
tenment rationalism. Traditionally, Anglophone students of Hegel encounter
Jacobi’s views only in Hegel’s criticisms of Jacobi in the conceptual prelim-
inaries (Vorbegriff) of the smaller Encyclopaedia Logic. Jacobi’s writings have
been translated by George di Giovanni, and his views have attracted increas-
ing 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 ra-
tionalism 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 ‘immedi-
ate knowledge’ advocated by Jacobi – and before him by Hamann (1759;
1949–57, 2:57–82) and, sans religious application, by Crusius and his follow-
ers, 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 de-
tailed 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 Ency-
clopaedia, though in less detail and with omissions.) This discussion also de-
serves particular emphasis because of its prominent location as the last of
three accounts of metaphysical knowledge critically rejected in the concep-
1
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 some-
what briefer second edition, edited by Jacobi himself for his collected works.) For exten-
ded 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 Jaco-
bi’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 at-
tacked and repudiated Kant’s conception of time in his general attack on
Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic. Jacobi attacks and repudiates Kant’s Tran-
scendental Aesthetic in his Appendix to David Hume über den Glauben (Wer-
ke 2:291–310; cited as ‘DH’). He turns Kant’s conception of time against Spin-
oza 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 recog-
nise 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 Con-
cerning 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 con-
demns. 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 re-
interpret a philosopher’s view from his own position. (For example, Hegel
2
For discussion of the German counter-enlightenment and its use of Scottish philoso-
phers, 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.
 299

credits Kant with the important insight that empirical knowledge is knowl-
edge of appearances, whilst also charging that Kant’s understanding of ‘ap-
pearances’ was wholly inadequate; Enz. §45Z.) To understand Hegel’s estima-
tion of Jacobi’s significance thus will require accepting, for the sake of discus-
sion, some of Hegel’s philosophical position and understanding some of his
terminology for expressing it. Fortunately, two of the three parts of his criti-
cism 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 – to-
gether 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 applica-
tion, as shown in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the first Critique) and de-
ploys ‘abstract’ (i.e., mutually independent) universals which lead to meta-
physical 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 charac-
terising accounts of the thinking subject, in contrast to accounts of the ob-
jects 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 spe-
cies 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 ad-
vance 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 Ja-
cobi’s argument for the cognitive inadequacy of conceptual thought, presen-
ted most succinctly in the seventh Appendix to the Letters on Spinoza. Accor-
ding to Jacobi, the concepts produced by human thought are limited to cate-
gorising 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 at-
tempts to comprehend ‘infinite’ unconditioned truth, one must convert it in-
to something conditioned by causal mediation. Therefore, instead of ration-
ally comprehending ultimate truth, one perverts it into an untruth.
In Enz. §62R Hegel uses the term ‘anthropocentrism’ to characterise Jaco-
bi’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: Inso-
far 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 con-
ditions, 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 an-
thropocentric, and to make this charge without appealing to Kant’s idealist
doctrines of space and time. Jacobi does develop his argument out of his un-
derstanding 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 re-
gresses 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 think-
ing. On this view of thought, to comprehend something is to explain it by ap-
peal to laws of nature and the causal action of other things. In this way any-
thing we comprehend is treated as one particular among others. Hegel accor-
dingly says: ‘… explanation and comprehension thus consist in showing that
 301

one thing is mediated through another; thus all content [of thought] is only
particular …’ (Enz. §62R). Consequently thought is only capable of compre-
hending 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 con-
ception of thought, is thought adequate to ‘the unconditioned’. Hegel ex-
pressly makes this contrast insofar as after characterising the particular con-
tent 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 uncondi-
tioned –, 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 noume-
non 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 direc-
tion. 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 fatal-
ism’ (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 free-
dom. 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
302

fatalism. For this renunciation of our humanity Jacobi coined the term ‘nihil-
ism’.3 Jacobi’s doctrine of ‘immediate knowledge’ is his alternative to such
nihilism. Although Hegel shunts aside the issue of nihilism in the Encyclopae-
dia, he knew quite well and could count on his audience knowing this infa-
mous 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, struc-
tures 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 insist-
ed that he had knowledge of God (Enz. §77; cf. SB 1:70). Jacobi expressed him-
self even more sharply. He characterises his view as a ‘salto mortale’, a fatal
leap annihilating discursive thought, which results from stepping onto a fide-
ist ‘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, con-

sists 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 Ja-
3
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.
 303

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 sensi-
ble 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 Jaco-
bi 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 partic-

ular kind of cognition, namely ‘immediate knowledge’ (cf. DH 106). Hegel’s
critique of Jacobi turns on two fundamental, if implicit, questions: First, whe-
ther one achieves a particular kind of knowledge through the mere repudi-
ation (or negation, logically speaking) of mediate knowledge; second, whe-
ther 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 representa-
tions. Jacobi held that nihilism also results from any indirect or representa-
tional 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 signifi-
cance 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.).
304

There are at least three kinds of accounts of ‘immediate’ knowledge, two

of which are representational accounts of knowledge which exclude syllo-
gism. 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 con-
scious 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 inter-
mediaries in our awareness of objects. Locke’s (Essay, 1.2.1, 1.2.8–9) represen-
tational 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. Nonethe-
less, 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 propo-
sitional aspect to perceptual knowledge. Below I shall show that, although Ja-
cobi 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 in-
tuition 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). Rus-
sell, of course, would never countenance God as an object of direct acquain-
tance, 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.
 305

epistemology. One cardinal defect of intuitionism or aconceptual acquain-

tance – 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 concep-

tion 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 objec-
tion 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.
306

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 ‘im-
mediate 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 ‘im-
mediate’ 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’, ‘provi-

8
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 insep-
arability 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 exis-
tence] 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 expres-
sion means, their views must be considered more closely, and upon closer examination
the differences between them are apparent. Descartes maintains a representational ac-
count of perception and thought (per Thesis 1, §95) and seeks to demonstrate the exis-
tence of God, whereas Jacobi sought to reject both representational accounts of percep-
tion 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 be-
tween 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 occu-
pied 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.
 307

dence’ and the like,10 many of which are plainly descriptive terms, that abso-
lutely no representation is required for ‘immediate knowledge’ (DH 34, 58,
175). Jacobi appears to claim that the kind of ‘immediate knowledge’ he in-
tends is unconditioned by anything other than the existence of the subject
and object of knowledge. He reasons that we are born human; humans are ra-
tional 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 ac-
quaintance’: 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 ques-
tion, 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 ac-
count of his view from 1 and 4 Nov. 1788.
308

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 ‘im-
mediate’ knowledge and time, a time which doubtless contained much reflec-
tion and reconsideration by Jacobi? Jacobi’s claim that ‘immediate knowl-
edge’ is inexplicable (DH 106, SB 272) hardly supplements his view; in the pre-
sent context this claim would amount merely to a dodge to escape any at-
tempt to judge the soundness of his appeal to allegedly ‘immediate’ knowl-
edge of important truths or beings.
A deeper point can be found in Hegel’s objection, however. Although He-
gel’s most explicit discussion of this point is not in the Vorbegriff, and so can-
not 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 cul-
tural 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 identi-
fication of objects requires a representational system of classification (in the
widest sense) and accordingly excludes Jacobi’s presumed cognitive ‘immedi-
acy’. 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 episte-
mology 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 plau-
12
The most pertinent text is chapter I of the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, ‘Sense-
Certainty’. 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).
 309

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 represen-
tations in knowledge and on the social context of individual subjects, his vin-
dication of Thesis 2 over Thesis 3 (from §92), shows how far he stands not on-
ly 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 dis-
cussion: ‘– 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 Aristo-
telian thesis against Jacobi, namely that anything extant must be a determin-
ate 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 qual-
ity or feature. Thus any known object is complex or ‘mediated’ because it con-
sists in at least two aspects. Hegel contends that ‘mediated’ objects of knowl-
edge 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, ontolo-
gical 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 subse-
quent 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 con-
tains mediation’ (Enz. §74). The ‘content’ discussed in this passage are extra-mental ob-
jects, 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 interpre-
tation 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 imme-
diacy] 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 medi-
ation 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, it-
self 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 on-
tology. 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 Jaco-
bi’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) ontolo-
gical holism. According to Hegel, the causal characteristics of things are parti-
ally 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 condi-
tions. 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 interac-
tions 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-
 311

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 concep-
tual 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 deter-
mined only in connection with the identity conditions of other things. Hegel
opposes this conception of identity to the more common conception of iden-
tity, 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 criti-
que 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 thorough-
going coincidence of opposition in nature, which contains all contradictions, but also re-
312

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 cogni-
tion. If things are mutually interrelated in Hegel’s way, then in order to deter-
mine 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 com-
parisons, and so any merely ‘immediate’ relation to an object would not suf-
fice 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 in-
sight, because the content brings mediation with it, is knowledge which con-
tains 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 at-
tempt to forego any and every mediation, Jacobi ultimately must be incapa-
ble 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 knowl-
edge, 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 de-
velop 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 encom-
passes’ (SB 245). These statements are remarkable from Hegel’s perspective, but their sig-
nificance 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 under-
standing 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.)
 313

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 imme-
diate kind of knowledge, a knowledge lacking mediation, whether with an
other or with itself. Similarly it is declared as factual untruth that thought pro-
ceeds only with determinations mediated through other finite and condi-
tioned [determinations] and that mediation [i.e., discursive thought] destroys
itself in these mediations. Logic itself and the whole of philosophy is the ex-
ample 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 remin-
ders 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 Ja-
cobi 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 knowl-
edge 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 Transcen-
dental 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 gen-
eral problem: as a merely formal doctrine, the principle of ‘immediate knowl-
edge’ 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 re-
ports the ‘immediate’ contents of one’s consciousness is a claim to justify
314

one’s assertion as being true because it is ‘immediate’.17 Principles of justifica-

tion are supposed to discriminate between known and unknown claims by
discriminating between warranted and unwarranted (or justified and unjus-
tified) claims. However, any principle of justification which equally warrants
any claim and its negation is no principle of justification whatsoever, and in-
deed (and in principle), Jacobi’s principle of immediate knowledge can war-
rant 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 obvi-
ous fact of disagreement) which reflects on the meta-level epistemic princi-
ple. If Jacobi were to stone-wall and deny that there is disagreement, this de-
nial 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 evalu-
ate or reconcile diverse and conflicting claims would directly introduce medi-
ation 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 ‘im-
mediate knowledge’ does not, pace Jacobi, guarantee the truth of its claims.18
Jacobi’s principle fails to distinguish between genuine insight and mere dog-
matic conviction. ‘Immediate knowledge’ is thus a highly problematic last
epistemological refuge (cf. Enz. §77). The significance of this point can be ap-
preciated by setting it in a broader context.
Jacobi whole-heartedly adopted the first part of Kant’s dictum, that con-
cepts without intuitions are empty (KdrV B75/A51), but neglected the second,
that intuitions without concepts are blind (DH 31–2). The third phase of He-
gel’s objection in Enz. §75 show that incompatible claims, insofar as they re-
main mere claims, don’t readily come to agreement. Although Jacobi knew
that there are incompatible opinions, his writings fail to recognise how seri-
ous 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 com-
posed 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).
 315

The problem with this is not only Jacobi’s concession that we inevitably rely
upon modes of representing, indeed often on different modes of represen-
ting, 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 com-
munity 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. Ja-
cobi himself doubtlessly had no tendency toward violence, but his shocking
and irresponsible expression shows how neigh is physical violence when ra-
tional 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 to-
ward presuppositionlessness, not as a Quixotic attempt to proceed from ut-
terly nothing on the basis of utterly nothing, but to ground the possibility of
316

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 alterna-
tive 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 INTU-

ITIONISM.

Jacobi unequivocally rejected both scepticism and rational cognition – excep-

ting 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 criticis-
ing 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 jus-
tification 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 advo-
cates – and critics.
Hegel’s criticisms of Jacobi’s intuitionism are unlikely to impress or even
to interest contemporary epistemologists. However, Hegel’s success in criti-
cising 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 con-
structive 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 reli-
able way between which claims are, and which are not, true, nor even ap-
proximate. In principle, such unstructured intuitionism provides no re-
sources 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.
 317

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 mod-
esty 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 an-
alysis is insufficient to address any substantive philosophical issues, and be-
cause he realised that developing a tenable, cogent theory of human knowl-
edge requires identifying, cataloguing and assessing our actual cognitive ca-
pacities – 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 philoso-
phy – 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 rea-
sons 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 em-
pirical domains. Used in the Mediaeval period as their Latin counterpart to
Aristotle’s episteme, to designate the highest possible form of knowledge, con-
sidered to be perfect, infallible, demonstrative knowledge of necessary truths,
the term was not univocal; there were a host of distinctive theories of knowl-
edge, but their forms of demonstration drew upon Aristotle’s Posterior An-
alytics (Grellard 2011); not only his Prior Analytics. Only upon Tempier’s con-
demnation of neo-Aristotelian heresies in March 1277 were the demands
upon scientia elevated to deductivist Infallibilism by the demand to demon-
strate the impossibility of all logically possible alternatives to what is (claim-
ed to be) known. Few epistemologists now affirm such stringent standards of
justification, whether regarding empirical knowledge or philosophical ac-
counts of empirical knowledge. Nevertheless, substantive commitment to
infallibilism remains widespread, not only amongst critics of fallibilist ac-
counts 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-

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360�74_0�6

320

ophy? Two are familiar to me. One is triumphalist: according to many promi-
nent 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 philoso-
phers 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 phi-
losophy, but all non-formal substantive domains of philosophy. More gener-
ous forms of formalism welcome all substantive and historical domains of
philosophy, though only to the extent that they admit suitably rigorous for-
malisation. Now I do not claim that all analytical philosophers fall into one of
these groups; here I examine two tendencies characteristic of those philoso-
phers 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 proposi-
tions either to commonsense or to the empirical sciences, retaining for philo-
sophy only the a priori domain of analytic propositions and their philosophi-
cal analysis.2
Starting in the 1950s this overt empiricism was subject to sustained criti-
cism 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 post-
empiricists 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. Commit-
ment 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 epis-
temology 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 proto-
phenomenologist (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 super-
ficial; contrast Meinong’s (1877, 1882) two splendid Hume studies.
2
An important exception is Wittgenstein’s attempt to understand realism whilst dispen-
sing with empiricism, in part by appeal to ‘hinge propositions’ (1969, §§337, 341, 343).
 321

Descartes, who first attempted to assimilate the non-formal domain of empir-

ical 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 suppres-
sed 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 ana-
lytic 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 character-
istics which belong to the definition or essence of something, and that com-
plete enumerative induction (outside mathematical domains) is difficult to
obtain due to controversies about what does or does not belong to the rele-
vant 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 ade-
quacy 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 phil-
osophical 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 re-

3
Post. An. 27b, 92b; Top. 8.2, 157a23–34. These points pertain to modern forms of induc-
tive inference, although Aristotle’s ‘induction’ concerned, not inference, but proper iden-
tification 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.
322

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 be-

tween 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 sys-
tematise the relevant empirical data.
3) Empirical adequacy is much weaker than and does not involve the (al-
leged) 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 evi-
dence 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 cen-
trally to this ‘Law of Weakening’ to justify his Constructive Empiricism. In-
deed, 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 de-
duction, it is irrelevant to any domains which employ ceteris paribus clauses.
Therefore the ‘Law of Weakening’ is irrelevant to issues about scientific explana-
tion, because explanations employ, ineliminably, ceteris paribus clauses! Thus
van Fraassen’s use of the Law of Weakening, involved in his distinction be-
tween 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 do-
mains – has been overlooked for more than three decades. This neglect cor-
roborates how pervasive is the model of infallibilist deductivism in main-
stream 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 phil-
osophical 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 do-
main 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 in-
clude 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, sub-
stantive 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).
324

may be within a non-formal, substantive domain (Westphal 2010b, §2). This

point was seconded by Carnap (1950b). Deduction, within any specified logis-
tic 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 per-
tains 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 cogni-
tive 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 se-
mantics 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 indirect-
ly, we cannot isolate philosophical problems from one another to solve or dis-
solve them piecemeal, because the semantics of the terms and principles in-
volved bear on at least some other, related problems. (How far these relations
may extend varies.7) The ‘divide and conquer’ approach to resolving philoso-
phical 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 con-
sidering 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. Unfor-
tunately, 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 anal-
ysis is inadequate for philosophy of science, which instead requires the ‘expli-
cation’ of key terms or concepts in use within some domain studied philoso-
phically. The ‘explication’ of a term or principle, in this sense, aimed to pro-
vide 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.
 325

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 practi-
tioners. 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. How-
ever 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 philo-
sophical method may preserve semantics as first philosophy, though it entails
that philosophical semantics has no priority over semantics of natural lan-
guage.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 struc-
ture and function.9 (On this count, Brandom follows Quine rather than Car-
nap; see below, §§136, 137.) Carnap’s replacement of ‘analysis’ by ‘explication’
may appear to subvert his entire formalist orientation. However, Carnap ne-
ver 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 com-
plement, ‘descriptive semantics’, to determine which protocol sentences
were uttered by any specific community, especially, by ‘scientists of our cul-
tural circle’. The wide-spread neglect of the non-formal aspects of Carnap’s
semantics reflects the wide-spread formalist presumption of infallibilist de-
ductivism 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 lin-
guistic 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 difficul-
ties 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 in-
quiry, 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 philoso-
phy. 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 a-
gainst the sufficiency of Quine’s logical point of view for non-formal, substantive domains
of philosophy – though without giving up on substantive, constructive philosophy.
326

use the formal mode of speech or one’s preferred meta-linguistic construc-

tion?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 philo-
sophical 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 philosophi-
cal locutions, that is, so to speak, the ‘ordinary language’ of philosophers. Only
by examining these can one find the most suitable, least misleading formula-
tions 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, anal-
yses 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), ap-
proach 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 Phänome-
nologie 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 pre-
Kantian 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 her-
11
For a concise example of how easy are such errors see below, §134.3.
12
E.g., Sellars (SM, 62, 71, 77) mentions Parmenides thrice; contemporary counterparts to
Heraclitus are radical sense-datum theorists, trope theorists and causal process time-
slicers, 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).
 327

meneutical method for specifying the meaning of key terms used in any philo-
sophical text. This method is extremely important for Hegel’s texts, because
Hegel persistently states, explicates and re-explicates the meaning or signifi-
cance (intension) of his terms contextually. This belongs to Hegel’s Parmen-
idean 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 instruc-
tive. 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 princi-
ples within non-formal domains are necessary for properly stating a philo-
sophical view. What about justifying a philosophical view within a substan-
tive, non-formal domain? Justification in non-formal domains requires some-
thing in addition to strict logical deduction. The fundamental problem is that
justification in non-formal domains requires non-formal, substantive princi-
ples and premises. Controversies over these, and over which logistic system
to use within any non-formal domain, can readily founder upon the Pyrrhon-
ian Dilemma of the Criterion (quoted above, §12).
Consider why Chisholm (1982, 65–6) held there to be no satisfactory solu-
tion 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 in-
stances 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 distin-
guish 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 founda-
tionalist models of rational justification, including both scientia and historia.
Can the Dilemma of the Criterion be avoided or resolved? Only by advancing
328

beyond deductivist models of rational justification (and also, e.g., ‘Reflective

Equilibrium’). Indeed, it can be solved only by developing an option neglec-
ted 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 impor-
tance 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 de-
fends 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, inclu-
ding 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 sub-
stantive 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, substan-
tive claim or judgment, to determine whether or the extent to which we our-
selves 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 justifica-
tion 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 non-
formal domains are consistent with – indeed ultimately they require and just-
ify – realism about the objects of empirical knowledge and strict objectivity
about basic practical norms. It is still widely supposed that ‘pragmatic real-
 329

ism’ is oxymoronic. This supposition, Hegel rightly argued, rests upon a series
of false dichotomies (Westphal 2003a). Hegel elevated the history of philoso-
phy to a specifically philosophical discipline because he recognised (already
in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit) that comprehensive, critical, philosophi-
cal history of philosophy is essential to philosophical explication, to philoso-
phical assessment and to philosophical justification in non-formal, substan-
tive domains. Thus in non-formal domains of philosophy, cultural and intel-
lectual history – including all forms of empirical inquiry – play central, ine-
liminable roles within rational justification. For the same reasons, in justify-
ing specifically philosophical views in substantive domains, history of philos-
ophy plays a central, ineliminable role. Philosophy itself, as a rational exami-
nation of substantive issues within substantive (non-formal) domains, is
essentially historical and social.
These points entail that, in non-formal domains, rational judgment – in-
cluding philosophical judgment and especially those judgments involved in
assessing and then affirming (or denying, restricting or revising) the justifica-
tion of one’s own philosophical views – is characterised by historicity: We
each can make our judgments only on the basis of our best available informa-
tion, options, understanding, insights and our best assessment of them and of
our use of them. We can only rationally justify our own philosophical judg-
ments (in non-formal domains) by proposing them for informed critical scru-
tiny. 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 con-
temporary 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 struc-
tured by the considerations just indicated and the social practices and histor-
ical processes which undergird and make possible such considerations. All of
this is entailed by the sole alternative to scientia, namely, justificatory fallibil-
ism, 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 dres-
sing’ – spicing up an essay with passing historical allusions – cannot suffice;
neither can the assimilation of historical views to contemporary predilec-
330

tions, too often exhibited by ‘analytic’ studies of historical texts in philoso-

phy. Of perhaps greatest concern in this regard is that Richard Rorty’s Philoso-
phy 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 shal-
low 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 care-
ful scrutiny of information, views, evidence, reasoning and analysis – includ-
ing 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 con-
temporary 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, dis-
cerning 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 ten-
dency 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.
 331

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 phil-
osophical 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, cen-
tral 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 phi-
losophy must be historical: the subject-matter of philosophy changes histori-
cally. 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 un-
derstanding and comprehension of nature, history and the realms of spirit.
My present concern, however, is not substantive claims such as Hegel’s phi-
losophy of history, but rather methodological. Consider another less ambi-
tious, more methodological reason for historical change in philosophy’s sub-
ject matter: The problems and issues central to non-formal domains of phi-
losophy shift and are reconfigured due to other cultural developments, whe-
ther economic, political, moral or, in Modernity, natural-scientific. The non-
formal 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 distinc-
tive 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 consider-
ations is to court various forms of philosophical mishap, both methodological
and substantive, and to risk parochialism, undue confidence, error or irrele-
vance. These are amongst Hegel’s critical points in ‘The Animal Kingdom of
332

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 strug-
gle 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’ in-
terpretation, 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 revolu-

tionary 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 ex-
ample, 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 Univer-
sity 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, lit-
erature 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 phil-
osophy 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.)
 333

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 He-
gelian pantheism root and branch’.16 Ever since, the ‘received view’ of Hegel
and his philosophy has largely been that of his detractors, who were untrou-
bled about accuracy or considered assessment.17 The level of rhetorical invec-
tive 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 funda-
mental 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 acknowl-
edged, ‘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 futur-
ism for having contributed nothing ‘that deserves to be remembered’ (CP
9:41). Most analytic philosophers were taken in by Russell’s rhetorical invec-
tive; few could then know that at this time Russell regarded Schiller as ‘cer-
tainly among the two or three most eminent of living British philosophers’
and was writing very strong recommendations for him!18 The results of Rus-
sell’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 main-
stream Anglophone philosophy; cf. Reisch 2005, 2007; Erickson et al., 2013).
In the Twentieth Century philosophical methods and strategies prolifer-
ated; in many regards, for the good. Too often, though, practitioners formed
schools or ‘cultural circles’ (Kulturkreise, as they were called by Logical Posi-
tivists), many of which defined themselves in opposition to what they regar-
16
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).
334

ded as Hegelianism. Unlike Russell, Carnap advocated a principle of toler-

ance, which he exhibited generously in Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928),
gladly citing every source which pointed toward a growing, credible consen-
sus about how best to philosophise; twice he cites Dilthey favourably (§§12,
23), Nietzsche thrice (§§65, 67, 163). At that time he was on excellent speak-
ing terms with Heidegger. Unfortunately, his ecumenical attitude soon sub-
sided, as he wrote to Flitner and publicised in his impatient and uncompre-
hending 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 phil-
osophy, 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 educa-
tion, 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 rudi-
ments, 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, Ox-
ford, Dublin, Scotland, France, Germany, Holland, Italy and the USA; on psy-
chology in Holland, on physiological psychology and on psychology of per-
ception 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.
 335

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 con-
tributions 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 (‘Phe-
nomenology of Moral Consciousness’), on Herman Lotze, on relations be-
tween philosophy and science, between psychology and philosophy, on com-
parative human psychology, on political economy as a moral science, on the
classification of the sciences and on scientific philosophy as a theory of hu-
man 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 transla-
tions 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 philoso-
phy, 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 in-
ternational, cosmopolitan, multi-disciplinary, polyglot movement, not only to
promote scientific knowledge, but also to promote public education and pro-
gressive political reform (Mormann 2004, Uebel 2011). Several leading positiv-
ists were non-aligned Marxists or socialists, who had political as well as intel-
lectual 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). Al-
ready 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 Enlighten-
ment programme; if its methods support enlightenment, it can achieve these
aims by promoting and employing its methods, without announcing its en-

20
McCumber (2001), Reisch (2005), (2007). McCumber aims to show the issue merits
examination; that assay did not aim to prove a positive case.
336

lightenment aims and agenda. Carnap was politically active to his last days.21
These features of recent European philosophy contrast starkly to the frag-
mentation 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 predi-
lections) and in feminist philosophy.22 Note that monolingual academic re-
search, 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 philos-
ophy, but in history and philosophy of law – is the Treatise of Legal Philosophy
and General Jurisprudence, edited by Enrico Pattaro, in thirteen hefty vol-
umes, complete but for the final volume of indexes. Yet this monumental stu-
dy, too, shows signs of the intellectual and cultural disruptions of the Twenti-
eth 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 men-
tioned 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 cur-
rents, 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? Be-
cause 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 ap-

21
FBI (1954), Mormann (2000), 36; cf. Kallen (1946), Carnap (1963), 81–3.
22
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’.
 337

proach or method. If Hegel held the views commonly ascribed to him, espe-
cially 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 phil-
osophical views and options which Hegel himself had, for sound and consid-
ered 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 phil-
osophers to justificatory infallibilism (§107), some necessary conditions of sin-
gular, 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 re-
volution. Though there were many of them, great minds like Galileo’s or New-
ton’s or Mendel’s stand out, and the social and historical aspects of their
achievements often disappear into the shadows of their staggering innova-
tions. In the Seventeenth Century this contrast appeared to be even more im-
portant, 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 superi-
ority 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
338

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 re-
jecting 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 mau-
vais genie. In this one fell swoop Descartes bequeathed to posterity three key
features of the Modern epistemological predicament, which survived transla-
tion 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 whe-
ther any of our experiences can be known to correspond to anything be-
yond 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 his-
torical 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 can-
not be, justified sufficiently to count as knowledge.
Now the sciences are plainly historical and social phenomena. This is one rea-
son 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. Ac-
cordingly, history figures in human knowledge only regarding the contingent
 339

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 sus-
tained criticism by analytic epistemologists. Many believe that analytic criti-
cism 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 ‘explica-
tion’, which was later echoed by Gettier’s critique of epistemology qua pure
conceptual analysis. Carnap’s crucial methodological shift has not often e-
nough been recognised in theory nor followed in analytical practice.25
The commitment to infallibilism among contemporary philosophers is in-
dicated by their use of counter-examples to refute, or at least to defeat the
justification of philosophical views, including philosophical accounts of em-
pirical or specifically scientific knowledge. It is widely presumed that relevant
counter-examples need only be logically possible. However, mere logical pos-
sibilities 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 skep-
tics demand that our cognitive capacities be proven a priori fit for any logi-
cally possible environment before trusting them in our actual environment of
spatio-temporal objects, events and people. This challenge may appear unan-
swerable. However, it presupposes that logical deduction is not only suffi-
24
See Uebel (1992), Westphal (2015b).
25
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 insuf-
ficiency of classical conceptual analysis, yet he persists in addressing philosophical issues
piecemeal, and with little regard to philosophical history. Carus (2007) highlights the cen-
trality of explication to Carnap’s philosophy.
26
Stroud (1989), 34, 36, 48; (1994a), 301–4; (1996), 358.
340

cient, but also necessary for cognitive justification. This is justificatory infalli-
bilism.
Justificatory infallibilism is central, e.g., to McDowell’s recent views. He
stresses that the fallibility of our perceptual-cognitive capacities qua capaci-
ties 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 exper-
ience’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 ‘na-
tural 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’; cogni-
tive, justificatory necessity cannot be deduced from assertoric (‘factive’) pre-
mises. 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) appar-
ent 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 cru-
cial 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 develop-
ing instead his (1981) fallibilist information-theoretic epistemology (cf. Dret-
 341

ske 2006). The presumption that cognitive justification even within non-
formal 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 suf-
fices for justification only within the formal domain specified by that logistic
system. However, in non-formal, substantive domains, justificatory infallibil-
ism is not too stringent for rational justification, in principle it is irrelevant to
non-formal domains. Logical deduction may be relevant to rational justifica-
tion 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 justifica-
tory 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 justifi-
cation 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-de-
pendence 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 refer-
red, 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 knowl-
edge. In principle, specificity of description (intension) cannot secure singu-
larity of reference, because any description may be either empty or ambigu-
ous, 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 non-
existent (subsistent) entities. However, in principle definite descriptions can-
not 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-
342

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 appropriate-
ness and no assessable justification. This is central to Kant’s and Hegel’s Se-
mantics 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 descrip-
tion and reference (per Evans 1975); cognition in non-formal, substantive do-
mains 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, be-
cause knowledge requires both specifically cognitive reference, sufficient ac-
curacy 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 lin-
guistic 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 con-
dition 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 what-
ever 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
Externalist aspects of justification in perception are not presently germane.
28
Varieties of empiricism are defined and discussed in HER, 48–50.
 343

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, Cartesi-
an 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 a-
chievement 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 reject-
ing ‘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 knowl-
edge 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 Philos-
ophy 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).
30
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.
344

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, noth-
ing 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-tem-
poral reference system (the Speaker) and (at least roughly) the scope of the
relevant spatio-temporal region of any designated particular(s) is possible on-
ly 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 singu-
lar 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 Descrip-
tion’ 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 He-
gel’s analyses or conclusions; I do maintain that scrupulous interpretation of
his text and issues, within their historical and systematic contexts, substanti-
ates my attributions to him of these views. These implications of Hegel’s se-
mantics 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 seman-

32
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.
 345

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 be-
cause, 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, compre-
hensive 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 Newtonian-
ism, 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 Empiri-
cism 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) con-
cepts, the principles they structure and their proper use can be assessed ra-
tionally, though only by attending to the social and the historical aspects of
rational inquiry and rational justification. As noted, justification in non-for-
mal 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 prob-
lem 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.
34
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).
346

the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion. In non-formal domains the Dilem-

ma 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, jus-
tify and exploit the possibility of constructive self-criticism. In the body of the
Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel uses his analysis to assess a broad, representa-
tive 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 jus-
tify any significant, substantive claim or judgment, even the most scrupulous-
ly self-critical amongst us faces the difficulty in practice of determining whe-
ther or the extent to which we ourselves have justified our judgment because
we have sufficiently fulfilled all relevant justificatory requirements, or whe-
ther instead we merely believe we have fulfilled those requirements and so
merely believe we have justified our conclusion. To make this distinction reli-
ably 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 ade-
quate to their intended domains and are superior to their relevant alterna-
tives, whether historical or contemporary. Hence in non-formal domains ra-
tional justification is fundamentally also an historical phenomenon. Hegel
was the first to understand and to argue that these social and historical as-
pects of rational justification in non-formal domains are consistent with –
indeed ultimately they justify – realism about the objects of empirical knowl-
edge and strict objectivity about practical norms.37 It is still widely supposed
that ‘pragmatic realism’ is oxymoronic. This supposition, Hegel rightly ar-
gued, rests on a series of false dichotomies – including, e.g., the points dis-
cussed earlier about social ontology and the Modern epistemological predica-
ment (§106). Hegel elevated the history of philosophy to a specifically philo-

37
Regarding the strict objectivity provided by Hegel’s methods for identifying and justi-
fying basic practical norms, see Westphal (2017d), (2018a).
 347

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 in-
cautious 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 philo-
sophical 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 rela-
tions. 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 intercon-
nections amongst philosophical issues, both direct and indirect, provide
crucial checks against inapt formulations.
Ultimately, if surprisingly, Hegel’s transformation of Kant’s Transcenden-
tal 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 concep-
tual 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, be-
cause 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 Hera-
clitus 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.
348

110 CONCLUSION.

Philosophers disregard the history of philosophy – and intellectual and cul-

tural history more broadly – at their own peril, because philosophy – like all
forms of human inquiry – is an historical and social, as well as rational pheno-
menon. Ignoring or dismissing these aspects of thought and inquiry, or ne-
glecting the semantic and justificatory links between various issues or topics
within philosophy, condemns us to the very relativism and historicism de-
cried by ahistorical philosophers. Neglecting these social and historical di-
mensions tends to reduce philosophy to a talking shop, which would abne-
gate our intellectual responsibility, individually and collectively. The spectre
of historicist relativism is exorcised by searching critique of the Modern epis-
temological predicament (§106) and by sober, critical assessment of the so-
cial and historical aspects of human inquiry and rational justification in sub-
stantive 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 consider-
ation. Whatever may be the sympathies of some of his expositors, Hegel a-
greed 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 sufficient-
ly 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 to-
talitarian 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.
41
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’.
 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 pragma-
tism. 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 con-
cepts 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 regula-
tive’ (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 im-
portant 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 examina-
tion revealed several key steps towards pragmatic realism Hegel took in the
1807 Phenomenology. Building on those findings, this chapter identifies sev-
eral significant features of Hegel’s pragmatic reconstruction of Kant’s Critical
philosophy in the Science of Logic, which corroborate and integrate the previ-
ous 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 Cogni-
tive Reference (§55.1) – Hegel developed into a systematic, pragmatic real-
ism. Hegel’s re-analysis of Kant’s system of principles, in ‘Of the Transcenden-
tal Power of Judgment as such’ (KdrV B171–5), is thus the first and still one of
the most sophisticated and adequate pragmatic – specifically pragmatic real-
ist – accounts of the a priori.
The pragmatic principle is a rule for clarifying terms, conceptions or prin-
ciples, not only by interdefining them with others, but also by linking them in

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350

experience with their relevant domain(s). Christopher Hookway (2002, 46)

states the pragmatic principle in these terms: ‘we provide a complete clarifi-
cation 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 prin-
ciple 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 doc-
trines and analyses suffice to show that Hegel espoused and defended prag-
matic realism, including a close cousin to the pragmatic maxim. These in-
clude: Hegel’s Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference (§112.4); his rejection of
transcendent metaphysics (§112.9); his concern with the ‘realisation’ of con-
ceptions and principles (§114); his (moderate) mental content, semantic and
justificatory externalisms (§113.2); his social and historical analyses of the ra-
tional 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 with-
in 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 He-
gel’s pragmatic account of a priori conceptions; §114 undergirds the findings
both sections by examining Hegel’s concern with the ‘realisation’ of our con-
cepts and principles.1

112 TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC IN HEGEL’S SCIENCE OF LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY OF NA-

TURE.

112.1 What of Kant’s Critique of Cognitive Principles can be Justified? If Tran-

scendental Idealism is unjustified for strictly internal reasons (KTPR) as Hegel
recognised by 1802 (above, §§25–29), then Hegel’s successor to Kant’s Tran-
scendental Logic, his Science of Logic, must address the question, whether,
how or to what extent can Kant’s Principles of cognitive judgment be re-
vamped, 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 pur-
poses we have – is an inevitable consequence of Carnap’s conceptual explication, lin-
guistic frameworks and their use, assessment and revisions. Caruthers recognises C.I.
Lewis’s (MWO) lead, but neglects Carnap’s, James’ and Dewey’s views.
 351

the purely a priori exercise for which it is still too often mistaken. Taking He-
gel’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: reca-
pitulating what Hegel purportedly argues or says evades rather than addres-
ses this critical issue.
These errors are illustrated (all too often) by mistaking Hegel for a mad ratio-
nalist who sought to relaunch comprehensive metaphysics by deriving it uni-
laterally 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 fa-
voured 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, or-
ganic 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.
352

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 intuition-
ism 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 recapitula-
tion 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, an-
alysis and justification of Hegel’s Science of Logic – both in its original publica-
tion and within his Philosophical Encyclopaedia – is interconnected with his
Realphilosophie, that is, with Hegel’s philosophies of nature and of spirit (be-
low, §§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 recog-
nised that not all forms of epistemic circularity are justificatorily vicious,
thank goodness! This is one result of his analysis of the possibility of construc-
tive 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 assess-
ing 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 He-
gel’s Science of Logic is the Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference, which He-

3
See Schelling (1805), §64; SW 7:153, cf. 193; cf. Hegel (1802) and Schulze (1803).
4
I agree with Redding (2015) that Hegel developed a ‘weak’ rather than a ‘strong’ (Bran-
domian) inferentialism about conceptual content (intension) and linguistic meaning.
Hegel knew and understood purely formal deduction from his teacher in Tübingen, Gott-
fried 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.
 353

gel restates in these terms:

… it is an essential proposition of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, that con-
cepts 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 transcen-
dental 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 con-
stituted 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 sur-
rounding 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 sufficient-
ly structured so as to exist, to be somewhere at some time as something de-
terminate, 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 corro-
borates 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).
6
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.
354

that our fundamental categories can be ‘realised’ (realisiert), insofar as we can

identify and localise objects, events, structures or phenomena which instanti-
ate them (per above, §108). This is Hegel’s central reason for critically exam-
ining the content of our conceptions and principles, starting already in the
1807 Phenomenology (Westphal 2009b), and continuing in much greater de-
tail 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 Lo-
gic (Ferrini 1988, 1991–92), is that Kant’s conception of the distinctive charac-
ter of the categories of modality – namely, that they add nothing to the con-
ception 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 clos-
est any cognitive category comes to satisfying Kant’s characterisation of mo-
dality, 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 Be-
ing (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 thorough-
ly 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 anticipat-
ing the identification of conditional necessities, and the constitutive dispo-
sitions – causal powers – of entities which manifest these conditional ne-
cessities. Hegel expressly criticises Kant’s account of modality in just this con-
nection 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.
9
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. Conven-
tionalism about measurement is mistaken because it neglects the cogency of synthetic
 355

Hegel further argues in the Doctrine of Essence that a complete concep-

tion of any kind of thing (Sache) includes its constitutive causal characteris-
tics, whereas a complete conception of any specific thing (Ding) would fur-
ther 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 He-
gel 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 conse-
quent constructivism; ‘systematic’ Kant’s presentation is not, nor is it com-
plete, for developments in the natural sciences during Kant’s lifetime – espe-
cially in chemistry and biology – outstripped his focus in the Critique of Pure
Reason upon narrowly mechanical forms of causation and explanation, a re-
striction unresolved by the Critique of Judgment, according to which biologi-
cal life cannot be objectively cognised because in principle mechanical expla-
nations 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 mo-
dalities and indeed of our most basic conceptual categories.
112.6 ‘The’ Causal Principle: General or Specific? These issues are, Hegel real-
ised, 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 catego-
ries ‘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 ro-
bust 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.
356

specific and restricted: Every spatio-temporal event has a distinct, external

spatio-temporal cause (or causes). Kant first states this specific causal princi-
ple 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 Metaphysi-
cal 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 spe-
cifying ‘general though sufficient marks’ for ‘the conditions under which ob-
jects corresponding to’ the Categories ‘can be given’: Any spatio-temporal
particular or phenomenon we can identify, we cannot identify simply as in-
stantiating Kant’s Categories as such. Instead, recognising any spatio-tempo-
ral particular as instantiating any of the Categories requires identifying and
individuating it by recognising a variety of its manifest non-categorial charac-
teristics, foremost among these: its occurrent sensed qualities. Such identifi-
cation is also required to solve the (sensory and intellectual) binding prob-
lems (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 compe-
tent 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 Ima-
gination 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 what-
ever, and so is required for us to distinguish ourselves from at least some par-
ticulars of which we are aware, etc.. In exactly this connection Hegel is cor-
rect (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 individu-
ating 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
 357

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 pre-
sent 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 mani-
fest (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 rele-
vant sensed qualities, affords us any ‘realisation’ – any demonstrable and de-
monstrated instantiation – of any of these conceptions. Only when used con-
jointly 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 sev-
eral 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, He-
gel profoundly reconstructs Kant’s System of Principles, and does so pragmat-
ically, because he realised, not only that sound transcendental analysis and
proof can dispense with Kant’s official restriction to ‘pure’ a priori transcen-
dental conditions of human experience, cognition and agency, but because
sound transcendental analysis and proof must dispense with Kant’s official
358

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 magni-
tude (KdrV A166–7/B207–8). This is a non sequitur: In this significant regard
Kant oversimplified the quantifiability of natural phenomena. This is one rea-
son 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 cor-
rect 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 metaphy-
sics – whether pre-Critical or contemporary, or any ontological (mis)inter-
pretation 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 meta-
physics is not verificationist. Hegel’s rejection turns not on a thesis about
conceptual content (intension) or linguistic meaning, but on a basic referen-
tial requirement of any candidate cognitive claim (in any non-formal do-
main), 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 justifi-
catory 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 pri-
ori, empirical, hybrid or intermediate conceptions.
112.10 Hegel’s Pragmatism is Rooted in Natural Science. Central to Hegel’s is-
sues in the Science of Logic are two key features of quantitative natural sci-
ence. First, quantitative laws of nature cannot be justified simply by mathe-
matics (WdL I, 21:272) – pace Galileo’s kinematics and Newton’s statics of flu-
ids.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 founda-

13
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.
 359

tions.14 Hegel foreclosed on such metaphysical speculations by philosophical

explication of basic scientific conceptions and principles within their explan-
atory 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 meta-
physical questions.15
112.11 Hegel’s Functionalism and Emergentism. A further central aim of He-
gel’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 or-
der to differentiate properly between mechanical, chemical, functional or te-
leological and properly organic functions, and in order to outline the basic
ways in which organic life is possible only through interaction with its organ-
ised environment, in which organisms intervene.16 Hegel’s analysis of the con-
ception 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, clas-
sificatory 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 sci-
ence revamps Aristotle’s meta ta physica on the basis of modern natural sci-
ences. In effect, Hegel agrees with Galileo (Opere, 7:75–6/1974, 63) that, if he
had fuller observational information about nature, Aristotle would have re-
vised his first principles.

113 HEGEL’S PRAGMATIC A PRIORI.

113.1 Hegel’s Pragmatic Development of Kant’s Constructivism. Another ma-

jor 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 uni-
versalisation tests (O’Neill 1989; Westphal 2016a, §§18–23). Hegel developed

14
See Descartes’ letter to Mersenne, 29 June 1638.
15
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).
360

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 construc-
tive 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 empiri-
cal 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 empiri-
cal knowledge and with strict objectivity about basic moral principles. He-
gel’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 oth-
ers’ 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 ‘his-
torical’ 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. How-
ever, 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 sen-
sory manifold (cf. Westphal 2010b, §2). Indeed, Hegel’s attention to the a pri-
ori transcendentally necessary use of impurely a priori conceptions and prin-
ciples discussed above (§§27–29, 112.7) directly extends his early critical prob-
ing 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-analy-
sis 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 real-
ised 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 re-
cent, Kant had already argued, soundly on transcendental grounds, for men-
 361

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 sub-
ject’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) fac-
tor(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 con-
ceptions 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 Lo-
gic, of the tight interconnections between the Thesis of Singular Cognitive
Reference, the transcendental unity of apperception, synthetic a priori judg-
ments and Kant’s Refutation of Idealism (cf. above §§44.4, 51, 57, 68). Seman-
tic 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 Pheno-
menology of Spirit (above, §68). Semantic externalism is also central to He-
gel’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 surround-
ings (however locally or globally specified; above, §§43, 108), Hegel also ad-
vanced a moderate semantic holism and a moderate justificatory holism. In
both cases I say ‘moderate’ to indicate Hegel’s stress upon the interdepen-
dence 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
362

‘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’; se-
cond, Quine’s neglect of the many cognitive and semantic differences be-
tween 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 catego-
ries, 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 judg-
ment 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. Bran-
dom’s ‘strong inferentialism’ remains committed to semantics as first philoso-
phy, and to a sophisticated form of semantic internalism, insofar as inferen-
tially articulated propositional contents are his philosophical arché for all
else, including epistemology and ontology. Brandom (2008, 200) adopts He-
gel’s phrase ‘determinate negation’ and continues to presume it means the
kinds of sentential negations basic to his own strong inferentialism. Bran-
dom’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 on-
tology 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).
 363

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 sen-
tential negation, at least one semantically interpreted, semantically signifi-
cant sentence must be presupposed, rather than explicated, by Brandom’s in-
ferentialist semantics. This problem has been at the core of Brandom’s se-
mantics since 1983; others, too, noticed it then.20 Brandom’s (2008) recent re-
working of his view has not addressed that problem. By treating our differen-
tial corporeal responses to worldly circumstances strictly ‘naturalistically’
(i.e., causally), Brandom inherits a weakness of Sellars’ treatment of sensa-
tions as only belonging to the causal order – a weakness central to Rorty’s dis-
missal 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 pro-
gress 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: Bran-
dom’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 philosophi-
cally and exegetically far superior work by, e.g., Wieland (1966), Theunissen (1975) or Cra-
mer (1976), all of which have been republished in standard reference collections. Bran-
dom’s (2014) main title for his ms. is ‘A Spirit of Trust’. His attributions to Hegel are, how-
ever, 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 ‘unsynthe-
sized intuitions drop out’ of account. According to Kant, there is no such ‘unsynthesised
sensory intuition’.
364

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 pre-
ferred (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 an-
alytic 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 justific-
ation in knowledge (and in reasonable belief) entail that epistemology can-
not 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 as-
pect 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 non-
formal 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 se-
mantic externalism: that linguistic meaning and conceptual content are root-
ed 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.)
 365

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 formal-
ised techniques, though only insofar as these fundamental aspects of seman-
tic externalism are acknowledged in practice – and all the better in theory
too. Philosophy of language – and philosophy of mind – can augment episte-
mology, but cannot supplant it, because (at the very least) neither the phe-
nomena of cognitive justification nor the relevant concepts of cognitive justi-
fication are reducible to the concepts, principles or theories of philosophy of
language or philosophy of mind.23 Matters can appear otherwise within Bran-
dom’s strong inferentialism only because, and to the extent, that his inferen-
tialist 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 Foun-
dations of Natural Science, which in turn was to be grounded by the transcen-
dental Critique of Pure Reason. The minimal semantic content presupposed
by any sentential negation, is, in Hegel’s view, in part a function of our sen-
sory experience of the world and what it makes manifest to us. This thesis,
however, does not require aconceptual experience, nor any recourse to myth-
ical 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 The-
sis 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, lim-
its and conditions for the proper use of our conceptions, principles and judg-
ments. 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 recog-
nised 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 an-
alysis classically aspired to providing necessary and sufficient conditions for
23
Cf. Hookway (2003), Westphal (2014).
366

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 propae-
deutic to studying his own.) Such Cartesianism, infallibilism and a priorism
linger in the prevalent assumption that mere logical possibilities of an alter-
native suffice to refute a conceptual ‘analysis’.
It is significant that Kant recognised that conceptual analysis is insuffi-
cient for addressing substantive philosophical issues (KdrV B264, 408), and
that the a priori concepts of concern to him – the Categories – cannot be de-
fined 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 con-
cepts and their significance. Kant regretted lacking a German counterpart to
‘explicatio’ (KdrV, B758); Hegel adopted and employed the Germanisms ‘Ex-
plikation’ 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 can-
not be defined or acquired in accord with concept empiricism, though unlike
Kant yet very much in accord with Carnap’s explication and use of ‘explica-
tion’, 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 indivi-
dual concepts, terms, phrases or principles, and for any fragments of langu-
ages 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 in-
tellectual history more broadly – is required for informed, insightful philoso-
phical explication and assessment of broad, general concepts and principles
– as distinct to conceptual analysis. The significance of Hegel’s use of concep-
tual 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.
 367

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 re-
gards 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 depend-
ence 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 specifi-
cally upon minds, but upon anything else. Hegel’s idealism is a moderate on-
tological 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 gen-
erate 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 particu-
lars, such as perceptual judgments. In contrast to considering relevant classi-
fications (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 Begriffsbe-
stimmungen, oder was, wie sich gezeigt hat, dasselbe ist, die bestimmten Begriffe sind
schon für sich betrachtet worden; aber diese Betrachtung war mehr eine subjective Refle-
xion, oder subjective Abstraction“. The entire section merits and requires detailed examin-
ation. (All references in this § are to WdL II, GW 12).
368

What determinate concepts there are, and how these determinations are nec-
essary, 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 cen-
trally concerns specific judgments about extant particulars and their charac-
teristics. ‘Subject’ and ‘predicate’ are names of logical place holders; only in
specific judgments about specific particulars are ‘subject’ terms and ‘predi-
cate’ terms specified in any determinate way (WdL II, 12:53.17–54.34). Only by
specifying our conceptions in determinate judgments about identified partic-
ulars do we ‘realise’ our conceptions, without which they remain subjective
representations („Vorstellungen“; WdL II, 12:55.10–22). Hegel states this as di-
rectly 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 representa-
tion in the head. (WdL II, 12:55.17–22)28

26
„Was es für bestimmte Begriffe gibt, und wie sich diese Bestimmungen desselben noth-
wendig 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
 369

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 He-
gel’s usage, a ‘Vorstellung’ is in some significant way merely a subjective rep-
resentation, 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 struc-
tures – 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 beant-
worten, 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 im-
portant 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 tran-
scendental 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 care-
fully than most other commentators, but even to his account we can well ask Hegel’s tit-
ular 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 judg-
ments about particulars, Léonard (1974, §§213–4) appears to agree with the account de-
veloped here.
29
Lau (2004), Redding (2014), Stovall (forthcoming).
30
„Damit ist der Begriff überhaupt realisirt worden; bestimmter hat er eine solche Reali-
tät gewonnen, welche Objektivität ist“ (WdL II, 12:125.27–8; cf. 101, 119, and esp. 128).
370

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 constitu-
ents 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. Con-
versely, material particulars do not persist because causal relations and struc-
tures persist. Rather, the persistence of any material particular is the persis-
tence of its causal structures and relations over some period of time within
some region of space; and vice-versa: these are mutually, constitutively inter-
dependent aspects of extant, worldly structure. To represent particular con-
tinuants as four-dimensional space-time worms is our representation, and we
must be very careful, Hegel argues in detail, not to mistakenly reify our man-
ners 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 distinc-
tion between any ‘substance’ and its ‘accidents’ or ‘properties’ is only our own
analytical distinction, which if reified thwarts knowledge and comprehen-
sion, 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 funda-
mental and which are merely incidental to it. Hegel’s holistic analysis repeat-
edly stresses that what anything is, exists only in its various internal struc-
ture(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 judg-
ments about any known particular differentiate and integrate our recognition
of its constitutive structures and relations, and any relevant incidental struc-
tures or relations it may also exhibit. What we ‘posit’ or affirm in our cogni-
tive 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.
32
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
 371

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 grap-
pling with and – with care, diligence and due attention – classifying, charac-
terising and comprehending the world we inhabit, including its history,
which includes us and our history – for however long we may manage to con-
tinue, 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 media-
tions 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 the-
ory 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 He-
gel’s use of the term ‘realisieren’ in just the sense Tetens first established. Ac-
cordingly, Hegel’s Logic is a theory of categories, standing squarely in the tra-
dition marked by Aristotle and Kant.35 This is made especially plain by impor-
tant 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 doc-
trines examined herein provide excellent grounds for classifying Hegel’s phil-
osophy 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 con-
clusions 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, en-
tire agreement about Hegel’s sophisticated, if complex, realism.
35
I omit Klaus Hartmann’s (1966, 1971, 1976) well-known account of Hegel’s category the-
ory 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.
372

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 individ-
ual human beings are fundamentally social practitioners, and that social
practices and social practitioners are mutually interdependent for their exis-
tence and characteristics,37 was adopted and further elaborated by both Dew-
ey (1930) and Mead (1934, 1964). Finally, Hegel’s interests in intellectual, cul-
tural and political history, and in the philosophical understanding and cultur-
al 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 specifi-
cally: within the unjustly neglected pragmatic realist fold. Hegel’s views like-
wise accord with Rein Vihalemm’s (2011, 2012, 2013) ‘practical realism’. Hegel’s
ontological holism, together with his incisive account of the social and histor-
ical aspects of rational justification, form a sophisticated basis for the com-
prehensive, 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
Beckermann et al (1992); Wimsatt (1995, 2000).
37
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 me-
chanics 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 respec-
tive roles and proper epistemological accounting were far from obvious. I re-
view 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 Se-
venteenth and eighteenth century philosophers, they are no less prevalent in
mainstream analytical philosophy of science. Their diagnosis augurs a funda-
mental philosophical reorientation.

117 THE ADVENT OF MODERN SCIENCE.

GALILEO directly disputed authority as a criterion of truth in scientific mat-

ters. 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 mathe-
matical 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 de-
mands must also be rationally intelligible.
Galileo formulated a genuinely scientific methodology. His ‘resoluto-com-
positive’ method involves making an hypothesis, e.g., that the speed attained

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374

by a ball falling a certain distance is constant, regardless of the slope it de-

scends. 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 cir-
cumstances. If observation accords, within tolerable limits, with those deduc-
tive 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 investi-
gation 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 investi-
gate and demonstrate some the attributes [passiones] of a motion so acceler-
ated (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 ul-

timately physics constrains the metaphysics of nature. Descartes was in-
censed by this, but Galileo showed himself to be a scientist more than a meta-
physician 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 syn-
thesis’. Basic principles are to be derived by a careful quantitative analysis of
particular phenomena, in this case, observed motions. Once successful prin-
ciples are determined for those particular motions, the principles are general-
ised to see if they can account for other cases of motions:
… whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called an hypothe-
sis; 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 impe-
tus 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
 375

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 natu-
ral 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 discrep-
ancies between his idealised basic gravitational model and actual natural
phenomena. Through repeated use of the same explanatory resources, New-
ton 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 phenom-
ena 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 ide-
alisations of the scientific model and explanation, proves that there is a genu-
ine 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 pre-
posterous, 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 specula-
tions 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.
376

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 philoso-
phy, though the Causes of those Principles were not yet discover’d: And there-
fore 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 contro-
versy about even apparent action at a distance, Newton was quite right that it
sufficed for his explanatory, scientific purposes to show that bodies do be-
have in accord with the law of gravity he formulated, which provided excel-
lent grounds to treat gravity as a cause or force, even if perhaps not an ulti-
mate cause or force. François De Gandt (1995, 265–72) notes that Newton’s
mathematical theory of orbital motion forged an important kind of theoreti-
cal independence from metaphysical and physical questions about the ulti-
mate 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 propa-
gated through the spaces round about’, he shrewdly prescinds from meta-
physical issues about the allegedly essential or constitutive qualities of mat-
ter. Newton’s physics requires only that matter have some power of gravita-
tional 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’, infer-
ring from observed phenomena some properties of sub-observable compo-
nents of observable bodies, such as corpuscles (Mandelbaum 1964, 61–117).
Boyle argued abductively, by refusing to take mere logical possibilities as ob-
jections 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 suc-
cess of Newtonian Mechanics justifies attributing to any sub-observable parts
of bodies the same kinds of properties his theory ascribes to gross bodies: vol-
ume, mass, mobility, rigidity, inertia, gravity. Newton’s quantitative analysis
of molar phenomena provides enormously strong grounds for attributing spe-
cific properties to matter, even to unobservably small bits of it. It suffices for
Newton’s dynamics that matter have a gravitational power of attraction; whe-
ther that power is constitutive of matter, or is divinely endowed to it, is physi-
cally irrelevant! Newton shrewdly set ‘modal intuitions’ aside to do physics.
I have deliberately stressed Galileo’s and Newton’s methods. Bacon recog-
nised that good science requires the joint use of sensory observation and ra-
tional analysis, but he did not appreciate the extent to which both scientific
observation and rational analysis are driven by the effort to provide an accu-
rate quantitative, mathematical treatment of physical phenomena. The Mod-
ern 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 New-
ton’s mathematics forms the ‘correspondence rules’ between his theoretical
and observational language. This suggestion is too glib. Newton’s mathemati-
cal 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 scien-
tific societies. These societies served, developed and highlighted the impor-
2
By ‘intended and remitted’, Newton means ‘intensified or diminished’.
378

tance of two key features of natural science: They served to disseminate sci-
entific information and techniques, and they initiated the development and
use of the peer review process. The replication of key observations and exper-
iments 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 scien-
tific 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 ulti-
mate causes of motion, but only about specific laws governing specific kine-
matic phenomena. Galileo acknowledged that his new physics required a
new metaphysics (and theology); to this extent he agreed that Descartes’s is-
sues 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 in-
nately by God, and which are known to be true by their intuitive self-evi-
dence, 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 phe-
nomena precisely so as to eliminate, so far as possible, alternative arrange-
ments of simple natures instantiated in physical objects, so as to leave us with
 379

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 intu-
itive self-evidence. Descartes granted that his explanations might be false;
God may have arranged the world to function differently than Descartes’ ex-
planations propose (Prin. 4:204). This is especially true of explanations which
appeal to unobservable physical micro-structures. (This is the issue of trans-
diction, 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 mathe-
matical 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 gen-
uine 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 ac-
count of empirical knowledge can only land us in error, relativism or scepti-
cism. 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 individual-
ism 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 rational-
ist; the basic items of knowledge concern elementary truths self-evident to
reason.
Descartes’s physics, based on these methods, was far from adequate. Des-
cartes’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 ex-
posed, 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). Des-
cartes 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-
380

luto-compositive analysis of the natural phenomenon itself.

Nevertheless, Descartes’ epistemological package has dominated episte-
mology 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 axiomatic-
deductive 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, fasci-
nating, important, and still largely unwritten chapter in the history of philos-
ophy. 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 iden-
tified 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 philosoph-
ical account of human nature, including human knowledge. Hume’s basic
objects are impressions and ideas; his basic principles are concept- and verifi-
cation-empiricism, and his basic laws are that impressions and ideas are asso-
ciated 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 conse-
quence of Cartesian infallibilism, deductivism, and individualism. He recog-
nised that such a dire conclusion reflected directly back onto his basic as-
sumptions 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 rare-
ly noticed way in which it reveals the great extent to which Modern empiri-
 381

cists latched onto the empirical basis of natural science, whilst disregarding
the fundamental role of mathematics in physical mechanics: Hume’s infa-
mous 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 ‘in-
troduce 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 neces-
sary components of human knowledge. Kant also broke another key bone of
contention between Modern rationalists and empiricists, namely that ratio-
nalists believed that our having a priori concepts sufficed to legitimate meta-
physics, while empiricists believed that banishing metaphysics required re-
jecting a priori concepts. Kant argued that we do indeed possess a priori con-
cepts, though through his sophisticated theory of cognitive reference, Kant
shows that we can only use a priori concepts in legitimate cognitive judg-
ments about spatiotemporal objects and events. Singular cognitive reference
requires singular sensory presentation, and this singularity of reference re-
quires 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 indis-
cernables.) Kant also broke with Cartesian foundationalism, by rejecting in-
ternalism 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 applica-
bility of mathematics to nature, and thus also our use of mathematics in
natural science. In his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant refu-
ted 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.
382

Kant’s notion of ‘properly founding’ natural science retained the axiomatic-

deductive model, and sought to justify Newton’s three Laws as corollaries
constructed a priori on the basis of Kant’s principles of causal judgment de-
fended 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 ac-
count of natural scientific knowledge. Their repeated failures to understand
natural science may appear to support Quine’s dictum that two kinds of peo-
ple are drawn to philosophy: those interested in philosophy, and those inter-
ested 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 understand-
ing 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, na-
tural 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 sci-
ence to accord with that predicament is one more attempt to assimilate sci-
ence to unquestioned philosophical predilections; in this regard it is inconsis-
tent with Quine’s professed scientism, that science alone is the legitimate
model and instance of genuine knowledge. A key source of naturalism, accor-
ding to Quine (1981, 72), is ‘unregenerate realism’. This tenet cannot be justi-
fied 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 under-
stand empirical knowledge (Westphal 2015b).
 383

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 resour-
ces that have yet to be assimilated from traditions and stances typically ne-
glected, 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 endea-
vours to stake out a new version of empiricism. His new version of empiri-
cism 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 Fraas-
sen proposes to scuttle these objections by identifying empiricism with a cer-
tain kind of stance. He argues that empiricism cannot consist in express em-
piricist theses, because no sound principle of empiricism has yet been found.
All key theses of empiricism have been refuted, indeed by empiricists them-
selves, and nothing can foreclose on future proposals for key empiricist the-
ses suffering the same fate. If empiricism continues, despite the critical de-
mise 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 postu-
late, and any forms of abduction. They hold some version of the naive princi-
ple 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 dis-
agreement. (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.
384

Principle of Naive Empiricism, that ‘experience is the only source of informa-

tion’ (ES 45, 47), without fear of theoretical refutation. Van Fraassen deliber-
ately leaves this principle undeveloped, for his main concern is with identify-
ing 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 re-
flection than have been common in the analytic tradition, in which philoso-
phers 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 the-
ory 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. ‘Stan-
ces’ are news to today’s heirs of logical empiricism because they have reso-
lutely 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 com-
pelling 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 philoso-
phy 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 non-
observational 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 (Har-
per 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’
 385

or ‘illuminating’) formulation of its key Principle of Naive Empiricism, that

only sensation provides information about the world, has been given in sev-
eral 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 strat-
egy 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 ‘em-
piricist’ 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 de-
monstrably false! This strategy cannot be given any legitimate voluntarist re-
commendation, 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 ‘natural-
ism’, 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, evaluat-
ing, formulating, or even understanding empirical claims about specific fea-
tures 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 experi-
ence, 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 epistemol-
ogy; 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 inter-
locutors. But to go this far is already to accord some weight to both the opin-
ions 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 justifica-
tion is an individual affair. Is this individualism tenable, even in its own epis-
temological terms? Does van Fraassen’s empiricist stance offer any real basis
for understanding how and why science is ‘a deeply social enterprise’? Con-
sider 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 back-
ground information is required to decode this information. Perhaps there is
such a primitive level at which there is no distinction between receiving in-
formation 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 in-
formation decoding or in our information channels themselves. Dretske at-
tempts to account for conceptual content solely in terms of referential opaci-
ty. Lacking from his account of conceptual content is thus the key role of in-
ferential articulation in both identifying and using conceptual content (Sel-
lars 1981). The fundamental importance of inferential articulation for specify-
ing conceptual content reinforces the central role of language in information
decoding and processing. These brief observations lend contemporary sup-
port 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).
 387

The crucial need to account epistemologically for the structure and func-
tioning of the mind is only one lesson of Dretske’s information theory. His
theory also puts paid to the egocentric predicament, including Quine’s ver-
sion of it. ‘Saving the surface’ does not ‘save all’! This is because what informa-
tion 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 es-
sentially 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 con-
cepts (Westphal 2003a, §27).
One striking feature of the Cartesian epistemological package that has re-
mained the epistemological package right into the present day, expressly
found in Quine’s, Van Fraassen’s and Dretske’s views, is epistemic individual-
ism. 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 com-
mitments, 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 ra-
tionally 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 at-
tempts 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’. Highlight-
ing philosophical stances (cf. ES 49) almost unwittingly raises again a very im-
portant though largely neglected issue remaining from early logical positiv-
ism. 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 so-
cial aspects of empirical evidence, see Haack (2003), 57–91; on the social aspects of ra-
tional justification, see above, §§83–91, 100–110.
388

sentences to those uttered by ‘scientists of our cultural circle’. This is how

Hempel defended Carnap against the charge that Carnap had offered a coher-
ence 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 be-
yond 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, Bayes-
ian 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 ap-
proach to such choices is inconsistent with his own cardinal distinction be-
tween ‘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 criti-
cisms 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 meet-
ing various empiricist goals. The devastating criticisms of empiricism devel-
oped 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 up-
on their own philosophical stance is very much a manifestation of the volun-
tarist 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 ex-
pressions 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-
 389

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 identi-
fying assumptions, commitments or principles shared by competing philo-
sophical stances (or so he said in response to questions at the Pasadena meet-
ing 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 stan-
dards 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 re-
newed in the Modern period by Bayle; Descartes sought to answer it, though
unsuccessfully. This Dilemma was included in Nagel and Brandt’s (1965) clas-
sic anthology, Meaning and Knowledge. It then largely vanished from sight
until Moser and vander Nat (1995) again anthologised it. Pyrrhonian scepti-
cism 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 whe-
ther 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 justifica-
tory 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 do-
main 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 Em-
piricism’ is covertly a l0w-profile Pyrrhonian scepticism (Westphal forthcoming b).
390

Fallibilism is a fact of our empirical inquiry – and of our ‘a priori’ philosophi-

cal inquiries, too! Trying to eliminate human fallibility by forcing our empiri-
cal 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 individ-
ualist 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 dif-
ferent 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 in-
formed 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 ra-
tional 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 re-
jected 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 sur-
roundings. Amidst a plethora of other issues, Hegel devotes the whole of the
 391

Phenomenology to resolving Sextus’ Dilemma and the epistemological conun-

drums 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 transcenden-
tal proofs of what we now call mental content externalism, of anti-individual-
ism 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 princi-
ples in the Transcendental Analytic! Demonstrably, the Cartesian/Humean
predicament is not the human predicament.
Hegel expressly developed the pragmatic and social dimensions of cog-
nitive 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 re-

cognise Hegel’s acute epistemology and his equally acute cognitive seman-
tics. This twin failure resulted directly from analytic philosophers’ anachro-
nistic return to the eighteenth century metaphysics and epistemology of
Hume’s first Enquiry. Hegel is, of course, the original and past master of philo-
sophical 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).
392

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 episte-
mologists and philosophers of science to become much more reflective and
sophisticated about their own philosophical stances, as well as those of oth-
ers. 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 natural-
scientific knowledge to pre-conceived philosophical models of natural sci-
ence. 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 dis-
cerning 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 occu-
pied 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 Nietz-
sche, 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 mat-
ter, 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).
 393

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, in-
cluding 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 possi-
ble under the special conditions of being able to set aside all of his everyday,
moral, and religious concerns, involvements and beliefs. Descartes’ episte-
mological 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 a-

chieve 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, comprehen-

sively developed by Aristotle and healthy throughout the Mediaeval, Renais-
sance and Modern periods well into the Nineteenth Century,1 in the Twenti-
eth Century among analytic and scientifically-minded philosophers, ‘philoso-
phy of nature’ apparently vanished. Fortunately, the increasing calibre of re-
cent research in history, methodology and philosophy of science has once
again revealed fascinating issues at the intersections among the natural sci-
ences, 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 Phi-
losophy of Nature within this interdisciplinary grey area is not illuminating.
Hegel classifies his philosophy of nature as rational physics.2 ‘Rational phys-
ics’ 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 to-
day, 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 com-
plement 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
See, e.g., Cassirer (1999), Meixner and Newen (2004), McKeon (1994), Malament (2002).
2
Enz. II, Intro.; MM 9:10–11/Hegel (1970c), 2.
3
E.g., Kilmister and Reeve (1966).

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396

Indeed, Hegel’s study of gravitational theory played a central role in the de-
velopment of his ‘dialectic’ from merely a destructive set of sceptical equipol-
lence arguments directed against contemporaneous physics and astronomy
into a constructive set of philosophical principles based upon gravity exhibit-
ing 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 He-
gel’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 He-
gel 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 suffici-
ently to have informed reasons to favour French schools of analysis, particu-
larly 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 na-
tural 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.
5
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 publi-
cation 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, compri-
sing §§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).
 397

(§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 regulari-
ties in natural phenomena. This requires that mathematical formulae be fit-
ted 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 an-
alysis and explanation of the phenomena. The factors in the mathematical
formula must be plausibly interpretable as factors within the physical situa-
tion. Galileo explicitly disavowed metaphysics as a guide to determining the
plausibility of those factors, at the beginning of Day 3 of his Discourses Con-
cerning the Two New Sciences. This incensed Descartes and the same attitude
in Newton worried Kant, though it was decisive for the development of mod-
ern science and became even more pronounced in Newton’s Principia.10 New-
ton’s mathematical theory of orbital motion forged an important kind of in-
dependence of physical theory from metaphysical and physical questions
about the ultimate nature of space, time or gravity: For Newton’s work it suf-
ficed to regard gravity as a centrally directed force, where that centre is speci-
fied 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 inte-
gration with other scientific theories and an ‘explicative component’ con-
cerning the intelligibility or plausibility of the basic concepts or factors in-
volved in a scientific theory, including heuristic principles and basic princi-
ples 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.
398

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: Giv-
en 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 in-
cluded time by generalising Kepler’s law of areas; the time elapsed when tra-
versing 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 direc-
tion 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 ulti-
mately 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 geometri-
cal species of the curve (if it has one) be determined, in part because New-
ton’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-
 399

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 visit-
ing 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, New-
ton used the absence of orbital precession to measure precisely the inverse-
square 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 calcula-
tions require dividing up a continuous motion and dividing up the various
factors which constitute that motion and treating them as if they were mutu-
ally 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 physi-
cal 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 mu-
tually 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.
400

mutual causal interaction into fictitious discrete impulses (cf. §266n.). In-
deed, this contrast illuminates Hegel’s repeated stress on how ‘modern analy-
sis’ (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 geomet-
rical 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 retrodic-
tions 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 theo-
retical 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 re-
jected 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 in-
herent in matter. The postulation of inert matter fared ill as science devel-
oped. 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 re-
moves one prop supporting mechanical explanations of gravity. The other
14
Cf. Hume En §7.1, final n. (on vis inertiae and gravity).
15
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.
 401

was the problem of action at a distance, which is only a problem for those
narrowly mechanical conceptions of matter which in principle require con-
tact 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 advo-
cated in chemistry, although Newtonian mechanics ultimately ascribes gravi-
tational 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 grav-
ity by the Creator. Nevertheless, he affirmed the reality of gravitational attrac-
tion, having measured it very precisely by several independent measures, pro-
viding increasingly precise and precisely agreeing measures of the inverse-
square power of gravitational attraction (Harper 2011). Yet it remained for la-
ter 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 caus-
es 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 corpus-
cularism, 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 ‘Aristotelian-
ism’, but never reconciles it with Hegel’s alleged preference for ‘phenomenological’ laws
402

that adequate scientific explanation provides the only possible grounds for
ascribing active characteristics – causal dispositions – to material phenom-
ena. Comprehending constitutive characteristics of things provides explana-
tory insight, provided we rescind the traditional and Early Modern preoccu-
pation 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 Re-
volution connotations the term, which concern constitutive characteristics of
something (such as matter, or a specific material or structure), and to disa-
buse us of our Cartesian tendency to seek conceptually necessary and suffici-
ent conditions for classifying things or their features. This shift away from a
priorist conceptual terminology and modalities (‘essence’/‘accident’, ‘neces-
sary’/‘contingent’) to scientifically credible grounds for identifying logically
contingent yet nevertheless constitutive features of things can be found expli-
citly in Newton’s exchange with Huygens about light (Westphal 2009b, §5.2).
This is Hegel’s view beginning already in the Phenomenology of Spirit, devel-
oped 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 ‘solicit-
ing’ force (below, §129.5). Kant used the term ‘solicitation’ to refer to the ef-
fect 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 so-
licitation encourages misleading division of a continuously effective force in-
to 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 ‘qui-
et supersensible realm of law’ because abstract formulations of laws of nature
don’t account for actual phenomena precisely because they are abstract ide-

of 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).
 403

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 pheno-
mena 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, re-
quires 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 He-
gel 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 phe-
nomena? Because so far as logical, epistemic or metaphysical necessities may
be concerned, natural phenomena may instantiate any mathematical func-
tion, 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 mis-
take 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 in-
tuition (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 var-
ious kinds of idealisations typically involved in stating causal laws, but these niceties can-
not be discussed here.
23
Radical empiricists like van Fraassen hold that insisting on having an ‘account’ is al-
ready to beg the question in favour of an illicit realism about explanations and explanan-
da. 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).
404

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 gra-
vitation (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 [exam-
ple; omitted] natural laws were expressed merely as general occurrent (eintre-
tender) 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 ex-
pression, 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 suffi-
ciently; what matters instead are other circumstances, in this case the direc-
tion and speed of the motion and the relations among various different bodies
in this regard. To inform ourselves about these requires experiments. For ex-
ample, one places bodies in a space from which as much air as possible is ex-
pelled 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 pendu-
lum, 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 explain-
ed 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. (Pfleide-
rer 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 com-
mon regularities underlying diverse and apparently opposed or conflicting
phenomena and that this is centrally a matter of exact mathematical descrip-
tion combined with comprehensive classification of natural phenomena un-
der 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 evi-
dence 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 impor-
tance 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 consid-
ering 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 Phil-

osophy 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 ex-
amples 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).
25
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 ac-
count of the role of mathematics in it, see Ihmig (1989), Moretto (2004) and Wand-
schneider (1982).
406

since 1830.27 The holistic character of Hegel’s philosophy together with his
epistemology renders suspect the dichotomy formed by these two ap-
proaches, 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. ‘His-
torical’ knowledge (historia) is based squarely and solely on perception or
empirical evidence; it is inevitably partial and unsystematic, or at least can-
not be known to be otherwise. ‘Rational’ knowledge (scientia) is the only ri-
gorous form of knowledge, for it justifies conclusions solely by deducing them
from original ‘first’ principles. This distinction held sway throughout the Mo-
dern period, was central to Kant’s epistemology and is still detectable today
in deductivist assumptions often made, if implicitly, about empirical justifica-
tion.28 Hegel was deeply suspicious of this standard dichotomy. This is indi-
cated by his rejection, by 1802, of distinctions in kind between both the a pri-
ori 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 be-
tween scientia and historia, along with the foundationalist model of justifica-
tion they embody (above, §§60–64, 83–91). More careful recent research sug-
gests more sophisticated lines of interpretation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Na-
ture which avoid the ultimately untenable dichotomy between ‘rational’ and
‘historical’ knowledge.29
Hegel insists that, whilst the two disciplines are distinct (Enz. §§7–9), na-
tural 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 Na-

27
Houlgate (1998), xiii–xiv. Petry (2001) reviews research on Hegel’s philosophy of nature.
28
Descartes (1984, 1:13) uses this distinction in passing in the Third of his Rules for Direc-
ting the Mind. This distinction gives the point to Locke’s (Es 1.1.2) claim to use the ‘his-
torical, plain method’ and to Hume’s (En §8, ¶64.2) contrast between ‘inference and rea-
soning’ 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 dis-
tinctive interpretation anchored in Hegel’s epistemology and semantics. Houlgate’s com-
prehensive 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).
 407

ture, concerns not only the second part of his Encyclopaedia. Nor does it con-
cern 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 rela-
tion 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 expe-
rience, and that the natural sciences develop conceptual determinations in
the form of generalisations, laws and classifications which must be reconsid-
ered philosophically (Enz. §12). Thus Hegel insists that his Logic cannot be
properly understood apart from his Philosophy of Nature, nor can his philoso-
phy of nature be understood apart from Hegel’s knowledge and understand-
ing of the methods and content of natural science. Hegel’s Logic examines the
ontological and cognitive roles of ontological categories (e.g., being, exis-
tence, quantity, essence, appearance, relation, thing, cause) and principles of
logic (e.g., identity, excluded middle, non-contradiction. His Logic also analy-
ses syllogistic inference, cognitive judgment and principles of scientific expla-
nation (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 prin-
ciples, 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 sour-
ces of many of the key concepts and principles examined in his Logic and
especially in his Philosophy of Nature does not make his philosophical pro-
ject 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 foun-
dation or basis of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is something he calls ‘the ne-
cessity of the concept’ (Enz. §246+R), which philosophy elucidates in part
with some of its own conceptual resources (Enz. §9). In what can this concep-
tual 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).
408

(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 princi-
ples used in natural science are either assumed to be familiar – as Newton as-
sumed our familiarity with space and time – or they are introduced indepen-
dently of one another in ways obscuring their conceptual significance, which
is a function of how each concept is both distinguished from and also inte-
grated with other concepts within its domain and their proper ontological
interpretation (Enz. §246Z). Hegel advocated moderate holism about concep-
tual 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 higher-
order concepts or principles, whilst also integrating specific concepts with
their proper instances. Hegel’s moderate semantic holism invokes his ‘Co-De-
termination Thesis’ (above, §43).
124.2 Hegel’s Philosophical Semantics. If ‘semantics’ is philosophical theory of
conceptual content (intension, classification) and of cognitive or linguistic re-
ference, then ‘metaphysics’, as the study of our ‘diamond [conceptual] net’
with which Hegel identifies his Logic, is fundamentally semantic. Hegel’s phil-
osophical 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 ana-
chronistic, 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 fun-
damentally 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).
32
Stekeler’s (1992) semantic interpretation of Hegel’s Logic dove-tails perfectly with He-
gel’s transcendental-pragmatic epistemology, as explicated here. This is a strong consider-
ation 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.
 409

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 pur-
suing 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 mo-
tion, 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 material-
ist view of nature has proven amazingly durable amongst philosophers, even
those who profess a marked interest in philosophy of science, or who pro-
claim 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 ma-
terial 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, deri-
vative from the effects of the primary qualities of bodies on our sensory re-
ceptors. With the mechanisation of nature inevitably came the mechanisa-
tion 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.
35
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).
410

terms of bodies in motion; hence it too is open to purely scientific, mechani-

cal 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 sen-
sory physiology. From here it was but a short step, or rather a short leap to re-
presentationalist theories of perception, according to which all we are ‘di-
rectly’ 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 non-
extended, active, thinking substance, and if ‘body’ consists solely in non-
thinking, 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 any-
thing 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 empiri-
cal 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 epistemol-
ogy 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
 411

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 re-
examines these concepts and principles in connection with theories and ex-
amples drawn from natural science throughout his Philosophy of Nature.38
One reason for Hegel’s so doing is to show that the concepts and princi-
ples 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 aspira-
tion 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 whe-
ther matter might not have the power, if properly configured, to think (Yol-
ton 1983). Perhaps materialism does not require eliminating mental phenom-
ena, even if it banishes ‘the mind’ as a distinct kind of substance; this is the
‘hylozoism’ Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and Critical foundations for na-
tural 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 ulti-
mately 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.
412

Schelling dispensed with Kant’s Critical restrictions on the use of teleolog-

ical 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 an-
alysis 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 teleo-
logical principles of organisation is one stage of a broad and ambitious pro-
gram: Hegel sought to avoid both substance dualism and eliminative reduc-
tionism by developing a sophisticated and subtle emergentism. Long derided
by reductionist philosophers, emergentism has recently regained philosophi-
cal 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 character-
istics, 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 inter-
dependent 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 organi-
sation 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 (necessar-

39
See Simon (1962), Beckermann, et al (1992), Wimsatt (1994), (2000).
40
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).
 413

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 emergen-
tism 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, undifferenti-
ated and universal: space and time (Enz. §§254–7), and working through a
finely-grained series of steps (Enz. §249) towards the most complex, the or-
ganic life of animal species (Enz. §§367–76). The third part of Hegel’s Encyclo-
paedia 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 philoso-
phy (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 phe-
nomenon 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, He-
gel 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 organisa-
tional 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.
414

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 ra-
tionalist telos of a completely self-developing and self-explicating system. He-
gel does have some such telos in view, but the notion that it is preordained
relies upon transferring conscious purposes from their proper domain (hu-
man 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 He-
gel’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 exposi-
tors, 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 justi-
fying concepts and principles in his Philosophy of Nature is not transcenden-
tal, 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 justi-
fied 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 na-
tural 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 provi-
ded, not by antecedent divine preordination, but by the facts of human cogni-
tion and action, on the one hand, and their – that is, our – remarkable pro-
ductions in the natural and social sciences and more generally in society, his-
tory, 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 schema-
tising formalism only by showing, on the basis of an internal examination of natural phe-
nomena for their own sake, that those phenomena exhibit the kinds of conceptual struc-
tures and principles explicated in Hegel’s Logic.
 415

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 He-
gel’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 consis-
tently argues that the theistic, metaphysical ascription of such aspirations to
a transcendent creator who tends to them from beyond the cosmos is in ev-
ery 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 sa-
tisfies these aspirations, to a much greater extent than is typically apprecia-
ted.46 This is part of Hegel’s on-going effort to overcome our modern alien-
ation 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 anti-
cipated, 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.
416

126 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 understan-
ding of what he said. He wanted to swing religious consciousness into full sup-
port 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 utter-
ances are passing events, and that even what is said (lekta) ‘perishes’ if its
truth-value perishes, because its proper referent perishes. Constitutively, per-
sons are ensouled, living bodies. When a person dies, the corpse no longer
rightly bears the person’s name (cf. Nasti de Vincentis, 2018). Sextus Empiri-
cus 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 impor-
tant 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 philoso-
phy, 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 consid-
eration, for its central aims and issues, for its methods, for its staggering eru-
dition 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 compartmen-
talise Hegel’s views, treating the main sections of Hegel’s philosophical Ency-
clopaedia as a series of mutually separable philosophical tracts, each of which
poses considerable challenges. This pronounced tendency obscures both He-
gel’s division of philosophical tasks and their equally important interconnec-
tions. The scope, character and relations amongst the various aspects of He-
gel’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 intuition-
ism. 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 im-
portant 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 instan-
tiate 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.

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418

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 characteris-
tics of a known object.
4. Central to our intelligent comprehension of Denkbestimmungen is natural sci-
ence.
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 ‘real-
ise’ 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 pub-
lished transcripts of Hegel’s Berlin lectures on Logic and on Philosophy of Spi-
rit 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 univer-
sality, 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 com-
mentators to ascribe some more or less standard form of subjective idealism
to Hegel, according to which the world is mind-dependent, both for its exis-
tence 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 hu-
man minds, this is only because the world depends for its existence and char-
acteristics 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 supple-
ments these salutary findings. Also see Ferrini (2012).
 419

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 Enlighten-
ment through American pragmatism to mid-twentieth century Wissenssozi-
ologie 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 ‘epis-

temological 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 ontologi-
cal and epistemic thesis that
1. Some things exist and have at least some characteristics unto themselves, re-
gardless 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 as-
2
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 consis-
tent on this crucial issue; see below, §129.2.
420

pects of human knowledge concern our cognitive skills and abilities, recog-
nising 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 Re-
mark 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 interdepen-
dent for their existence and characteristics. Causal dependence upon human
minds is, in Hegel’s ontology, only a sub-species of causal dependence, al-
though (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 hu-
man knowledge. Hegel’s ontological holism is moderate, because he contends
that the whole and its members are mutually interdependent for their exis-
tence 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 cog-
nitive activity can any human subject know the genuine features, the ‘true na-
ture’, of any object known.4 Hegel’s Encyclopaedia is a lecture syllabus, in-
tended for explication and elaboration in the lecture hall; it is terse and com-
pact in the extreme. Fortunately, Hegel’s key epistemological theme about in-
telligence, namely that it forges a genuine and veridical cognitive link be-
tween worldly objects or events and human knowers, is even plainer in his
lectures. Indeed, in his lectures Hegel identifies Herder as one of his epis-
temological 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 can-
not and do not know things as they are.

3
Hegel’s rejection of historicist relativism is established by Beiser (1993).
4
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.
 421

129 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 put-
ting 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 non-
realism, 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 Intro-
duction 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 ob-
jective about things. Mere attention does not suffice to experience the truth of
things, rather it requires our subjective activity, which reforms the immedi-
ately 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 them-
selves 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 cog-
nitive abilities had been exceeded and exacerbated by Herder’s socio-histori-
cal, 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
422

no such problem, and neither did nor do working natural scientists (PhdG, 9:
54.8–9/¶74). Furthermore, Hegel excoriated Kant for dismissing the corre-
spondence conception of truth as a mere verbal definition. Against Kant, He-
gel 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 recon-
cile a realist epistemology, including a correspondence conception of the na-
ture 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 ap-
pears 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 spec-
ify to be ‘alien and external to the things’ if those things have their own char-
acteristics 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, com-
menting 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 opposi-
tion (Gegensatz) of thought to objectivity; this is the way of the ancient phi-
losophers, 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 im-
mediately connected with the object, that the subject is not without knowl-
edge 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).

 423

those of pre-modern metaphysics, modern empiricism, Kant’s Critical philos-

ophy, 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 think-
ing we can and do know the true nature of things.6 For example, in his lec-
tures on theoretical spirit (1827–28), Hegel emphasised the following:
That which is truthful, the truthful, the eternal is only for thoughts; compre-
hending thought is thinking in its totality, thought in its total determinate-
ness. 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 dis-
tinct. 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 misunderstan-
ding 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 knowl-
edge 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 philo-
sophical 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.
424

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 knowl-
edge of worldly phenomena (Enz. §§438, 439). Hegel’s division of his exposi-
tion into a ‘phenomenology of spirit’ and a philosophical ‘psychology’ wisely
exploits a distinction like Kant’s between an ‘objective’ and a ‘subjective’ de-
duction. 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 episte-
mology 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 fa-
vourably 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 psy-
chology (Enz. §§440–468) are compressed in ways which indeed require lec-
tures 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 Psychol-
ogy 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 gen-
eral, 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).
 425

Spirit knows the object as rational because rationality structures both the ob-
ject 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 precon-

ditions is taken up describing, in ways which cannot be summarised here (see
deVries 1988), how intuition (Enz. §§446–450), which incorporates and trans-
forms sensation and feeling; and representation (Enz. §§451–464), which
incorporates and transforms memory, imagery, imagination, and psychologi-
cal association; function together to enable us to identify and to name univer-
sal 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 cau-
tions 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 think-
ing 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.
10
DeVries (2013) provides a good conspectus of Hegel’s cognitive psychology; its philoso-
phical significance is underscored by Eason (2007–08), deVries (1988), Stern (2013), Herr-
mann-Sinai and Ziglioli (2016).
426

our thinking contributes to producing the true nature of the object is consid-
ered below (this §, §130). First it is important to continue following out He-
gel’s stress on the objectivity of our properly informed thinking and the real-
ism 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 intelli-
gence, 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 ob-
ject, we do so by investing ourselves in our conceptually articulated compre-
hension of it. Intelligence achieves objectivity by identifying the specific fea-
tures of the known object. This is epistemological realism (per above, §128).
129.2 Hegel contra the ‘Metacritiques’. Hegel pointedly contrasts his confi-
dence 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)
 427

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 uni-
versal is only in the subject, and it has been asked, whether genera are in na-
ture or are only in the subject. The universal has this convenience for the sub-
ject, 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 consti-
tutive) 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). In-
telligence 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, ren-
dered 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 re-
peated, emphatic stress on the role of our experiential intake in our develop-
ing 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; in-
stead [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 uni-
versal. (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
428

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 fur-
ther remarks make plain that this production is only one aspect of the cogni-
tive process, the proper complement to which involves our investing our-
selves 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 re-
mains the default presumption within Anglophone philosophy, it is impor-
tant 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. How-
ever, Hume recognised that we also have, use and understand merely deter-
minable 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 what-
soever, 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 con-
cepts of time, times, period of time, space and spatial region. These funda-
mental 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 Tran-

clear indication of how closely related they are. This passage thus corroborates my con-
tention that Hegel’s Logic and his Philosophy of Nature are much more thoroughly inte-
grated than is commonly recognised.
12
See DeVries (1988, 2013), Halbig (2002), Hespe and Tuschling (1991), Winfield (2007,
2010), Eason (2007), Stern (2013).
 429

scendental Idealism.
129.4 Cognition and Laws of Nature. The specifics of Hegel’s cognitive psy-
chology 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 determinate-
ness. These laws do not stand behind it, as if appearances were lawless. In-
stead, the law is there in the appearance. The form [sc. of law] contains con-
nection to itself, though it also contains being externally dispersed (Außerein-
andersein). 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 iden-
tical 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-scientifi-
cally 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 reaction-
ary (and epistemologically hopeless) return to any sort of pre-scientific reflec-
tion, 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 re-
flection upon the results of natural science, because only through natural-sci-
entific research can we correctly identify the laws of nature:
One must show through experiments what the force is; the content the ap-
pearance 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 arti-
culated 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 cir-
cumstances 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 re-
flection, 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 fea-
tures of natural phenomena. This is why natural science is so fundamental to
identifying genuine Denkbestimmungen, in part because one of the most im-
portant 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, on-
ly 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 natu-
ral 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 Al-
though the natural sciences do not suffice for philosophical comprehension,14
they are on Hegel’s view basic necessary conditions for genuine comprehen-
sion (above, §§122–126, Westphal 2015b).
129.5 Hegel’s Rejoinder to Herder’s Causal Scepticism. Hegel’s thesis that for-
ces only exist in and through their manifestations affords his response to Her-
der (1787), who based sceptical conclusions on the supposed distinction be-
tween 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-suffi-
cient 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 con-
tent 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 na-

ture; primary amongst them is Newton, though Hegel also has in mind New-
ton’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 explana-
tion 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 detri-
ment of the understanding and reception of Hegel’s philosophy.
129.6 Causal Laws and Concrete Universals. Considering these features of He-
gel’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 essen-
tially manifest in their expressions, and that their expressions consist in caus-
al 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-Aris-
totelian 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 connec-
tion with Hegel’s account of thought. Here he states:
The further relation, determinateness, is such that with it falls away the oppo-
sition 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 essen-
tially as thought. Intelligence, the simple being by itself and externality, this is
the opposition; however, since intelligence within itself is this sensuous man-
ner 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 com-
prehending 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 indi-
viduals 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 in-
stances, which include their specific interrelations.
The specific contribution Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature makes to this genu-
ine comprehension is to re-analyse and to explicate the basic terms, concep-
tions, principles, laws and findings developed in the natural sciences, so that
we can articulate, recognise, and thus appreciate the ways in which the fun-
damental terms, concepts and principles in scientific theories are interde-
fined by their contrasts (their ‘opposition’, Hegel says) in ways which prefig-
ure the particular character of whatever natural laws they are used to formu-
late (above, §§122–126). If ‘the truthful nature of the object is equally well the
 433

product of my spirit’ (Enz. §23), this is because theoretical spirit comprehends

and expresses the truthful nature of known objects in their express and genu-
inely 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 as-
cribes our awareness and grasp of objectivity, not to consciousness as such,
but specifically to intelligence. This point can be reinforced by two brief ob-
servations, which further develop the present interim conclusions.
130.1 Hegel’s Sensationism. Hegel held a ‘sensationist’ account of sensa-
tions.15 According to sensationism (about sensations), the mere fact that ob-
jects in our environs cause our sensations does not explain how our sensa-
tions can or do represent, or even refer to their supposed objects. Explaining
how sensations acquire a representational function (both referential and in-
formative) within human perception is the central task of sensationist theo-
ries. Sensationist theories of perception generally adopted the sensory atom-
ism common to Modern theories of perception. A second key problem recog-
nised by sophisticated sensationist theories is to explain what unites any
plurality of sensations into a percept of any one object. This issue arises with-
in 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 sen-
sations 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 ‘sen-
sationism’, 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 ‘in-
tentional’ sensations in Hegel’s analysis. Hegel’s espousal of sensationism regarding sen-
sations is consistent with his sharp criticisms of Condillac’s original version of sensation-
ism (Enz. §442).
16
These are issues central to Hegel’s analysis of ‘Perception’ (PhdG, chapt. II; Westphal 1998a).
434

§§448Z, 449, 450; Hegel 1994, 190.90–102). Accordingly, Hegel stresses that
feelings (Gefhühle) only exhibit both their subjective and their objective as-
pects through their role in theoretical spirit (Enz. §446+Z), and that theoreti-
cal spirit has direct cognitive reference to individual objects via sensory intu-
ition (Enz. §445Z). In his Berlin lectures on theoretical spirit, Hegel expressly
states that sensations provide the stuff, the content or matter, of sensory intu-
itions, both inner and outer (Hegel 1994, 190.28–37, 191.70–77), and they pro-
vide the basic content for feelings (Hegel 1994, 191.90–95). Nowhere in this
regard does Hegel describe intuition as intellectual intuition, much less es-
pouse 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 objec-
tive reference by being incorporated into sensory intuitions via acts of intelli-
gent synthesis, and only thus become candidates for conversion into self-
ascribed representations. Self-ascription is the cardinal cognitive advance
achieved by representations, according to Hegel (Enz. §451). Thus both self-
conscious 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 judg-
ment, 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-tempo-
ral objects and events requires, as we have seen (§§129.4, 129.6), exacting
natural-scientific observations and experiments. Such natural-scientific in-
vestigations, 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 conten-

17
These passages are partially quoted by Franks (2005, 377–9), who claims they under-
mine 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 exter-
nality is not done to them one-sidedly by our intuition …’ (Enz. §448Z).
 435

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 He-
gel’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 ob-
jects and events – including those which generate the existence and charac-
teristics 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 cogni-
zant 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 cen-
tral to the Logic, consisting in logical identification and analysis of the funda-
mental Denkbestimmungen as worldly structures, along with the basic cogni-
tive principles, etc., required for us to identify, analyse and ultimately com-
prehend 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; in-
stead [we consider it] as its form, generally speaking, as explicating itself, de-
termining itself, particularising itself, positing particularity, judging and thus
concluding with itself. However, thinking cognition is initially applying think-
ing 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 uni-
versal. (Hegel 1994, 229.284–295)

This passage closely associates Hegel’s own philosophical activity, his way of
explicating and assessing Denkbestimmungen, with identifying and articulat-
ing Denkbestimmugnen through those cognitive processes through which we
‘begin with intuition, perception and we make these perceptions into some-
thing universal, we transform this particular, this individual into the univer-
436

sal’. Hegel’s own philosophical activity, he says here, consists in considering

these same materials, these same processes and products, these same univer-
sals, 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, par-
ticularising itself, positing particularity, judging and thus concluding with itself.

Certainly Hegel’s philosophical re-analysis of the Denkbestimmungen discov-

ered 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 devel-
oped on the basis of the results of natural science;
2. Hegel’s philosophical vantage-point fundamentally involves a distinctive re-
consideration of those very same natural-scientific results;
3. Hegel’s philosophical vantage-point centrally includes a distinctive reconsid-
eration of those very same cognitive processes and involved in common-
sense and natural-scientific knowledge.
It should not be surprising that Hegel associates his own logical methods, in-
sights 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 con-
structive set of philosophical principles based on gravity exhibiting the essen-
tial 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 contempora-
neous natural sciences already in the 1807 Phenomenology, in both ‘The Cer-
tainty and Truth of Reason’ and in ‘Observing Reason’ (Ferrini 2009a, 2009b).
Whilst Hegel’s Logic may have some important kind of philosophical pri-
ority to Philosophy of Nature, I submit that this priority has not been cor-
rectly 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-Tempi-
er) 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 rela-
19
Ferrini (1999); cp. De Orbitis Planetarum, GW 5:247.29; Hegel (1987), 295.
 437

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 justi-
fication in all its forms; Hegel’s epistemology replaces it with a very sophisti-
cated transcendental-pragmatic, fallibilist account of rational justification,
one which both allows and requires much closer connections between He-
gel’s Logic and his Realphilosophie, including his Philosophy of Nature (Ferri-
ni 2012). These close connections between Hegel’s Logic, Philosophy of Na-
ture, 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 tech-
nology; the other of the humanities. Those who have understood Hegel’s phil-
osophy of nature have been well-versed in both; unfortunately, most of He-
gel’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 aug-
mented Kant’s insightful cognitive psychology whilst dispensing with Tran-
scendental 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 ob-
jects and events can only be grasped by intelligence (not merely by consci-
ousness).
3. Intelligence obtains genuine objectivity by correctly identifying characteris-
tics of a known object.
4. Central to our intelligent comprehension of Denkbestimmungen is natural sci-
ence.
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 corre-
sponding 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’
438

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 refu-
ted 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-exam-
ined in this study, Hegel’s philosophical psychology clearly exhibits Hegel’s
commitment to developing and defending in all its facets a very robust prag-
matic 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 epis-
temology, and more broadly to theoretical philosophy. Some important fea-
tures of the character and significance of Hegel’s contributions to philoso-
phical 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 out-
right what constitutes, nor what justifies, some specifically philosophical se-
mantics, 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) rela-
tivised 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 He-
gel’s philosophical semantics converge in an important insight which under-
cuts conventionalist or merely meta-linguistic alternatives; and that the ro-
bust 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 assess-
ment, 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-determina-
tion Thesis (§43), our use of causal concepts and judgments in solving (sub-
personally) 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 (§§9.1, 57.4), the con-
stitutive roles of Kant’s concepts of reflection (identity, difference; compati-
bility, incompatibility; inner, outer; form, matter) in identifying any one parti-
cular (§§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 iden-
tification 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 ele-

mentary cases of simple perception of our surroundings, and in the most
exacting cases of developing and assessing scientific measurement proce-
dures, we must grasp the object itself for what it is, which requires our distin-
guishing 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: accu-
racy about the genuine features of anything we know.
132.2 In focussing on Sellars’s philosophical semantics, I set aside his com-
mitment to a fundamentally atomistic ontology, a commitment devolving ul-
timately 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 moot-
ed by General Relativity (Redhead 1998, Parrini 1983, 2009), nor by QM (Brock
2003). In rejecting the sufficiency of first-order predicate logic for epistemol-
ogy I agree with Hintikka (2014) that first-order predicate logic cannot formu-
late 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 Reichen-
bach (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 se-
mantics (§133). After arguing (briefly) that the relevant, relativised synthetic
a priori cannot be merely linguistic (§134), I then argue in detail that the rele-
vant, 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 prag-
matic realism in Mind and the World Order (1929) and his relapse into empiri-
cism 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;
 441

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 fun-
damental 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 character-
istics. 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 examina-
tions of mythical givenness highlight Kant’s point about the inherently judg-
mental character of human thought and knowledge, even about the appar-
ently 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 up-
on propositions (cf. Carnap 1950a, §11), and thus to neglect the kinds of capa-
cities required for us to form or to assess relevant propositions or their appro-
priate 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 whe-
ther S/he judges as S/he ought. This is Sellars’s insight into the fundamental,
irreducibly normative character of rational judgment, constituted by assess-
1
‘... 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 “imme-
diate experience”’ (EPM ¶79, cf. FMPP 1.44).
442

ing which judgment (if any) is proper to make in view of available information
and relevant considerations (Westphal 2015b, §6.3).2 This fundamental in-
sight is Kant’s: In any judgment about objects, events, actions, principles or
cognitions, we must consider whether the various factors we happen to con-
sider 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 sci-
entific 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 behaviour-
istic 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 Sel-
lars stressed that understanding a sign, term or phrase involves recognising
and being able to draw such inferences, together with recognising in what cir-
cumstances various of those inferences may or may not be relevant, permissi-
ble 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 in-
deed behavioural, but cannot be explained merely causally or behaviouristic-
2
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 differ-
ent 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).
 443

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 stimulus-
response relations cannot distinguish between what Descartes called the ‘for-
mal’ 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 corre-
spond roughly to grammar, meaning (intension) and use, i.e.: specific state-
ments made by particular people on particular occasions. Carnap first devel-
oped formal studies of syntax in The Logical Syntax of Language (1934). He ad-
ded formal semantics in his Introduction to Semantics (1942), which he exten-
ded 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 what-
ever they do. All of that belongs to pragmatics. Sellars early learned that prag-
matics cannot be formalised (Olen 2012, 2015; Westphal 2015b, §6.2). The fact
that the pragmatics of language use cannot be formalised is linked in signifi-
cant 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 ‘expli-
cation’ 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 facili-
tate the practice from which the explicandum derives. Carnap’s methodologi-
cal and terminological contrast between conceptual analysis and conceptual
explication matches Kant’s (KdrV A727–30/B755–8).
444

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 pur-
ported ‘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 explican-
dum (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 in-
quiry, the context of which in part determines the content or significance (in-
tension) 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 rele-
vant context of linguistic use. However, Carnap’s (1950a, 1–18) account of con-
ceptual explication requires semantic externalism, because only framework-
independent 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 rea-
sons, and also for a further reason, widely neglected by his successors.
Carnap recognised – indeed insisted – that his formal syntax and his for-
mal semantics were only two aspects of any complete semantics. The third
aspect he called ‘descriptive semantics’; its task is to identify which observa-
tion statements are uttered by natural scientists. What Carnap calls ‘descrip-
tive semantics’ belongs to Morris’s third class of linguistic studies: pragmatics.
Without this pragmatic ‘descriptive semantics’, Carnap’s linguistic frame-
works are – officially, expressly and inevitably – nothing but uninterpreted
semi-axiomatic systems, altogether lacking empirical significance or use
(Westphal 2015b, §2).
 445

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) untena-
ble 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 ex-
plication (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, sub-
stantial 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 ac-
tual linguistic reference, and different theories of reference must be able to
conflict (disagree) with one another. Call actual linguistic reference ‘REFER-
ENCE’.
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).
446

Hence these two theories of reference appear to conflict about what REFER-
ENCE 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 actu-
ally 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, REFER-
ENCE 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 ‘re-
ference’.
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 state-
ments (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-lin-
guistically to linguistic formulations of theories of linguistic REFERENCE. Now if
actual linguistic REFERENCE is supposed to be problematic, why is meta-lin-
guistic ‘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 offici-
ally denied by her or his deflationary view of ‘reference’ or of REFERENCE. Indi-
rect discourse, referring to anyone’s statement (first-, second- or third-per-
son), 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-langu-
ages 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, inso-
far as he often sought to treat mere marks as meaningful symbols. For exam-
ple, ‘v’ by itself is just an angle, but has no meaning. Within some logical
 447

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 ex-
pected 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 se-
mantics (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 re-
fer to that ‘theory’! By the above reasoning, no one can refer to one’s own pre-
ferred ‘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 re-
ductio 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 Mech-
anics (‘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 veloc-
ity, whereas according to GR, mass varies with velocity. Both Kuhn’s argu-
ment about ‘mass’ and the above argument about ‘reference’ require a strong
semantic internalism, together with a ‘descriptions’ theory of reference, ac-
cording 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.)
448

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. In-
deed, Carnap’s (1956a) semantics directly prefigures Kuhn’s account of theo-
retical 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 con-
tains 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 function-
ing within those contexts of actual usage. The significance of Sellars’s seman-
tic 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 abso-
lutely 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 estab-
lished empirically, because they constitute basic definitory conditions for
empirical inquiry, analysis and justification. Most logical empiricist and neo-
6
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.
 449

pragmatist versions of the relative a priori are merely linguistic, as in the L-

and 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 character-
less 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 be-
cause 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 lin-
guistic 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 clas-
sifications 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 logi-
cally 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-as-
signment); 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 con-
duct any relevant experiments, to make any relevant measurements and to
450

construct (and assess) any relevant theory; where establishing them presup-
poses 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 proce-
dures 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, mea-
sure 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 pro-
cesses or events can be measured. As Toulmin (1949) stressed, neither his
case nor this stronger case for ‘synthetic necessary truths’ requires the empir-
icist’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 engi-
neer and as Head of the US Office of Weights and Measures (Oct. 1884–Feb.
1885), Peirce understood the importance and the difficulties involved in de-
tecting and eliminating sources of systematic error from precise measure-
ment procedures. Peirce was the first to devise a procedure to use the wave-
length of light as a standard unit of measure, and use it to determine the stan-
dard 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 expla-
7
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.
 451

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 ex-
plains it.
ii) Alternatives to the phenomenon would carry information about alterna-
tive 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 an-
alysis, 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 ap-
proximations 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 high-
ly refined, late 19th-century form: When provided the relevant data and analy-
sis, 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 discov-
ery 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 alter-
ation 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).
9
Peirce states: ‘In studying logic, you hope to correct your present ideas of what rea-
soning 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
452

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, identifi-
able 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 META-

LINGUISTIC.

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 scien-
ces are my topic, not ‘metaphysics’. I shall also avoid the common termino-
logical contrast between logical modalities and ‘alethic’ modalities, because
the latter is a misnomer. ‘Alethia’ concerns truth and knowledge, literally un-
concealedness, not ‘truth makers’, i.e., actual objects or events or processes
(whether causal or otherwise). Kant’s account of modality as merely epistem-
ic 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 artic-
ulate 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 descrip-
tion 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, “Lo-
gic 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 fal-
lacious. ... 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.])
 453

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 be-
lieve, correct. The relevant semantic point, about the meaning of our descrip-
tive 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 in-
volves 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 pred-
icates in Carnap’s empiricist semantics, because all confirmation was ulti-
mately 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 re-
quires that those statements can be made and confirmed independently of
any other statements or terms. This strand of semantic atomism is constitu-
tive 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 state-
ments 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 rela-
tions 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 confirm-
able use, of basic observation predicates to report fully confirmable observa-
tions, 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
454

expression. Which inferences these are, however, is set not only by the predi-
cate(s) in question, but also by the syntactic form of the observation state-
ment(s) in which those predicates occur, and this syntactic form is set by the
formation rules of the linguistic framework to which those statements be-
long, as Sellars notes (ITSA 49, 57). A second reason is that simple observa-
tion(s) alone cannot determine whether an observed, occurrent characteris-
tic is or is not affected by (and so dependent upon) further, non-observed
physical circumstances and causal laws. For example, whether something ap-
pears to be red is in fact – whether known or not – dependent upon the rela-
tive 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 de-
terminate 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 re-
quire 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 incompati-
bilities 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-
 455

ibilities Brandom highlights, which are supposed to include disjunctive fami-

lies 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 incom-
patibilities which we must understand and identify prior to and independ-
ently of any such logical translations, in order to make or to assess any such
‘translation’ into logical notation. To properly grasp and formulate the dis-
junctive relations amongst families of characteristics Kant did not treat nega-
tion truth-functionally, and insisted upon the logical distinctness of the ‘infi-
nite 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 in-
compatibilities 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 clas-
sifications – was already highlighted by Waismann’s (1945) criticism of verifi-
ability theories of meaning and the consequent ‘open texture’ or ‘porosity’ of
all our empirical concepts – a point underscored also by Austin’s (1946) inex-
plicably loquacious or exploding goldfinch. Their points about the ‘open tex-
ture’ of empirical concepts and the defeasibility of our use of them corrobo-
rate the point made above about conceptual explication supplanting concep-
tual ‘analysis’ (§134.2). Goodman (1946) made the general case about counter-
factuals, which van Fraassen (1980) used to support his ‘Constructive Empiri-
cism’. The general case about counterfactuals was re-affirmed by Hempel
(1988) when announcing the demise of logical empiricist philosophy of sci-
ence – well after these points had been developed by Frederick Will (1969) to
456

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) repu-
diates ‘the anachronistic extensional quantificational reading’ of Frege’s nota-
tion in Begriffschrift, he inherits from his reading of Frege the ideas that ‘mo-
dal force’ lies in ‘relations between concepts expressed by generalized condi-
tionals’, 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 vocab-
ulary 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; im-
portant here is Brandom’s neo-Fregean, neo-pragmatist meta-linguistic infer-
entialist account of physical modality, which he calls his ‘Modal Expressiv-
ism’. Its key ideas Brandom extracts from Frege’s Begriffschrift in these terms:
The necessity (whether natural or rational) of the connections between em-
pirical concepts is already contained as part of what is expressed by the logi-
cal 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 con-
cepts 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 expli-
cation? 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 chal-
lenge, particularly, but not exclusively, for semantic inferentialists. The cur-
 457

rent primitive state of our thought about the phenomenon of nonmonotoni-

city is, however, no reason for ignoring it. The literature that addresses the re-
lations 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 sub-

junctive 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 meth-
ods 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 quantita-
tive 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 mon-
otonicity; waiving monotonicity is to waive provability, which is to waive
strictly demonstrative (deductive) reasoning. Yes, there is plenty of non-for-
mal reasoning in the sciences, arts, trades and every-day life, but all such non-
formal 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 devel-
opments (§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 seman-
tic 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 ex-
planations requires empirical investigations and causally informed history
and philosophy of science. Brandom’s inferentialism is predicated on the pre-
sumption 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 cau-
tion 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 ex-
pects philosophical analysis to illuminate the special class of statements
containing all and only subjunctively robust counterfactual statements. Con-
sider 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 vocabu-
lary 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 the-
ories 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 deduc-
tive-nomological understanding of explanation. What was wrong about it is
that subjunctive robustness need not be underwritten by laws: modally quali-
fied 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 proxi-
mately) measuring the relevant, constitutive forces. Constitutive forces un-
derwrite all mechanical explanations, insofar as such explanations appeal di-
rectly or indirectly to the material structure of the mechanisms or compo-
nents 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 desig-
nation 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 condi-
tional, 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 such-
and-such a condition obtains or such-and-such a process occurs, then so-and-
so 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 indi-
cates that some causal explanations are particular, under-specified and in-
voke 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 classifica-
tions, causal dispositions and empirical justifications: This characteristic lack
of monotonicity entails that infallibilist standards of justification are, in prin-
ciple, irrelevant to all non-formal domains, including the entirety of morals
and the entirety of empirical knowledge (above, §§2.1, 52, 85, 107). Strict logi-
cal deduction may contribute to empirical justification (in some domains, in
some contexts), though it does not constitute, nor does it suffice for, empiri-
cal 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.
460

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 incom-
patibilities is misguided. Only to empiricists is it news that our minds work by
differentiation rather than by abstraction and generalisation. Regarding ab-
straction, Gombrich (1963, 2) laconically observed: ‘Our mind, of course,
works by differentiation rather than by generalization ...’. Gombrich’s obser-
vation has been elaborated and confirmed by recent psychological investiga-
tions (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 fol-
lowing 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 seman-

tics. 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. Bran-
dom also neglects a feature of Carnap’s semantics which Quine never under-
stood, 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 in-
ferentialism holds that inferential incompatibility is constitutive, not merely
explicative, of material characteristics and their differences and incompatibil-
ities. By contrast, ‘weak’ inferentialism rescinds the constitutive and holds on-
 461

ly the explicative thesis. Redding shows that Brandom holds the strong thesis.
However, ‘strong’ inferentialism is incompatible with the semantic external-
ism 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 con-
tains 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 explic-
itly 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, com-
monsense 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 ob-
servational 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.
462

once semantic, epistemic and ontological – just as one should expect of a ro-
bustly 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 prob-
able. 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 as-
serted 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 mani-
fest, occurrent qualities and merely apparent quantities, expanses or shapes –
because any dispositional characteristic may manifest itself differently in dif-
ferent circumstances or on different occasions, none of which can be appre-
hended presently in or by apparent experience. These alleged claims about
mere appearances are ‘certain’ and ‘infallible’ only because they are by defini-
tion 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.
 463

now within that same appearance, to whomever it so appears. This cognitive-

justificatory point, and it alone, requires any empiricist supposition regarding
mutually independent observation predicates and individually completely
(dis)confirmable protocol sentences. The cognitive (epistemological, justifi-
catory) problem is that once such claims are stripped of any and all further
implications (to insure their infallible, incorrigible certainty), they can pro-
vide no cognitive justification whatsoever regarding any other or further em-
pirical 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 mo-
dally stronger ‘is of identification’ which Hintikka (2005, 2014) argues is re-
quired for epistemology, insofar as knowledge of any individual requires dis-
criminating that actual individual from counter-factual impostors and re-
quires 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 in-
dividuals involves their individuation.) The ‘is of identification’ used in attrib-
uting any observed characteristic to any observed particular is modally rich,
insofar as it constitutively – if fallibly, corrigibly and indefinitely (indetermi-
nately 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 per-
sisting 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 iso-
lation’ (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 knowl-
edge (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.
464

so is our use of them in any actual knowledge of any actual individual. Every-
one’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 chan-
ging 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 cogni-
tively 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) stum-
bled over this distinction when a porter delivered to him a letter in his upper-
storey 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 expecta-
tions 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 signifi-
cance 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 or-
ganisms distinguish between changes in their sensory intake due to their sur-
roundings, and those due to their own behaviour or comportment. Neuro-
biologist 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 decision-
making on the basis of complex computations negotiating internal and external
processing. The adaptive value of such an organization consists of being unpre-
dictable 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 goal-

19
For concise discussion of Kant’s account of the discriminatory character (identification
through individuation) of perceptual and of causal judgment, see Westphal (2017a).
 465

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 pragma-
tism. 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 execu-
tions, which we guide by monitoring – and as needed modifying or halting –
them. No elementary non-modal descriptive predicates – nor modally desic-
cated descriptive predicates (‘presently seems to me like ...’) – are required for
knowledge, and no elementary apparent certainties are required for knowl-
edge, because our experiences, our techniques, our classifications and our
theories are all corrigible, not merely fallible, if we but attend with discern-
ment 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 corpo-
real 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 under-
standing 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 epistem-
ology 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 con-
cur about the basics highlighted herein.
466

and assessment are possible. Those require resolving the Pyrrhonian Dilem-
ma of the Criterion. Solving these problems are amongst Hegel’s chief contri-
butions to pragmatic realism. Conversely, examining these fundamental mo-
dal 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 conten-
tion that objectivity is achieved only by intelligence, not merely by conscious-
ness (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 perceptual-
judgmental 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 rec-
oncile 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 modal-
ity 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 misunderstand-
ing linked to his persistent misquotation of his favourite passage from Sel-
lars’s (1958) paper on causal modalities. Brandom’s (2015) book aims
to explicate what Sellars means by saying that “the descriptive and explana-
tory resources of language advance hand in hand.” In addition to Kant’s idea,
Sellars here takes over Carnap’s idea of understanding concepts whose para-
digm 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 explana-
tions is likewise inquiry into how to refashion relevant portions of our lan-
guages in order better to express and assess our discoveries, understanding
and explanations. These points comport well with, and further support, Toul-
min’s (1949) defence of synthetic necessary truths, and they dovetail with He-
gel’s philosophical semantics in both his Logic and his Realphilosophie, inclu-
ding the Philosophy of Nature.
In connection with ‘inductive’ scientific confirmation of a significant na-
tural 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 im-
portant 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 in-
stances,” and gives inductive conclusions, in spite of the fact that, as princi-
ples of inference, they relate to the very “meaning” of scientific terms, a cor-
rigibility 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 philos-
ophers 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 falsi-
ficationism. In contrast to Brandom, though like pragmatic realists, Sellars re-
cognised that empirical truth and conceptual meaning (intension) are inter-
related in myriad ways through empirical and especially through scientific
inquiry. In part this is because our explicit definitions do not serve to com-
pletely 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 con-
stantly, 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
468

of legitimacy to conventionalism, which evaporates when actual scientific

methods and procedures are examined with the care they deserve and re-
quire, including centrally Newton’s fourth rule of method:
In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by in-
duction should be considered either exactly or very nearly true notwithstand-
ing any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such proposi-
tions either more exact or liable to exceptions. (Newton 1999, 796; 1871, 389)

By ‘redefining’ (inter alia) space, time and simultaneity, Einstein’s GR suc-

ceeded (inter alia) at better satisfying Newton’s Rule 4 at astronomical dis-
tances 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 specifi-
cally cognitive status unless and until is it referred by Somone to some partic-
ulars (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 desig-
nated 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) any-
thing at all – and accordingly to have or to assess any kind or extent of ap-
proximate 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 sub-
ject 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 deploy-
ing linguistic locutions. Their “rulishness” is their subjunctive robustness. Fol-
lowing out this line of thought, Sellars takes it that “grasp of a concept is mas-
tery 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-
 469

nap’s L- and P-rules are specified for and within any linguistic framework gov-
erning the use of terms – descriptive and otherwise – by an informal meta-
language, by whatever natural language Someone uses to (re-)construct that
linguistic framework. The linguistic framework itself is a conceptual explica-
tion of terms, concepts, principles or theoretical laws in use within some spe-
cific 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 Expres-

sivism’ substantiates, illuminates, justifies nor otherwise entitles Brandom to
these assertions. Brandom’s ‘Modal Expressivism’ is a proposed solution sear-
ching 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’ classi-
fications 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 sys-
tems, structures, events or phenomena, or as constitutive regularities identi-
fied and exploited by basic measurement procedures, whereby natural regu-
larities are exploited as information channels in Dretske’s (1981) sense.22 Ac-
cordingly, 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 relia-
ble 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).
470

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 Sel-
lars 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 se-
mantics, including his account of ‘synthetic necessary truths’, converges very
significantly with Hegel’s. Indeed, the key semantic, explicatory aims of He-
gel’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 Tran-
scendental Idealism, by capitalizing upon Kant’s method of conceptual expli-
cation and using it to better understand our empirical knowledge, both com-
monsense 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 peren-
nial philosophical issues recur in different versions in different contexts, to
help to identify the most important features of an issue, and the most perspi-
cacious 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 justi-
fication. Philosophers ignore historical philosophy, and historians of philoso-
phy ignore critical assessment, not only at their own peril, but also imperil
the philosophical endeavor itself. A cogent philosophical formulation and re-
solution of a genuine issue may not wear its historical-philosophical erudi-
tion 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 inten-
sion 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 philoso-
phical semantics, which distinguishes between the explication of the inten-
sion of basic concepts and principles in the Science of Logic and their cogni-
tive significance when used in judging relevant phenomena in the Realphil-
osophie, 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 cog-
nitive 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 funda-
mentally ill-conceived, because the allegation of universal causal determin-
ism mistakes the unrestricted scope (intension) of the specific causal princi-
ple 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 spe-
cific 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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472

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, responsi-
ble human action without any appeal to Transcendental Idealism. Kant him-
self 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 shortcom-
ing highlight and corroborate the cogency of Hegel’s Critical philosophical
semantics and theory of cognitive judgment. A leitmotiv is provided by Nietz-
sche’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 jeopar-
dised by these findings. However, that view remains in key regards Cartesian,
whereas a superior account of our freedom and autonomy was already devel-
oped 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 com-
monsense. (Common sense even today is deeply Cartesian.) I then character-
ise 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.
2
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).
 473

142 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 de-
ceived 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 ap-

pears 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-transpar-
ency’; 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 na-
tural 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).
474

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) ‘na-

tural 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 af-
firm 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 compo-
site person.
142.3 Three Steps to Decisions. To this model of the will corresponds a famil-
iar, 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 radi-
cally independent first instigation of an action; Kant states this idea:
… freedom … [is] a particular kind of causality, … namely a capacity abso-
lutely 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 contem-
porary philosophy of mind as the thesis of ‘mental content internalism’, ac-
cording 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-con-
scious 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 deter-
mined, 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).
5
Kant specifies ‘freedom’ in this sense, which is neutral between the views of his prede-
cessors and his own transcendental idealist distinction between phenomena and noume-
na; only thus does the Third Antinomy bear upon preCritical metaphysics.
 475

143 THREE FINDINGS OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE SCIENCES.

These basic features of Cartesianism are challenged by contemporary life sci-

ences 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 ob-
ject. Such aphasics visually perceive their surroundings, though without self-
conscious awareness of significant regions of their visible surroundings.
Consequently, human perceptual consciousness is at least to a significant ex-
tent possible without corresponding self-conscious perception. Such consci-
ousness, however, is not merely animalic, because these aphasic patients re-
spond to verbal requests by understanding them and executing them with
great perceptual-motor facility.
143.2 Libet Experiments. Neuro-psychological experiments by Benjamin Li-
bet and others report that specific neurological antecedents of response de-
cisions occur up to ten seconds prior to any self-conscious, experienced deci-
sion 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-con-
scious, experienced decision cannot be the actual decision made by the ex-
perimental subject, because the actual decision is already made pre-consci-
ously 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 philos-
ophers 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 re-
spond 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 cir-
cularity, exacerbated by the evolutionary considerations just mentioned. The
common appeal to ‘reflective equilibrium’ is little help, because such equilib-
476

rium is a conditio sine qua non for a tenable view, but constitutes no justifica-
tory 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 hu-
man brain, how it functions and how it evolved. Nevertheless it is worth con-
sidering two contemporaneous objections to Cartesianism.
144.1 Descartes’ Self-deception. Even at its inception, mental content inter-
nalism can be shown to be the fundamental self-deception of Cartesianism,
indeed within the second and sixth of Descartes’s Meditations, where Des-
cartes 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 iden-
tical 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 exis-
tence 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 inter-
nalism do not at all count as knowledge because – on his own terms – Des-
cartes erred about both. His error in this regard is most apparent in Medita-
tion 6, where he argues as follows:
First, I know that everything which I clearly and distinctly understand is capa-
ble 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 think-
ing 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, mutu-
ally independent substances; nor does it imply that God does make them dis-
tinct and mutually independent substances, only one of which – the exten-
ded 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 ‘obvi-
ously’ 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 Des-
cartes’ 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 intel-
lectual and the extended attributes of the one substance: At best, Descartes’s
analysis can distinguish between mental (thinking, non-extended) and physi-
cal (extended, non-thinking) attributes, though not between numerically dis-
tinct mental and physical substances. This is because Descartes’s analysis suf-
fices 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
478

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 paradig-
matic instance, that is the fundamental self-deception of Descartes’s purpor-
ted self-transparency. (Great shades of Frege’s distinctions between sense, re-
ference 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, ne-
glect these key questions by analysing conceptual intension yet ignoring whe-
ther 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 high-
lighted it (above, §§89.3, 102). Kant was the first philosopher to highlight the
insufficiency of mere conceptual analysis for non-formal domains, by distin-
guishing his specifically transcendental logic from general logic, and by dis-
tinguishing 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 self-
consciousness with the ‘I’ or with one’s ‘self’. Consider the question, Can Car-
tesians 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 un-
derstanding and its anti-Cartesian implications have been emphasised by
Burge (1979), and previously by Polanyi (1966), though they are already cen-
6
‘Cartesianism’ results from fixation upon the mauvais genie and justificatory infal-
libilism. 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).
 479

tral to Hegel’s analysis of the self-critical structure and capacity of our con-
sciousness 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 expli-
citly aware of). For example, when I consider, think through and solve a prob-
lem, 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 ex-
pressly 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 Phi-
losophy, 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 self-
transparent. 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 Phenom-
enology 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 aware-
ness 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 sur-
roundings, and on that basis distinguish ourselves from that which we per-
ceive around us (above, §§65–70). Kant and Hegel lacked information about
the sorts of perceptual aphasia mentioned above (§143.1). However, the em-
pirical finding that people who suffer such aphasia can perceive their sur-
roundings without self-conscious awareness of significant portions of their
visual field is neatly accommodated by their views, though not at all by Carte-
sianism. 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
Cf. Hegel, MM 2:382–3, 5:55–6, 10:131, 19:42–48, 20:84, Rph §144Z.
8
Hegel does not, of course, use this terminology; see Westphal (1998a), §6.5.
480

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 exam-
ined 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 ac-
tion on the basis of implicit concepts and principles. To this point I return be-
low (§146).

145 BIOLOGISM TODAY?

145.1 Today’s Biologism. Even today the thesis of biologism – that human ac-
tions are altogether causally determined by our biology – is vigorously assert-
ed. 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, sim-
ply 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 criti-
cised 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, inclina-
tions and passions’ (PhdG 9:169.17/¶303), together with his or her circum-
stances, including his or her ‘situation, habits, customs, religion etc.’ (PhdG 9:
169.39/¶305). In this connection note first that citing causes of individual ac-
tions does not suffice to explain them deterministically! Deterministic expla-
nation requires providing a complete, sufficient, exclusively causal explana-
tion 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 deterministi-
9
Hegel, Enz. §§388–412, Hegel (1992); cf. Ferrini (2009a–c), Westphal (2009b).
 481

cally any person or his or her actions.

In a striking passage Hegel designates a representative person as an ‘indi-
viduality’ (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, cus-
toms, habits, etc. and to accord with them, as also to set him- or herself a-
gainst 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 individu-
ality and which influence it shall have – which actually is redundant – thus
depends solely upon the individuality him- or herself; in this way this individ-
uality has become this particular individuality, which is to say, he or she has al-
ready 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 free-
dom 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 neuro-
biological 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 funda-
mental 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, Ge-
wohnheiten usf. zusammenzufließen und ihnen gemäß zu werden, als sich entgegen-
gesetzt 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“.
482

any decision about which button to press, precede in time any research sub-
ject’s explicit awareness of his or her decision and action. However, neither
this temporal precedence, nor the (purportedly) reliable prediction based up-
on 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 inten-
tions: 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 evi-
dence which would neurologically explain away this basic intention, upon
which depends the entire experimental design. To the contrary, the neurolog-
ical antecedents to any selection and depression of a designated button only
occur on the basis of the research subject’s prior, standing intention to coöp-
erate 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 re-
garding 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 deci-
sion 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-con-
scious, utterly self-transparent event. In this regard, Descartes, Libet and ra-
ther too much Cartesian commonsense – or rather: common Cartesian non-
sense – 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 ac-
tion several intentions which differ in their generality or specificity, even
though we often expressly attend only to one or a few of our several inten-
tions. In particular, Hegel distinguished expressly between the purpose (Vor-
satz) 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 execut-
ing that purpose; for example, signing a cheque. This action may involve sev-
eral more, and more general intentions; for example: to pay my rent on time;
 483

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 contrib-
ute my part to renovating my neighbourhood; by so doing to support, indi-
rectly, 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 be-
tween the purpose and the intention(s) of any human action strongly indi-
cates that our actions cannot be reduced simply to bodily behaviour. In this
connection two important basic points regarding causal explanation and re-
ductionism 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 suffici-
ent 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 cau-
sally 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 con-
ditions. Beginning in the 1960's physicists recognised that many relatively
simple mechanical systems satisfying Newton’s laws are, for strictly mathe-
matical reasons (as contrasted to measurement errors, etc.), behave chaotic-
ally (Lighthill 1986; Lichtenberg & Lieberman 1983). Determinism about hu-
man behaviour presupposes a highly simplified mechanical model of causa-
tion which does not apply universally even within macro-scale physical me-
chanics! This exposes one fundamental self-deception of the exponents of de-
terminism regarding human action.
Any deterministic causal explanation requires precise appeal to the rele-
vant 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 ex-
tent of information about any human action to explain it causally, rather
than casually, i.e., informally, very incompletely. In everyday life such exten-
sive causal information would be superfluous distraction. In everyday con-
texts, 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-
484

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 ascrip-
tion, in turn, does not suffice for causal knowledge, that is, for sufficiently jus-
tified causal ascription. Because causal descriptions are not merely formal,
but rather are substantive claims – they are expressed by synthetic, not by an-
alytic 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 ascrip-
tion or attribution, in contrast to empty or ambiguous (non-referring or inde-
finite) expressions. That is a crucial finding of Kant’s semantics of singular,
specifically cognitive reference, which Hegel recognised and for which he ar-
gued (soundly, I submit) in ‘Sense Certainty’, independently of Kant’s Tran-
scendental Idealism, and which Hegel further used regarding causal judg-
ment and explanation in ‘Force and Understanding’ and in ‘Reason Observing
Nature’ in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. One consequence of their seman-
tics 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 justifica-
tion of causal ascriptions (that is, of specific, accurate, justified causal predi-
cations), 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 justi-
fied 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, espe-
cially 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 em-
pirical 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.
 485

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 cau-
sal factors in a person’s environment, genetics and the stochastic characteris-
tics 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 assess-
ment of the ‘Libet Experiments’ (Radder & Meynen 2013) shows that these ex-
periments 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, cau-
sally-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 some-
thing. This representational character or capacity of any idea – what it repre-
sents and how it represents it to be, in sum, its content – is its ‘objective’ re-
ality (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 (Mo-
ran 2014), also as regards semantic counters (inscriptions, sign designs, sym-
bol 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).
486

less do we have any fully physical, causally sufficiently explanation of any se-
mantic 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 neuro-
logical 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 regar-
ded 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 conjunc-
tion, a mathematical symbol for multiplication, a punctuation mark, a typo-
graphical error or a mere printing blunder. These distinctions require re-
course to specific intelligent and intelligible uses of a dot, which themselves
are only determinate – and specifiable – within specific contexts of usage, in-
cluding 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 (specifi-
cation, interpretation or understanding) of semantic contents; causal covari-
ance 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 concep-
tions, 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.
 487

intension) of sensed qualities, though not at all for merely determinable con-
ceptions, such as ‘space’ and ‘time’.15 Hume recognised, of course, that we do
use determinable, linguistically mediated conceptions. Within Hume’s phi-
losophy 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 re-
peatedly 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 determin-
ism is even more demanding, for it can be earned only by complete, suffici-
ent, 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. De-
spite 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 pro-
gramme 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 argu-
ment’, its assessment and use would require exercise of our rational auton-
omy, 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 simi-
larity, temporal or spatial contiguity, and 1:1 correlation); hence his principles do not suf-
fice to specify any semantic content or relation.
16
On the many explanatory gaps regarding mental phenomena, see Horst (2011), Falken-
burg (2012), esp. 351–66.
488

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. Ra-
tional judgment is autonomous insofar as we are each able to – and do – pass
our own judgment, rather than simply adopting others’ judgments, recom-
mendations, advice or commands.
146.2 The exercise of judgment is normatively, and not merely causally, consti-
tuted. Exercising one’s own judgment is autonomous insofar as it involves re-
gulating 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 autono-
mous with regard to merely causal processes or events of our neuro-physio-
psychology. 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 func-
tionalist 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, under-
stood as a physiological or psychological process, is a causal process, this
process counts as exercising judgment only insofar as it responds appropri-
ately to normative considerations and criteria, and not simply to its causal
antecedents as such. A judgment is a conclusion reached by assessing its jus-
tifying 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 consti-
tute 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 pro-
positional contents, which themselves require or involve information relations.
 489

146.3 The exercise of judgment is required for responsible action. Acting re-
sponsibly, in contrast to merely behaving, is only possible through (actual or
potential) exercise of judgment, because acting responsibly is based upon jus-
tificatory grounds, in contrast to mere excuses or exculpations. Acting re-
sponsibly involves autonomy of judgment in ways which highlight the spon-
taneity 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 per-
missible. This point likewise holds for those cases in which we act very rap-
idly, without time to reflect expressly about how best to act: our acting re-
sponsibly 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 our-
selves 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 ‘individuali-
ties’ (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 ‘Incorpo-
ration 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 knowl-
edge and action (including morals, both ethics and justice). Fallibilist ac-
counts 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, includ-
ing 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 psycholo-
gists (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).
490

of illness. In these cases, including cases of psychiatric disorder, the auton-

omy 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 ex-

tent to which ethology or human evolution undermine morality. Moral real-
ists have, of course, replied to Darwinian criticisms of moral theory.20 Objec-
tions 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 mor-
ally 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 iden-
tification or justification of moral principles to human motivation (whether
individually or collectively). Comparative ethology has some rather frighten-
ing lessons regarding human motivation and affective responses, insofar as
many of humanity’s most inhumane episodes have vivid parallels in well-doc-
umented unsavoury chapters of chimpanzee behaviour, such as genocide (Di-
amond 2006; Mitani, Watts & Amsler, 2010). These findings are especially un-
welcome news for moral theories which link the identification or the justifi-
cation 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 re-
construction of natural law theory inaugurated by Hume and further devel-
oped 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 prin-
ciples 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).
20
Cf. Copp (2008), Caruthers & James (2008), Lillehammer (2010), Wielenberg (2010),
Brosnan (2011), Skarsaune (2011); cf. Burghardt (2009), Rose (2009).
 491

Basic moral principles are the sufficient minimum basic principles and insti-
tutions 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, where-
by 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 sub-
jective 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 con-
structivism, have long been sufficiently known to us, regardless of any impli-
cations of ethology or evolutionary theory for human morality.

148 CONCLUSION.

We may expect to hear further declarations of deterministic biologism. How-

ever, Hegel’s analysis of our rational autonomy should encourage us to expect
from the life sciences further insights into the biological basis of human free-
dom and action.21 We have much to look forward to! Hegel’s philosophical se-
mantics 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 pro-
test 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).
492

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 with-
out its purely a priori, Transcendental Idealist aspirations. Hegel thus refur-
bished Aristotle’s meta ta physica semantically, as the explication, specifica-
tion 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 multi-
disciplinary inquiry, which require disciplined inquiry – of several kinds. Phil-
osophising 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 mak-
ing proper, sound philosophical sense of actual sciences and its actual history
show that such multi-disciplinary philosophy is humanly possible, and splen-
didly informative! Kant’s Critical philosophy is separable from his Transcen-
dental 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 se-
mantics, semantics of singular cognitive reference, use of strictly internal cri-
tique and determinate negation, coupled with his comprehensive grasp of
philosophical and intellectual history, used for cogent conceptual explica-
tion, 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 sim-
ple 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 ro-
bust, Critical pragmatic realism, to rehabilitating Hegel’s philosophical cre-
dentials 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, Uni-
versity 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

494

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)
 495

150 ANALYTICAL CONTENTS

Contents vii
Acknowledgements vii
Note on Sources and Citations ix

1 INTRODUCTION 1
1 Hegel an Epistemologist? 1
2 Kant’s Critical Philosophy: A Synopsis 9
2.1 Kant’s Critical Fallibilism 9
2.2 Key Features of Rational Judgment 10
2.3 Judgment and Cognitive Reference 11
2.4 Kant’s Three-fold Strategy 13
2.5 Kant’s Methodological Constructivism 14
2.6 Transcendental Proof and Transcendental Idealism 15
3 Kant’s Critical Philosophy Outlined 16
3.1 Kant’s Key Questions 16
3.2 Kant’s Main Critical Writings 17
3.3 Kant’s Main Critical Problems 18
3.4 Kant’s System of Critical Philosophy 20

PART I Hegel’s Critical Reconsiderations of Metaphysics and

Epistemology

2 HENRY HARRIS AND THE SPIRIT OF HEGEL’S 1807 PHENOMENOLOGY 25

4 Introduction 25
5 Harris, Hegel and Philosophical History 25
6 Harris and Hermeneutical Method 28
7 Harris on Hegel’s Epistemology 32
8 Harris’ Epistemological Shortcomings 33
9 Some Critical Reservations about Hegel’s Ladder 34
9.1 Harris, Hegel and Perception 34
9.2 Harris, Hegel and ‘The Moral World View’ 36
10 Harris, Epistemology and Hermeneutical Method 38
11 Hegel’s References to Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism 40
12 The Problem of Assessing Standards of Knowledge 45
13 Distinguishing Recollection from mere Imagination 48
14 Dialectic, Justification and Hermeneutical Method 53
15 Coda: Some Brief Replies to Harris 56

3 IDEALISM : TRANSCENDENTAL OR ABSOLUTE? 57

16 Introduction 57
17 Some Critical Questions 59
18 Does Hegel’s Absolute Idealism Develop out of Kant’s
Transcendental Idealism? 60
19 Does Hegel Retain the Model of an Intuitive Intellect? 63
496

20 Transcendental Idealism, Scientia and Hegel’s Absolute Idealism 64

21 Some Basic Features of Hegel’s Mature Idealism 66
22 The Costs of neglecting Hegel’s Introduction to
the 1807 Phenomenology 73
23 Do Transcendental Idealism or Intellectual Intuition Illuminate
Hegel’s Mature Philosophy? 74
24 Conclusion 75

4 HEGEL’S EARLY CRITIQUE OF KANT’S CRITICAL FOUNDATIONS OF PHYSICS 77

25 Introduction 77
26 The Role of the Foundations in Kant’s Critical System 77
27 Hegel’s Early Critique of Kant’s Foundations 79
28 Three Internal Problems with Kant’s Foundations 80
28.1 Kant’s Flawed Proof of Matter’s Basic Forces 80
28.2 Kant’s Circular Account of Matter’s Quantity 81
28.3 Why Forces Transcend Kant’s Critical Analysis 82
28.3.1 Kant’s Flawed Proof of Newton’s Law of Inertia 82
28.3.2 Kant’s Flawed Disproof of Hylozoism 83
29 The Ramifications of these Problems for Kant’s First Critique 86
29.1 Kant’s Table of Categories as a Groundplan for Rational Physics 86
29.2 External Causation and Kant’s Analogies of Experience 86

5 THE TRANSCENDENTAL, FORMAL AND MATERIAL CONDITIONS OF THE ‘I THINK’ 89

30 Introduction 89
31 Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Sensory Affinity 89
32 Kant’s Transcendental Idealist Explanation of Sensory Affinity 91
33 Kant’s Fatal Equivocation 93
34 Hegel’s Recognition of Kant’s Problem with Transcendental Affinity 95
34.1 Some Interpretive Difficulties 95
34.2 Traces of the Problem of Transcendental Affinity in Hegel’s
Early Writings 96
35 Implications of Kant’s Problems with Transcendental Affinity 99
36 Appendix: Evidence of Hegel’s Awareness of Kant’s Issue of
Transcendental Affinity 106

6 THE FATE OF ‘THE’ INTUITIVE INTELLECT IN HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY 109

37 Intellectual Intuitions and Intuitive Intellects 109
38 Aconceptual Intuitionism in Schelling’s and Hegel’s Early Views 112
39 Hegel’s Youthful Neglect of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic 113
40 In Principle, Intellectual Intuition entails Petitio Principii 114
41 Hegel’s Reconsideration of the Problem of Petitio Principii 115
42 Hegel’s Critique of Schelling’s Intuitionism in his Lectures on the
History of Philosophy 122

7 HEGEL’S POST-KANTIAN EPISTEMOLOGICAL REORIENTATION 127

43 Hegel’s Co-determination Thesis 127
44 Hegel’s Post-Kantian Reorientation 130
 497

44.1 The Idea of System 130

44.2 The Status of Necessity 131
44.3 The Relation between Philosophy and Physics 132
44.4 The Emptiness of Kant’s Categories 133
44.5 The Metaphysics of Transcendental Arguments 133
44.6 Hegel’s Post-Kantian Agenda 134
45 Some Remarks on Naturalism and Fallibilism 136
46 Conclusion 139

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
47 Introduction 143
48 Pyrrhonian Scepticism 144
48.1 The Regress Argument 144
48.2 Equipollence 145
48.3 Vicious Circularity and the Dilemma of the Criterion 146
48.4 Epoché and the Greek ‘Ontological’ Conception of Truth 148
49 Empiricist Scepticism 149
49.1 Introduction 149
49.2 Knowledge by Acquaintance 149
49.3 Hume on the Concepts of ‘Cause’ and ‘Body’ 152
49.4 Induction 154
50 Cartesian Scepticism 155
51 Kantian Scepticism 158
51.1 Kant: Sceptic or Anti-Sceptic? 158
51.2 Hegel’s Strategic Response to Kant’s Idealism 158
51.3 Hegel’s Critical Response to Kant’s Idealism 158
51.4 Hegel’s Direct Response to Kant’s Idealism 159
52 The Persistence of Infallibilism 160
53 Conclusion 161

9 HEGEL’S PRAGMATIC CRITIQUE AND RECONSTRUCTION OF KANT’S SYSTEM OF

PRINCIPLES I: THE 1807 PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 163
54 Introduction 163
55 Three Unjustly Neglected Features of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 165
55.1 Kant’s Semantics of Singular Cognitive Reference 165
55.2 The Completeness of Kant’s Transcendental Doctrine of the
Power of Judgment 168
55.3 The Integrity of Kant’s Principles of Causal Judgment 169
56 Live Issues from Hegel’s Early Studies 170
57 Five Central Points from the 1807 Phenomenology 172
57.1 Hegel’s Defence of Kant’s Cognitive Semantics 172
57.2 Justificatory Fallibilism in Principle 174
498

57.3 Pure A Priori Concepts 174

57.4 The Binding Problems 174
57.5 Deflating Global Perceptual Scepticism 176
57.6 Hegel’s Refutation of Empirical Idealism 177
57.7 Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology and the Logic’s Point of Departure 177
58 Pragmatic Realism and Natural Science 178
59 Interim Conclusions 180

10 HEGEL’S SOLUTION TO THE PYRRHONIAN DILEMMA OF THE CRITERION 181

60 Introduction 181
61 The Dilemma of the Criterion and its Epistemological Significance 186
62 Forms of Consciousness 188
63 Knowledge as a Relation 190
63.1 The Problem 191
63.2 Eight Aspects of Knowledge as a Relation 192
63.2.1 Two Senses of ‘In-itself’ 193
63.2.2 A Grammatical Case Distinction 194
63.2.3 Consciousness as Reflexive; the List Doubled 195
63.3 Hegel’s Criterial Inference 197
64 The Issue of Completeness 202

11 HEGEL’S TRANSCENDENTAL PROOF OF MENTAL CONTENT EXTERNALISM 205

65 Introduction 205
66 Hegel’s Semantics of Singular Cognitive Reference 206
67 Hegel’s Justification of his Semantics of Singular Cognitive Reference
in ‘Consciousness’ 208
68 ‘Self-Consciousness’, Thought and the Semantics of Singular
Cognitive Reference 214
69 Hegel’s Interim Critique of the Ego-Centric Predicament 226
70 Conclusion 228

12 Mutual Recognition and Rational Justification in Hegel’s 1807

Phenomenology of Spirit 231
71 Introduction 231
72 Hegel’s ‘Self-Consciousness’ and Kant’s ‘I think’ 234
73 Hegel’s Analysis of Mutual Recognition: The State of Debate 236
74 Hegel’s Phenomenology and Kant’s ‘I Think’ 240
75 What Links the ‘I think’ and the Thesis of Mutual Recognition? 241
76 Rational Judgment, Autonomy and Spontaneity 243
77 Individual Rational Judgment and the Community of Rational Judges 245
78 Kant’s Constructivist Account of Rational Justification 247
79 Hegel’s Generalisation of Kant’s Constructivist Model of Justification 252
79.1 Hegel’s is no Coherence Criterion 253
79.2 Fallibilism and Constructivist Justification 256
79.3 Self-Criticism and Mutual Critical Assessment 256
80 Mutual Critical Assessment in Hegel’s Analysis of ‘Evil and
Forgiveness’ 257
 499

81 Mutual Critical Assessment and the Historical Dimensions of

Rational Justification 261
82 Conclusion 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
500

PART III Hegel’s Systematic Critical Pragmatic Realism

14 HEGEL’S CRITIQUE OF INTUITIONISM : ENCYCLOPAEDIA §§61–78 297

92 Introduction 297
93 Jacobi’s Critique of Discursive Knowledge 299
94 Jacobi’s Alternative to Discursive Knowledge 302
95 Hegel’s Questions About ‘Immediate Knowledge’ 303
96 Hegel’s Critique of ‘Immediate Knowledge’: I 305
97 Hegel’s Critique of ‘Immediate Knowledge’: II 310
98 Hegel’s Critique of ‘Immediate Knowledge’: III 313
99 Some Philosophical Significance of Hegel’s Critique of Jacobi’s
Intuitionism 316

15 Analytic Philosophy and the Long Tail of Scientia: Hegel and the
Historicity of Philosophy 319
100 Introduction 319
101 Why Bother with Philosophical History? 319
102 Van Fraassen’s Constructive Empiricism 322
103 From Formulation to Justification 327
104 What kind of history of philosophy does philosophy require? 329
105 Philosophy: its History and Ours 332
106 The Modern Epistemological Predicament 337
107 Residual Infallibilism 339
108 Some Necessary Conditions of our Singular Cognitive Reference 341
109 The Pragmatic A priori 344
110 Conclusion 348

16 HEGEL’S PRAGMATIC CRITIQUE AND RECONSTRUCTION OF KANT’S SYSTEM OF

PRINCIPLES II: THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC AND ENCYCLOPAEDIA 349
111 Introduction 349
112 Transcendental Logic in Hegel’s Science of Logic and Philosophy of
Nature 350
112.1 What of Kant’s Critique of Cognitive Principles can be Justified? 350
112.2 Hegel’s Rejection of Rationalism 350
112.3 The Empirical Grounds of Hegel’s Critique of Cognitive Principles 352
112.4 Hegel’s Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference 352
112.5 Hegel’s Reconfiguration of Kant’s Modal Categories 354
112.6 ‘The’ Causal Principle: General or Specific? 355
112.7 Transcendental Analysis cannot be Purely a Priori 356
112.8 Transcendental Analysis must be Pragmatic 357
112.9 Hegel’s Rejection of Transcendent Metaphysics 358
112.10 Hegel’s Pragmatism is Rooted in Natural Science 358
112.11 Hegel’s Functionalism and Emergentism 359
113 Hegel’s Pragmatic A Priori 359
113.1 Hegel’s Pragmatic Development of Kant’s Constructivism 359
113.2 Hegel’s Anti-Cartesian Externalisms 360
113.3 Hegel’s Moderate Semantic Holism 361
 501

113.4 Hegel’s Pragmatism is Robustly Realist, not Neo-Pragmatist 362

113.6 Conceptual Analysis, Logical Possibility and Explication 365
114 Hegel’s Ontology and the Realisation of the Concept 367
115 Conclusion 371

17 SCIENCE AND THE PHILOSOPHERS 373

116 Introduction 373
117 The Advent of Modern Science 373
118 Modern Philosophical Reaction 378
118.1 Descartes 378
118.2 Hume 380
118.3 Kant 381
119 Van Fraassen’s Empiricist Stance 382
120 Hegel’s Transcendental, Pragmatic Realism in Epistemology 390
121 Concluding Unscientistic Postscript 391

18 HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE: ITS AIMS, SCOPE AND SIGNIFICANCE 395

122 Introduction 395
123 Galileo, Newton and Philosophy of Nature 397
123.1 Galileo’s Methodology 397
123.2 Newton’s Two Questions 398
123.3 Some Limits of Newton’s Methods 399
123.4 Hegel’s Causal Realism 400
123.5 Corpuscularism and Dynamic Forces 400
123.6 Hegel’s Causal Realism (again) 402
123.7 Hegel’s Debts to Newtonian Physics 404
124 Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: Ontology, Metaphysics or Semantics? 405
124.1 Natural Science and Hegel’s Naturalism 405
124.2 Hegel’s Philosophical Semantics 408
125 Central Systematic Aims of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature 409
126 Conclusion 416

19 COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, INTELLIGENCE AND THE REALISATION OF THE CONCEPT

IN HEGEL’S ENCYCLOPAEDIC EPISTEMOLOGY 417
127 Introduction 417
128 Is Hegel a Subjective Idealist? 418
129 Corroborations from Hegel’s Lectures on Logic and Philosophical
Psychology 421
129.1 Psychology, Reason and Spirit 424
129.2 Hegel contra the ‘Metacritiques’ 426
129.3 Thinking and Experience 427
129.4 Cognition and Laws of Nature 429
129.5 Hegel’s Rejoinder to Herder’s Causal Scepticism 430
129.6 Causal Laws and Concrete Universals 431
130 Intelligence and Objectivity 433
130.1 Hegel’s Sensationism 433
130.2 Intelligence and Natural Science 434
502

130.3 Objectivity, Logic and Denkbestimmungen 435

131 Conclusions 437

20 ROBUST PRAGMATIC REALISM IN HEGEL’S CRITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY:

SYNTHETIC NECESSARY TRUTHS 439
132 Introduction 439
133 Sellars, Kant and Semiotics 441
134 Why the Relative Synthetic A Priori cannot be merely Linguistic 443
134.1 Carnap, Conceptual Explication and Linguistic Frameworks 443
134.2 Conceptual Explication and Semantic Externalism 444
134.3 A Brief Example from Huw Price 445
135 Measurement Procedures, Conventions and the Relative
Synthetic A priori 448
136 Why the Relative Synthetic A Priori cannot be merely Meta-linguistic 452
136.1 Some Preliminaries 452
136.2 Brandom’s Metalinguistic ‘Kant-Sellars Modal Thesis’ 452
136.3 Empiricism and Basic Empirical Descriptive Terms 453
137 Material Inferences sans ‘Inferentialism’ 454
137.1 Brandom’s ‘Inferentialism’ 454
137.4 Brandom’s Explanatory Aspiration 457
137.5 Brandom on DN Explanation 458
138 Sellars on the Modality of Ordinary Empirical Description 461
139 Conclusion 470

21 AUTONOMY, FREEDOM AND EMBODIMENT: HEGEL’S CRITIQUE OF

CONTEMPORARY BIOLOGISM 471
140 Introduction 471
141 Contemporary Life Sciences and Human Behaviour 472
142 Cartesian Self-transparency 473
142.1 Sensing Strictly Speaking 473
142.2 Cartesian Freedom 473
142.3 Three Steps to Decisions 474
143 Three Findings of Contemporary Life Sciences 475
143.1 ‘Blind-sight’ 475
143.2 Libet Experiments 475
143.3 Darwinian Selection contra Morals? 475
144 Hegel’s Anti-Cartesianism 476
144.1 Descartes’ Self-deception 476
144.2 Cartesian Learning? 478
145 Biologism Today? 480
145.1 Today’s Biologism 480
145.2 Reconsidering Libet’s Experiments 481
145.3 Hegel’s Incisive Anticipations 482
145.4 Human Behaviour and its Contributing Causes 483
145.5 Explaining Human Behaviour Causally 485
145.6 Earning Causal Claims Legitimately 487
 503

146 Freedom as Autonomy 488

146.1 Exercising judgment is the exercise of one’s own powers of
judgment 488
146.2 The exercise of judgment is normatively, and not merely
causally, constituted 488
146.3 The exercise of judgment is required for responsible action 489
147 Is Morality undermined by Contemporary Darwinism? 490
148 Conclusion 491

22 APPENDIX 493
149 A Snapshot from London of Philosophy circa 1880 493
150 Analytical Contents 495

Bibliography 505
Index of Names 539
Index of Subjects 541
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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 percep-
tion 235–6
ataraxia (quietude, unperturbedness) 144, 223
atomism, corpuscular 375–6, 400–1, 409; onto-
logical 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 explana-
tion, 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 infal-
libilism; 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; David-
son 199n
concept(s) (Begriff, Hegel) 36, 67, 69, 102, 126,
222, 310–1, 331, 367–9, 404, also see Denkbe-
stimmung; 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 frame-
work, linguistic; holism, semantic
consciousness, form of df. 188–90; self-critical
structure of 191–202, 274–9; also see appercep-
tion, 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 enti-
tlement (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 refer-
ential 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, singu-
lar 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 prag-
matism 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 Enlighten-
ment?’ (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

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; genu-
ine 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; deduc-
tive-nomological 458–9; deterministic 344,
355, 483–4; idealisations in, 171, 375, 403n; ini-
tial conditions 70–1, 213–4, 402–3, 483; scien-
tific 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; meta-
physical 52n, 342–3, 351, 385, 445n; neo-Pla-
tonic 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
543
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 se-
mantic 324n, 325n, 361–2, 421
humility 259
hylozoism 3–4, 83–6, 356, 411
‘I think’ (Kant) 104–5, 232–43, also see appercep-
tion
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 subjec-
tive 93, 149, 191, 229, 258, 274, 418–33; also see
Analytical Contents (§150)
identity vs predication 56, 344n, 463, also see ref-
erence, 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 inter-
nalism 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 equilib-
rium, 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, Ta-
ble (Kant) 13, 101n, 127, 151, 156; infinite nega-
tive form (Kant) 127–8, 357, 455; mature 259n,
262n, 279–80; normative structure 243–5; per-
ceptual 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 char-
acter 463–6, 481; synthetic a priori (Kant) 104,
127, 128, 361; teleological 300, 355; transcen-
dental 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; contextu-
alism 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 frame-
work
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; founda-
tions 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, ; rational-
ist, see experience-transcendent; Transcen-
dental 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 think-
ing, changed (Kant) 5–6, 7, 158–9, 162, 317, 492;
also see conceptual analysis vs explication, de-
terminate 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 ratio-
nal justification, see mutual recognition, He-
gel’s Thesis; justification, social aspects
myth, of the given (Sellars) 365, 441–2; re: Hegel
25, 74–6, 116n, 140, 162, 343, 351, 367; incarna-
tion 49; physical objects (Quine) 154n; recol-
lection (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 explana-
tion, law of nature, Newton, scientific revolu-
tion
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 Transcenden-
tal Idealism 99–100, 114, 135

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 analy-
sis, 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, sec-
tions 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; explica-
tion; justification, historical aspects of
philosophy of language, as first philosophy 206,
325, 362, 458, cf. 461; syntax, semantics, prag-
matics 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 episte-
mological 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
545
(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; demon-
strative (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 the-
ory 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 equiv-
ocation 68–9
relativism 2, 182–3, 185n, 201, 282, 348, 379; his-
toricist – 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; Kan-
tian 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 cau-
ses 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 founda-
tions of, see metaphysics; proper, see scientia
scientia 59–60, 74, 75, 227, 268, 319–48; Aristote-
lian 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 justi-
fication 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 (inten-
sion), see concept, intension; as first philoso-
phy, 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 cir-
cles, 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 Fraas-
sen 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 Self-
Consciousness; 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-con-
sciousness 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