Kant’s Philosopy of Nature (Ihre Entwicklung im "Opus postumum" und ihre Wirkung) || Does Kant’s opus postumum Anticipate Hegel’s Absolute Idealism?

Does Kant’s opus postumum Anticipate Hegel’sAbsolute Idealism?

Kenneth R. Westphal

Abstract : The three presumptions that Hegel’s idealism further develops or rad-icalises Kant’s transcendental idealism, that their respective versions of idealismare linked by Kant’s account of self-positing (Selbstsetzungslehre) in the late opuspostumum and that the basic model of Hegel’s early idealism holds also for hismature system are wide-spread and largely unexamined. This paper examinesseveral problems confronting these presumptions, including Hegel’s refutationof the basic premises of Kant’s transcendental idealism and Transzendentalphilo-sophie in the late opus postumum (§ 2), Hegel’s critical rejection of intellectual in-tuition because it cannot escape Pyrrhonian scepticism (§ 3), and his critical re-jection of the deductivist ideal of scientia, which undergirds Kant’s transcenden-tal idealism and his late Transzendentalphilosophie (§ 4), the highly un-Kantianprinciples of Hegel’s mature idealism (§ 5) and finally Hegel’s thorough and in-cisive critique in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit of common philosophicalviews, concepts and presuppositions, including those which undergird thethree presumptions noted above (§ 6). To understand properly Hegel’s philos-ophy of nature and hence also his philosophical system requires abandoningthose three presumptions.

1. Introduction

In the documents now known as his ‘opus postumum’ Kant apparentlymakes many striking statements.1 One of the most riveting is 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 ofKant’s opus postumum develop a form of absolute idealism of a kindKant associated with Schelling.3 These post-Critical developments of

1 I omit capitals from ‘opus postumum’ because it is not a work Kant either com-pleted or titled.

2 Kant, opus postumum, 1. Konvolut, 7. Bogen, S. 1, July 1801: OP, AA21:87.29–31; on-line ms.: http://kant.bbaw.de/op/co01/co01_027a.htm; alltranslations are by the author.

3 See Tuschling 1989, 1991.

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Kant’s thought are, Tuschling contends, direct and legitimate responsesto problems Kant himself identified within his Critical philosophy. Circa1800, Tuschling argues, Kant develops transcendental idealism into anearly form of absolute idealism – under the likely influence of Schelling– and closely corresponding to the absolute idealism developed bySchelling and Hegel circa 1801. Tuschling (1991) argues that in his lastthoughts on the matter Kant not only retracts the transcendentallyreal status of the aether, but also the ‘transcendental dynamics’ that un-dergirds the Selbstsetzungslehre. Nervous about ceding to transcendentalrealism, Kant soon (1800 f.) develops transcendental idealism into a newand final theory of self-positing according to which we posit ourselvesand the objects we experience within the space and time by which weintuit them. Because these objects and their relations are only appearan-ces we posit, synthetic judgments a priori are possible. On this view, thething in itself or noumenon (Kant now equates them) is simply whatev-er is thought in the object that makes a priori judgments possible. Be-cause Kant’s new view is designed as an alternative to realism, Kant’suse of the term ‘positing’ cannot simply mean that we constitute objectsand ourselves as objects of our awareness, a view that can be consistentwith realism, but rather that we generate our object and ourselvesthrough our acts of positing. Tuschling concludes (in part) that

absolute idealism, first articulated in Fichte and, after 1801, in Schelling andHegel, is inherent in Kant’s transcendental idealism.4

Tuschling’s findings have been an understandable source of excitementand encouragement among Schelling’s and Hegel’s devotees. Tusch-ling’s inclusion of Hegel in this list of absolute idealists appears con-firmed by Troxler’s Nachschrift from Hegel’s lectures of 1800–01.5

There is no question that Tuschling’s account of these aspects ofKant’s opus postumum is subtle and exciting. How well founded it maybe is a further question which divides into two: First, did Kant composethe exciting sentence about the ‘system of transcendental idealism’ thatTuschling seeks to understand? Second, to what extent does Hegel’smature absolute idealism grow out of Kant’s transcendental idealismin the way Tuschling et alia contend? The first question is answered per-suasively in the negative by Ernst-Otto Onnasch.6 Here I aim to answer

4 Tuschling 1989, 207, cf. 215.5 This Nachschrift is edited by Düsing 1988.6 See Onnasch in this volume.

Kenneth R. Westphal358



also the second question in the negative, I hope persuasively, by high-lighting several points neglected in the generally enthusiastic receptionof Tuschling’s analysis. Though my analysis is independent of On-nasch’s, the convergence of our previously independent inquiries isstriking. Some issues regarding the orthographic points Onnasch high-lights deserve brief mention before plunging into my convergent sys-tematic analysis.

Onnasch has kindly drawn to my attention that what appears inKant’s Gesammelte Schriften as one sentence appears in his manuscriptas two phrases:

System des transsc. Idealismus durch Schelling, Spinoza, Lichtenberg etc.

and

Gleichsam 3 dimensionen: die j Gegenwart, Vergangenheit u. Zukunft

The first part of the second phrase (‘Gleichsam … als’) is plainly notwritten on the same line as the first phrase (‘System … etc.’). The sec-ond phrase is written in two lines, with the first four terms displacedabove, and the last four terms (‘Gegenwart … Zukunft’) below, theline of the first phrase. Though the second phrase might be a laterthought appended to the first phrase, the start of the second phrase isdistinctly offset from the end of the first phrase above and decidedlyto the right. Kant had the space to extend the first phrase by writingan addition next to its end, so if it extends the first phrase, the startof the second phrase is oddly placed, also in view of Kant’s orthographyin these sheets. Additionally, the start of the second phrase is located(both vertically and perhaps more significantly laterally) very near an in-sertion mark made by Kant to the previous line (and paragraph) of hismanuscript (see Onnasch in this volume). Beneath the first phrase is ablank line, beneath which begins a new sentence expressing a newthought. Hence the first phrase may well stand alone, whether completeunto itself or incomplete, in the midst of Kant’s other remarks. Fromthe orthography and from Onnasch’s analysis I believe this is the case.Almost certainly the two phrases were not written in one continuousinscription.

Adickes quotes this sentence without further comment, simply cit-ing ‘C 375’.7 His system of referencing throughout his discussion of thefirst Konvolut (and not only this Konvolut) strongly suggests, indeed al-

7 Adickes 1920, 764, cf. 840.

Does Kant’s opus postumum Anticipate Hegel’s Absolute Idealism? 359



most certainly indicates that he worked on this material from Reicke’stranscription of Kant’s manuscript (designated by Adickes as ‘C’), ratherthan directly from the manuscripts themselves. Reicke transcribes thetwo phrases as a single sentence.8 Unfortunately, the foremost experton Kant’s handwriting thus missed what would have been an extremelyhelpful occasion to comment directly on Kant’s manuscript. The nextoccasion for Adickes to have done so would have been whilst editingthese materials for Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften. This occasion, however,was lost to him and to us by the intervention of National Socialists inthe Kant-Archiv, which prompted Adickes to resign on 19 June, 1926.9

2. Some Critical Questions

Whatever scholarship may ultimately decide about the orthography ofKant’s notorious phrases, there are good systematic reasons to supposethat Hegel’s absolute idealism is not the direct outgrowth of Kant’s tran-scendental idealism suggested by Kant’s phrases and widely assumed byHegel’s scholars. The main problem examined here concerns the com-mon assumption among many commentators – especially those devotedto Hegel’s Entwicklungsgeschichte – that whatever constituted Hegel’s ab-solute idealism circa 1801 holds also for Hegel’s mature version of ideal-ism in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), the Science of Logic (1812–1816) and the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (1817, 18272,18303), whereby his mature views simply elaborate a core view alreadyestablished, at least in outline, by 1801. This assumption is supported byreceived wisdom which merits more critical assessment than it has gen-erally received. Here I highlight five key points: Hegel refuted two keypremises of Kant’s transcendental idealism which also undergird his laterTranszendentalphilosophie in the opus postumum (§ 3), he critically rejected(ca. 1804) intellectual intuition because it is subject to the PyrrhonianDilemma of the Criterion (§ 4) and he critically rejected the deductivistideal of scientia, another key premiss of Kant’s transcendental idealismand later Transzendentalphilosophie. Moreover, Hegel’s criticisms of tran-scendental idealism and of scientia show that the a priori and the a posterioriare poles of a continuum rather than an exclusive distinction in kind, asKant maintained to the very end (§ 5). Likewise, the basic tenets of He-

8 Reicke 1884, 375.9 See Stark 1993, 114.




gel’s mature idealism reveal little debt to Kant’s late transcendental phi-losophy or Selbstsetzungslehre of the opus postumum (§ 6). Furthermore,Hegel’s wide-ranging critical assessment and supersession of commonphilosophical ideas and assumptions – especially about knowledge – inthe 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit includes several ideas and assumptionswhich undergird the popular notions that Hegel’s idealism somehowgrows out of or even radicalises Kant’s transcendental idealism, thattheir respective versions of idealism are linked by Kant’s notions ofself-positing in the opus postumum or that Hegel’s early absolute idealistviews (ca. 1801) hold in their essentials also for Hegel’s mature philos-ophy (§ 7). These points raise a series of crucial questions confrontingthe received wisdom about links between Kant’s and Hegel’s forms ofidealism (§ 8). I conclude that constructive answers to these questionsare little to be expected so that this standard view of the relation be-tween Kant’s transcendental idealism and Hegel’s absolute idealismmust be rescinded (§ 9).

3. Does Hegel’s Absolute Idealism Develop out of Kant’sTranscendental Idealism?

One common belief supporting the extension of Tuschling’s interpreta-tion to Hegel’s mature views is that, somehow, Hegel’s idealism is a di-rect development of Kant’s transcendental idealism, perhaps even a ‘rad-icalisation’ of it ; Tuschling seeks to articulate and further defend this no-tion, rather than to establish it de novo.10 I agree that Hegel’s objectiveidealism develops out of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Yet the relevant‘development’ revealed by detailed research is not constructive, butrather critical. (To be sure, ‘constructive’ developments can also bedeeply ‘critical’, but that is not the present case.) The cornerstone ofHegel’s method in the Phenomenology of Spirit is the constructive ‘deter-minate negation’ of alternative views based on their thorough internalcritique.11 By his own methodological lights, Hegel owes us a detailedinternal critique of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Though he did notdetail this critique in any extant materials, Hegel is right that Kant’s tran-scendental idealism is subject to devastating internal critique,12 indeed in

10 E.g. , Pippin 1989 and McDowell 2001 also share this common view.11 See Westphal 1989a and 1998a.12 See Westphal 2004a.




part for reasons Kant recognised in the opus postumum, and Hegel didrecognise some key points of this critique.

One of these points is this. In the Differenzschrift (1801) Hegel clearlyrecognised that Kant’s proof of the law of inertia in the MetaphysicalFoundations of Natural Science (1786) is irreparably flawed, so thatKant’s Critical philosophy ultimately fails to justify our causal judgmentsabout spatio-temporal particulars, whether common-sense or scientif-ic.13 The problem here is that the only causal principle Kant formulatesor tries to justify in the Critique of Pure Reason is the general causal prin-ciple that every event has a cause. However, the causal principle re-quired by the Analogies of Experience is the specific causal principlethat every physical event has an external physical cause. This latter prin-ciple is equivalent to Kant’s law of inertia. Hegel recognised that Kant’sessentially kinematic premises from ‘Phoronomy’ cannot justify Kant’sdynamic theory in ‘Dynamics’. (Kant claims that the key premiss of‘Dynamics’ is demonstrated in ‘Phoronomy’, though this is mistaken.14)Hegel accordingly recognised that Kant’s transcendental idealism cannotdeliver its promised justification of causal judgments, either in commonsense or in natural science. As Tuschling (1971) has shown, Kant subse-quently recognised this problem, which became Kant’s key point of de-parture for developing his thoughts in the opus postumum ; indeed, thisproblem is the crippling ‘gap’ Kant discovered in his Critical system.

Hegel’s second point goes beyond the problems Kant recognised inhis own Critical Philosophy. In both Glauben und Wissen (1802) and inthe Differenzschrift Hegel repeatedly probes the adequacy of Kant’s ac-count of the objectivity of nature and of our judgments about naturalphenomena.15 In so doing, Hegel realised that transcendental analysisand proof of the a priori necessary conditions for the possibility ofself-conscious human experience do not require transcendental idealism:genuine transcendental analysis and proof of these conditions can showthat some objective, material conditions must be satisfied by the worldwe inhabit, regardless of what we may say, think or believe about it, ifwe are to be self-conscious at all. In a word, Hegel recognised that thereare also material and mind-independent conditions which alone can sat-isfy some genuine a priori transcendental conditions for the possibility ofhuman thought and self-awareness. One key example of such a condi-

13 See Westphal 1998b.14 See Westphal 2004a, §§ 44–47.15 See Westphal 1996.




tion is that any world in which human beings can enjoy self-consciousexperience must provide us a humanly recognisable degree of regularityand variety among the ‘contents’ or ‘objects’ we witness. (Kant usesboth terms in this connection.) Lacking such humanly detectable regu-larity and variety would preclude us from forming any concepts what-soever, and so would preclude our making any judgments whatsoever.Such incapacity to make any judgments at all would in turn precludeour identifying any objects or events around us and thus preclude ourdistinguishing ourselves from them. In this case, we would – for reasonsprovided by Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction’, ‘Analogies of Experi-ence’ and ‘Refutation of Idealism’ – fail to be self-conscious. This isKant’s own sound conclusion of his analysis of the transcendental affin-ity of the sensory manifold.

This finding refutes Kant’s transcendental idealism because it direct-ly implies epistemological realism: to satisfy the transcendental principleof the affinity of the sensory manifold there must be a way the world isunto itself regardless of what we think, say or believe about it, whilstconversely, if we are at all self-conscious, we must know at least some-thing about that world. The fundamental premiss of Kant’s transcenden-tal idealism is that whatever satisfies the a priori transcendental conditionsfor the possibility of human self-consciousness must and can only be afunction of the structure and functioning of the human mind. Hegel’sreanalysis of the a priori necessary, transcendental though material con-ditions of cognitive judgment proves that this fundamental premiss oftranscendental idealism is false. Indeed, its falsity can be proven by ap-peal to Kant’s own principles and analyses in the Critique of Pure Rea-son.16

In Glauben und Wissen, Hegel develops this idea, inter alia, in con-nection with the idea of an intuitive intellect:

The idea (Idee) of this archetypal intuitive intellect is at bottom nothing elsebut the same idea (Idee) of the transcendental imagination that we haveconsidered above. For it is intuitive activity, and yet its inner unity is noother than the unity of the intellect itself, the category still immersed in ex-tension, and becoming intellect and category only as it separates itself out ofextension. Thus transcendental imagination is itself intuitive intellect.(G&W, GW 4:341)

This is a challenging passage. Hegel here violates a large number ofKant’s Critical strictures in order to extrapolate from Kant’s discussion

16 See Westphal 2004a, chap. 3, and 2004b.




of the teleological proof of God to Hegel’s post-Kantian, Schelling-in-spired view of an intuitive intellect. However, the important point herelies in a clause from this passage that has not received due attention:17

[…] 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. [emphasis added]

The term ‘extension’ doesn’t simply reach back, via Schelling, to thefirst Critique,18 it reaches back to Spinoza.19 If the ‘category’ becomes in-tellect and category only as it separates itself out of extension, then there aretwo factors here: extension as structured by the category, and the cate-gory as articulated expressly as ‘intellect’ (Verstand). The unity of ‘the’intellect is the unity of these two factors, and in this passage Hegel as-sociates one single ‘idea of this archetypal intuitive intellect’ with both ofthese factors. This strongly suggests the early roots of what are oftencalled the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ aspects of Hegel’s ‘concept’,where the objective aspect is a structure of the world, whilst the subjec-tive aspect is our express formulation and grasp of that structure.20 Thisearly view is not a transcendental idealist view; it is opposed to transcen-

17 Pippin 1989 neglects this passage whilst quoting from its surroundings; seeWestphal 1993, 268. Recently Pippin 2005 has radically revised his accountof Hegel’s idealism; his new view is much closer to the view I have been ad-vocating since 1989; cf. Westphal 2007–08 and 2008–09. (I do not claim tohave influenced Pippin’s shift in view.) McDowell’s 2001 account of how He-gel’s idealism radicalises Kant’s is critically examined in Westphal 2006a.

18 See Pippin 1989, 77.19 On the sudden rise of the importance of Spinoza in post-Kantian German phi-

losophy, see Beiser 1987, 48–61. On Hegel’s acknowledgement of Spinoza,see ‘On the Concept in General’ (WdL, GW 12:11–28). Pippin 1989, 84–85, noticed a Spinozistic remark about the identity of thought and being(G&W, GW 4:345), but dismissed it because of Hegel’s supposed allegianceto Kantian principles. However, the main point of Kant’s critical philosophyis to raise questions about our capacity to formulate and to know metaphysicalclaims, as Pippin 1989, 87, recognised. It is thus possible to retain such criticalissues whilst rejecting Kant’s transcendental idealist answer to them. ApparentlyPippin assumed at that time that critical questions about metaphysical knowl-edge can only be answered by adopting some form of transcendental idealism,cf. Pippin 1989, 219.

20 Pippin 1989, 77, attempts a much more Kantian reading of this passage. How-ever, his reading requires neglecting the points made here about this passage;see previous note.




dental idealism, and this view is retained and further developed in He-gel’s mature writings.21

4. Does Hegel Retain the Model of an Intuitive Intellect?

A second assumption supporting the extrapolation from Hegel’s earlyidealism to his mature views is the idea that Hegel’s mature philosophyretains the model and ideal of an intuitive intellect. This supposition,however, fails to pay sufficient attention to Hegel’s recognition, circaWinter 1804, in response to Gottlob Ernst Schulze’s anonymous ‘Aphor-ismen �ber das Absolute’ (1803), that Pyrrhonian Scepticism is not only aproblem for the ‘finite’ understanding (Verstand), but is an altogethergeneral problem also affecting ‘absolute idealism’ of precisely the kinddeveloped on the basis of intellectual intuition by both Schelling andhimself.22 Thereafter Hegel never omits the opportunity to point outthat intuitionism, as a form of justification or a form of knowledge,and expressly including intellectual intuition, cannot avoid petitio princi-pii because it cannot reliably (or even plausibly) distinguish between ac-tually being directly aware of something, and on that basis alone being(rightly) convinced that one knows it, as contrasted with merely beingconvinced that one is directly aware of something, and thereby being(spuriously) convinced that one knows it.23 Though it requires furthertextual analysis to demonstrate, Hegel’s mature philosophy dispenseswith the model of an intuitive intellect.24 Hence any of his early idealistviews which rely on that model cannot reflect his mature views, exceptby (informative) contrast.

21 E.g. , PhdG, GW 9:134.31–35, 135.15–18; cf. Westphal 1989a, 140–145,160, 167, 186–187; 2007–08 and 2008–09.

22 See Westphal 2000b.23 See Westphal 1989b.24 See Westphal 2000b and 2007–08, § 5.




5. Transcendental Idealism, Scientia and Hegel’s AbsoluteIdealism.

I have reviewed the above points briefly because I have analysed themin detail previously. Here I wish to bring attention to another, more se-rious problem. Another wide-spread assumption is that Hegel’s Phenom-enology of Spirit of 1807 is a failed early work excised by Hegel from hisown philosophical system, and that accordingly the Science of Logic isHegel’s main philosophical text from which all else in his philosophicalsystem follows. My conjecture is that this supposition rests, in part, onpaying attention to certain features of Kant’s theory of knowledge in theCritique of Pure Reason, features that become more pronounced in theopus postumum at the expense of other features of Kant’s Critical theoryof knowledge which are ultimately more important philosophically andwhich Hegel rightly developed.

The writings gathered in the opus postumum are highly exploratory.Plainly Kant is searching for a new, thoroughly revamped form of tran-scendental philosophy. However, it is extremely difficult to understandhow a sound or even a valid argument for his new form of transcenden-tal philosophy could be developed on the basis of his revamped ideasabout transcendental deduction. Kant’s late views retain the Criticalcharacteristics of transcendental principles: although they are syntheticpropositions, they are universally and necessarily valid in the sensethat they hold of any and all possible objects of human experience. Inthis regard, Kant maintains his allegiance in the opus postumum to the an-cient model of justification, central to rationalism and to the Critique ofPure Reason (as well as to empiricist scepticism), of scientia, the idea thatspecific principles or claims can be justified only by deducing them fromestablished first principles. This model has pervaded epistemology fromAristotle to the present day. Kant realised of course that the relevant firstpremises for his transcendental analysis of the very possibility of humanexperience and knowledge are not self-evident, yet he claims to be ableto prove the required principles ‘apodictically’ by transcendental proof(cf. KrV A xv, 31; B xliv Anm. , B 39, 47, 199).

One problem for Kant’s new transcendental philosophy in the laterfascicles of the opus postumum is that Kant still adheres to the deductivistjustificatory ideal of scientia, which motivates (though does not justify)Kant’s continued adherence to the fundamental principle of transcen-dental idealism within his new transcendental philosophy, that whatever




necessary, a priori conditions there are for the possibility of self-conscioushuman experience, and whatever satisfies those conditions, must derivefrom (or be legislated by) the structure and functioning of the humanmind. Kant’s adherence to these two basic premises is reflected in hiscontinued inference, that anything genuinely a priori must precede allexperience; e. g. (from the very late first fascicle of the opus postumum):‘System of pure philosophy (not derived from experience), hence for, notfrom, experience’.25 However, these two basic premises generate increas-ing difficulties for Kant’s equally fundamental aim of maintaining theobjectivity of human knowledge. This tension is one of the most im-portant features of Kant’s opus postumum.26 The problem is that tryingto 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 valianteffort ever to understand (inter alia) the non-formal domain of empiricalknowledge in accord with the deductivist ideal of scientia. In this regardKant’s Critique of Pure Reason – along with Descartes’ foundationalismand the empiricist attempt to reduce the language of physical objectsto the language of sense-data – are enormously instructive failures.Their failures show that the deductivist model of scientia simply is notsuited to non-formal domains, whether in theoretical or practical phi-losophy, and indeed for reasons already given by Sextus Empiricus.Hegel learned this lesson and worked out its enormous implicationsin (roughly) the two years leading up to completing his 1807 Phenomen-ology.27

Fortunately, the Critique of Pure Reason is not exhausted by its de-ductivist strand. Along side the model of scientia, Kant’s Critique also de-velops important and central strands of a fallibilist and social (even anhistorical) account of rational justification. Moreover, Kant’s Critiquedevelops a sophisticated and tenable semantic theory – a theory of cog-nitive reference – which suffices to secure his most important claimsabout both the possibility of empirical knowledge and the impossibilityof rationalist metaphysics, without appeal to transcendental idealism!28

25 1. Konvolut, Umschlag S. 4; OP, AA 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.

26 See Edwards 2000, 167–192, and Edwards in this volume.27 On the failures of Descartes’ foundationalism and of the reduction of talk of

physical objects to talk of sense data, see Westphal 1989a, chap. 2 and 4, andalso pp. 230–32 note 99; Westphal 2006b, § 4 and 2009b.

28 See Westphal 2004a and 2006a.




The key point of Kant’s semantics is that determinate cognitive refer-ence requires singular sensory presentation of objects known, and thatonly such determinate cognitive reference provides full and determinatemeaning (Kant’s terms are ‘Bedeutung’, ‘Inhalt’ and ‘Sinn’) for any of ourforms of judgment. (On Kant’s view, such determinate cognitive refer-ence is a necessary, though not a sufficient condition of determinatemeaning; hence Kant’s view is not a version of verificationism, whichholds that determinate reference to particulars is the sole and sufficientcondition of the meaningfulness of our terms.)

Elsewhere I have argued in detail that Hegel develops a pragmatic-realist theory of knowledge rooted in his internal critique of Kant’stranscendental idealism.29 Recently I have further argued that Hegel’spragmatic, social and historical account of rational justification developsthe fallibilist strands in Kant’s Critical theory of knowledge.30 Moreover,Hegel adopted and further developed Kant’s semantics of cognitive ref-erence, beginning directly in the first chapter of the 1807 Phenomenolo-gy, ‘Sense Certainty’.31 Indeed, by 1801 Hegel rejected any ultimate dis-tinction in kind between the analytic and the synthetic; according toHegel, these terms mark poles of a continuum rather than an exclusivedistinction in kind. Hegel is explicit about this in ‘Faith and Knowl-edge’, where he links this directly to his sense of ‘speculative’ knowl-edge.32 This important insight is further supported by Hegel’s recogni-tion (ca. 1804) that both coherentist and foundationalist models of jus-tification (whether scientia or historia) are refuted by the Pyrrhonian Di-lemma of the Criterion, which can only be solved by the kind of tran-scendental, though also fallibilist and pragmatic, account of rational jus-tification Hegel develops in the 1807 Phenomenology. Hegel’s account ofrational justification thus critically rejects the three basic, underlyingpremises of Kant’s transcendental idealism and his new transcendentalphilosophy in the later fascicles of the opus postumum. This is a very im-portant reason why Hegel’s mature idealism cannot properly be under-stood as an outgrowth or radicalisation either of Kant’s transcendentalidealism or of Kant’s Selbstsetzungslehre in the opus postumum.

29 See Westphal 1989a; 2003a; 2002/2003 and 2003c.30 See Westphal 2009b.31 See Westphal 2000a and 2009a.32 G&W, GW 4:335.2–6; see Westphal 2000b.




6. Some Basic Features of Hegel’s Mature Idealism

The conclusion just drawn is reinforced by considering the basic tenetsof Hegel’s mature idealism. Very briefly, Hegel’s absolute idealism – asdeveloped in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, the Science of Logic and theEncyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences – is a kind of moderate ontologicalholism.33 According to Hegel, the individual properties of things obtainonly as members of contrastive sets of properties. He further argues thatthe causal characteristics of spatio-temporal individuals are essential totheir identity conditions (the conditions that must be satisfied for some-thing to be what it is) and that their causal characteristics are essentiallyrelational and hence essentially interrelate spatio-temporal individuals.Hence the causal interdependence of particulars, along with the constit-utive similarities and differences among their properties, establish themutual interdependence of their identity conditions. The result istwo-fold. On the one hand, particulars have their ground (ultimately)in the whole world-system, because their characteristics obtain only inand through contrast with opposed characteristics of other things andbecause they are generated, sustained and corrupted through their causalinteraction with other things. On the other hand, Hegel analyses the‘concept’ (der Begriff) as an ontological structure. Hegel’s ‘concept’ is aprinciple of the constitution of characteristics through contrast, wherethe relevant contrasts include distinctive regularities or patterns of be-haviour, including causal regularities. More importantly, this concept,Hegel argues, exists only in and as the interconnection of things andtheir characteristics in the world. Hegel’s ‘idea’ (Idee) is the instantiationof this conceptual structure by worldly things and events. Hegel de-scribes spatio-temporal individuals as ‘ideal’ because they are not indi-vidually self-sufficient, and thus not ultimately real, where to be ‘real’requires ontological self-sufficiency. He characterises the world-systemas ‘spirit’ because he believes it has a normative telos toward which it de-velops historically. Part of this telos is self-knowledge, which the world-system gains through human knowledge of the world. None of thesedoctrines are expressed, articulated nor suggested by Hegel’s early ‘abso-lute idealism’ circa 1801.

The sceptical view that things are the unsensed causes of sensory ex-perience has been popular from Protagoras to Putnam; it appears inLocke’s ‘thing I know not what’, Kant’s unknowable ‘thing in itself’

33 See Westphal 1989a, 140–145, and 2008–09.




and in Herder’s causal scepticism, which Hegel identifies in his lecturesas the target of his critique, in ‘Force and Understanding’, of forces ofsolicitation.34 Hegel’s analysis of forces and scientific laws in ‘Forceand Understanding’ responds to this view and provides support for hisholistic ontology. Hegel defends an enriched ‘phenomenological’ ac-count of laws of nature. (This use of the term is distinct from that per-taining to Hegel’s ‘phenomenological’ method.) According to such anaccount, laws of nature are relations among manifest phenomena.This view was prominent throughout the nineteenth century in Ger-man and British physics. Very briefly, Hegel contends that nothingmore can be attributed to any force or set of forces than precisely thearray of manifest phenomena which they are postulated to explain, sothat ultimately there is nothing more to ‘forces’ than the conceptual in-terrelation of manifest phenomena. These interrelations are, on Hegel’sview, objective features of those phenomena, and the aim of conceivingthose phenomena is to formulate those interrelations accurately. Becausethe interrelations among and within natural phenomena are not strictlyspeaking perceptible, but nonetheless are objective features of thosephenomena, those interrelations are conceptual and concepts are struc-tures of nature.

The most basic point for understanding Hegel’s mature, objectiveform of ‘absolute idealism’ is to recognise that mind-dependence isonly a species of ontological dependence. Hegel contends that anyand all forms of ontological dependence – many of which are causal –entails that something is ‘ideal’ because it is not ontologically self-suffi-cient 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 unimpor-tant sub-species of ontological dependence. Hence the first thing mostpeople (including philosophers) think of in connection with ‘idealism’ isdeeply ill-suited to understanding Hegel’s mature idealism. Unfortu-nately, Hegel’s expositors have often succumbed to this equivocation,despite Hegel’s explication of his use of this term in a Remark addedto the second edition of the Science of Logic (GW 21:142–3) – presum-ably because he realised people misunderstood his unique form of ideal-ism.

How does Hegel argue for or try to justify his idealism? This is acomplex issue which I still seek to unravel. Part of the answer lies in He-gel’s internal critique of Kant’s transcendental idealism, some key points

34 See Westphal 2007–08, § 4.5.




of which are reviewed above. Part of the answer lies in Hegel’s analysisof causal relations, as just suggested. I have recently discovered two veryimportant features of Hegel’s analysis of causal relations which clarifyand reinforce these points.35

Hegel identifies a key equivocation in the traditional concept ofsubstance. This equivocation concerns a very basic feature of the tradi-tional concept of substance that remained unchallenged from the Greeksup through Kant; it underlay the debate about internal and external re-lations based on the thesis that the logical law of identity entails anatomistic ontology. The equivocation concerns two distinct senses ofthe term ‘intrinsic’ (or analogously, ‘internal’) when used in connectionwith the characteristics or properties of individual substances. One senseof the term ‘intrinsic’ in this connection is that a characteristic is essential(rather than accidental) to a substance, that the substance would not bewhat it is without that characteristic. Another sense of the term ‘intrin-sic’ in this connection lies in its contrast with ‘extrinsic’ or ‘relational’.In view of this contrast, an ‘intrinsic’ characteristic is contained solelywithin the individual substance; it is non-relational. These two sensesof ‘intrinsic’ have been conflated throughout the history of philosophy;conflating them generates the standard assumption that relational prop-erties cannot be essential to individual substances. (Put semantically, theassumption is that relations are expressed by polyadic predicates, where-as only monadic predicates can express the essential characteristics of anyindividual substance.) This equivocation is responsible for the (broadly)‘atomistic’ orientation of Occidental philosophy, that individuals areontologically basic, whilst relations are derivative because they dependon individuals, whereas individuals do not depend on their relations.

Hegel exposes this equivocation in ‘Force and Understanding’ be-cause he realises it wreaks havoc in our ontologies, both natural and so-cial. In particular, Hegel contends that this conflation blocks our com-prehension of causal forces and causal relations. Only if we clarify thisequivocation can we recognise that relations can be, and indeed are es-sential to individuals.

35 This research was conducted in Bielefeld, Spring 2007, with generous supportfrom the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. I thank my host, Martin Carrier,and my colleagues in Bielefeld, especially Michael Wolff and Holger Lyre, forproviding an especially stimulating and congenial research environment. I dis-cuss these results in more detail in my 2008 and 2008–09.




In ‘Force and Understanding’ Hegel argues for this view on concep-tual and phenomenological grounds. More striking yet, Hegel also con-tends in ‘Force and Understanding’ that empirical proof that causal re-lations are essential to material objects is provided by Newton’s gravita-tional theory, at least once Newtonian mechanics is re-written by Jo-hann Bernoulli and his successors, including especially LaGrange, interms of mathematical analysis (integral calculus). In this very importantregard Hegel’s epistemology in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit is natu-ralised (though not in Quine’s sense); already in the PhenomenologyHegel 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], philosophicscience presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics. (Enz.3 § 246Anm.).

Stated more directly, already in 1807 Hegel contends that any tenablephilosophical theory of human knowledge must take the natural scien-ces into very close consideration. This finding about Hegel’s analysis in‘Force and Understanding’ is greatly augmented and further supportedby Hegel’s taking contemporaneous natural science into very close phil-osophical consideration in ‘Observing Reason’.36

One central reason why epistemology must closely attend to thenatural sciences is semantic. In ‘Force and Understanding’ Hegel devel-ops a sophisticated account of the explanatory power involved in the in-tegration of physical laws under more general laws (PhdG, GW 9:91–92). One central feature of his account lies in his striking critique ofthe reduction of specific physical laws to general ones, and expresslyhow this is done in Newton’s Principia. Hegel rightly argues that such‘reduction’ does not and cannot involve an identity between the specif-ic, subsumed laws and the general law which subsumes them, becausethe specific laws refer to specific systems, relations and initial conditionsthat are, by design and of necessity, omitted from the general law.

Hegel’s analysis of the integration of general laws with specific lawsthrough the successive re-introduction of specific systems of particularsand their initial conditions has an important semantic component. Hegelcontends that general scientific laws, such as Newton’s Laws of Motion,are expressly and necessarily abstractions. As abstractions, they lack de-terminate semantic content or meaning because they lack determinate

36 See Ferrini 2007; 2009a and 2009b.




reference to spatio-temporal particulars (Gegenstandsbezogenheit). In aphrase, laws of nature are functions of judgment, they are not descrip-tions of any specific phenomena.

Kant and Hegel both rejected descriptions theories of reference be-cause they realised that descriptions, no matter how specific, cannot bythemselves determine whether they are vacuous (lack reference to anyparticulars), definite (because 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 forin ‘Identity and Predication’, that determinate reference and ascriptionof qualities are mutually integrated cognitive achievements which re-quire identifying spatio-temporal individuals (physical objects) by bothlocating them in space and time via singular sensory presentation andby correctly characterising them; only conjointly do these achievementsconstitute predication and provide for knowledge.

Hegel’s semantics is based on Kant’s, and includes (like Kant’s) thethesis that our conceptions are functions of judgment, and as such lackcomplete meaning unless and until they are referred to particulars. (HereI use the term ‘conception’ to designate the ‘subjective’ component ofHegel’s Begriff, roughly our classifications for or descriptions of particu-lars.) Consequently, conceptions lack truth-value unless and until theyare incorporated into judgments by which they are referred to particu-lars. This same point holds, analogously, for combinations of concep-tions, however complex or specific, including formulations of laws ofnature.

The direct implication of Hegel’s semantics for general laws of na-ture is that, unto themselves, they have no truth value; they only havetruth values when they are referred to spatio-temporal particulars (nat-ural phenomena), yet this Gegenstandsbezogenheit requires employing theentire apparatus of theoretical explanation, including more specific lawsof nature, specification of specific systems of objects, their initial condi-tions, together with any and all relevant theories, methods, techniquesor instruments for making the relevant observations or identifications.

This semantic point about general laws of nature has an importantcognitive component: General laws of nature are not themselves objectsof knowledge; they are objects of knowledge only when taken togetherwith the subsidiary concepts, theories, procedures and data throughwhich alone they can be determined to be instantiated, in part bybeing referred determinately to their instances. This important semanticand cognitive point is a quite general one, on Hegel’s view: The general




principles explicated and defended in the Science of Logic, too, are untothemselves not objects of knowledge. They, too, are objects of knowl-edge only when taken together with the subsidiary concepts, theories,data and procedures through which alone they can be determined tobe instantiated, in part by being referred determinately to their instances.

Indeed, this view undergirds Hegel’s justly famous remark, quotedearlier, that ‘not only must philosophy accord with the experience na-ture gives rise to; in its formation and in its development, philosophic sci-ence presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics’.37 This re-mark, made very early in Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of Na-ture, does not concern only the second part of his Encyclopaedia. Nordoes it merely concern the development of spirit out of nature in thethird part. It directly concerns Hegel’s Logic too. Just quoted was thesecond sentence of Hegel’s Remark; the first sentence refers to Hegel’sdiscussion of the relation between philosophy and the empirical sciencesin the Introduction to the Encyclopaedia as a whole.38 There Hegel statesdirectly that philosophy is stimulated by and grows out of experience,including natural-scientific experience, and that the natural sciences de-velop conceptual determinations in the form of generalisations, laws andclassifications which must be reconsidered philosophically (Enz.3 § 12).Thus Hegel insists that his Logic cannot be properly understood apartfrom his Philosophy of Nature, nor can his philosophy of nature be under-stood apart from Hegel’s knowledge and understanding of the methodsand content of natural science. Hegel’s Logic examines the ontologicaland cognitive roles of ontological categories (e. g., being, existence,quantity, essence, appearance, relation, thing, cause) and principles oflogic (e. g., identity, excluded middle, non-contradiction, forms ofjudgment and syllogism). It also analyses principles of scientific explan-ation (force, matter, measure, cognition; mechanical, chemical, organicand teleological functions), by using which we are able to know theworld.

Even this brief list suffices to cast grave doubt on the suggestion thatHegel’s Logic can be a purely a priori investigation, for it involves too

37 Cf. Enz.3 § 246 Anm., GW 20.236; see also Vorlesungen �ber die Logik (1831),nachgeschrieben von Karl Hegel, Vorlesungen, vol. 10, ed. by U. Rameil andH.-Chr. Lucas, Hamburg, Meiner 2001, 72.

38 ‘The relation of philosophy to the empirical was discussed in the general intro-duction’ (Enz.3 § 246 Anm.), i. e., in the introduction to the Encyclopaedia as awhole, not any of the introductions to its three component parts; see Westphal2008.




many very specific concepts and principles, at least some of which ob-viously derive from historical science (e. g., ‘chemism’).39 Much less so,then, can Hegel’s attempt in the latter two parts of his Encyclopaedia ofPhilosophical Sciences, to show that and how these concepts and principlesare specified and exhibited in nature and in human life, be purely a pri-ori. Indeed, as noted earlier, by 1802 Hegel already rejected the distinc-tion in kind between the a priori and the a posteriori, reinterpreting themas poles of a continuum. In sum, Hegel’s Science of Logic is flanked bytwo major works – the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophyof Nature – in which Hegel insists, for excellent reasons, that the Scienceof Logic is not and cannot be the self-sufficient, sui-generis foundation forhis philosophical system it is so often presumed to be. Instead, specificconceptions, principles and doctrines analysed in Hegel’s Science of Logiconly acquire their determinate meaning and full justification in andthrough his Realphilosophie, including centrally his Philosophy of Nature.40

Moreover, the very standpoint of Hegel’s Science of Logic is only ‘jus-tified’, ‘deduced’ or ‘proven’ (these are Hegel’s terms) by the 1807 Phe-nomenology of Spirit. Hegel states this plainly in the Introduction to botheditions of the Science of Logic,41 whilst none of his other ‘introductions’to his Logic are ever assigned such a crucial justificatory role, a role theycannot fulfil. Though the elder Hegel no longer claimed that the Phe-nomenology formed the first part of – that is, within – his philosophicalsystem of Logic, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Spirit, hedid not expunge his first masterpiece from his systematic philosophy.42

Hegel’s cognitive semantics entails that his Logik and Realphilosophiemust be integrated in ways which defy the distinction in kind betweenthe a priori and the a posteriori central both to Kant’s transcendental ideal-ism and to his late transcendental philosophy in the opus postumum. Like-wise, these two key components of Hegel’s mature system of philoso-phy are integrated in ways that hardly conform to Kant’s late modelof Selbstsetzung. Accordingly, Hegel’s mature views are neither an out-

39 Regarding Hegel’s treatment of chemistry see Engelhardt 1976, 1984 and Bur-bidge 1996.

40 See Stekeler-Weithofer 1992, Bykova 2003 and Westphal 2008.41 WdL, GW 11:20.5–18, 20.37–21.11, 21:32.23–33.3, 33.20–34.1.42 The case for this has been best made by Fulda 1975. Hegel speaks positively

about, draws from and cites for justification the 1807 Phenomenology in manyof his later writings; e. g., WdL, GW 21:7.25–8.2, 37.27–32, 11:351.3–12,12:36–198.11, 232.30–17, 6:544–5, Grundlinien §§ 35 Anm., 57 Anm.,135 Anm., 140 Anm. and Zus.; Enz.3 § 25, GW 20.68 f.




growth nor a radicalisation of Kant’s transcendental idealism nor his lateTranszendentalphilosophie, nor are Kant’s views, even in the opus postu-mum, a reliable guide to Hegel’s mature views.

One theme Hegel’s mature views share with Kant’s late transcen-dental philosophy is that the systematic unity of experience (not, Kantnotes, of experiences) must play a fundamental, transcendental role inhuman cognition.43 Though it is very much to Kant’s credit that he fi-nally realised this important point, Hegel had already learned what heneeded to know about this point from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, hisdiscussion of the ens realisimum in the Critique of Pure Reason and mostimportantly from the integrity of the three Analogies of Experienceas a set of principles guiding causal judgment.44

Moreover, Hegel was ahead of Kant on this topic. One lesson to belearned from Kant’s opus postumum is that it is at best extremely difficult,indeed very likely impossible, to provide a proper transcendental role tothe integrity of experience whilst adhering to the two basic premises oftranscendental idealism and of Kant’s late transcendental philosophy dis-cussed above (§ 4). By rejecting those premises and by developing histranscendental, though also fallibilist and pragmatic account of rationaljustification, Hegel succeeded far more than Kant in granting a propertranscendental role to the integrity of experience within human cogni-tion.45

7. The price of neglecting Hegel’s Introduction to the 1807Phenomenology

These points reveal a further assumption required by the enormous ex-trapolation from Hegel’s early idealism (ca. 1801) to his mature views:that Hegel was not particularly concerned about epistemology or se-mantics, especially the semantics of determinate cognitive reference.This major oversight results in part from the longstanding habit of dis-

43 E.g. , AA 21:84.3–7.44 On this last point, see Westphal 2000b, § 7.45 Edwards concludes his contribution to this volume by asking whether Hegel

offered a counterpart to Kant’s late Aetherdeduktion. Considered in light of hisanalysis, my account of the ‘Consciousness’ section of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomen-ology (see 2009a) may suggest a positive answer, though I cannot pursue thissuggestion here.




regarding Hegel’s own Introduction (Einleitung) to the 1807 Phenomen-ology in favour of the much more exciting, ambitious and – so it seems –brazenly metaphysical Preface (Vorrede), which is a Preface to Hegel’sprojected System of Philosophy, not only to the Phenomenology of Spirit.Neglecting Hegel’s Introduction circumvents Hegel’s central concernwith epistemology, reflected in his exact paraphrase in the very centreof the Introduction of the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion, aproblem he addresses very acutely both in his Introduction and in thebody of the Phenomenology.46 Neglecting Hegel’s Phenomenology also in-sures neglecting his brilliant articulation and justification of his sophisti-cated semantics of cognitive reference, beginning in ‘Sense Certainty’and his innovative and defensible naturalisation of epistemology in‘Force and Understanding’ and ‘Observing Reason’.

8. Can we Rely on Transcendental Idealism and IntellectualIntuition to Understand Hegel’s Mature Philosophy?

The foregoing considerations show that those who interpret Hegel’smature philosophy in terms of transcendental idealism, Kant’s Selbstset-zungslehre, intellectual intuition or Hegel’s own early idealism (ca. 1801)must address several fundamental questions:

To what extent can viewing Hegel’s Science of Logic as the self-suf-ficient, self-generating foundation for Hegel’s philosophical systemavoid turning Hegel’s decidedly post-Critical philosophy back into apre-Critical dogmatic rationalism?

How can Hegel’s Science of Logic, when taken as a self-sufficientstarting point and foundation for Hegel’s system, be known to betrue, or even to be determinately meaningful?

46 See Westphal 1989a, 1998a, 2003a, 2009a and 2009b. Hegel’s views are chal-lenging and difficult ; hence it is understandable that Hegel’s scholars have prin-cipally devoted themselves to expounding his views. It seems obvious that ques-tions of whether or how Hegel may have justified his views must await answersto what his views are. Unfortunately, the lack of interest in epistemology and inphilosophical justification more broadly among Hegel’s expositors has occludedHegel’s central and explicit concerns with these important issues and thus dis-torted our understanding and indeed much of our exposition of Hegel’s views.




How can the many very determinate concepts and principles ana-lysed in the Science of Logic, e. g., ‘chemism’, be derived purely a priori? 47

How and how well can Hegel’s Science of Logic, so understood, ei-ther avoid or respond to the Dilemma of the Criterion, including thetrope of petitio principii?

To what extent did Hegel retain the exclusive distinction in kindbetween the a priori and the a posteriori required to understand the Scienceof Logic as a self-generating, self-sufficient system of logical concepts andprinciples?48

To what extent can viewing Hegel’s Science of Logic as the self-suf-ficient, self-generating foundation for Hegel’s philosophical systemavoid ascribing to Hegel – whether implicitly or explicitly – the top-down deductivist model of scientia that Hegel exposed in the 1807 Phe-nomenology of Spirit as profoundly inappropriate to the non-formal do-mains of human action and cognition, whether commonsense, natu-ral-scientific or transcendental?

To what extent can viewing Hegel’s Science of Logic as the self-suf-ficient, self-generating foundation for Hegel’s philosophical systemavoid ascribing to Hegel the very same fault he claimed to find in Schel-ling’s systems of philosophy, namely schematising formalism?

While I cannot foreclose on the prospect of cogent answers to suchquestions, for reasons reviewed here I am not optimistic about them.49

Both the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit and Hegel’s Philosophy of Naturecentrally stress that Hegel’s epistemology is naturalised because it isdeeply rooted in the empirical sciences, indeed in ways incompatiblewith understanding his Science of Logic as the self-sufficient, self-generat-ing foundation of his system it is widely held to be. In sum, too muchresearch on Hegel’s Science of Logic unwittingly assumes the top-down

47 The suggestion that determinations such as ‘chemism’ do not belong in the Sci-ence of Logic reflects prior, often unwitting commitment to the deductivistmodel of scientia. Once this presumption is identified and expunged, Hegel’stopics in the Science of Logic fall easily into place.

48 See above, § 4 end.49 Houlgate 2006 is an important study which has much of value to say about the

first three of these questions; it does not, however, appear to address the latterfour. I think Hegel can only avoid the charge of schematising formalism on mykind of view, which allows Hegel to explicate his concepts, categories and prin-ciples ‘bottom up’ by examining relevant phenomena, as well as ‘top down’ byexplicating his Science of Logic, though this huge issue may only be mentionedhere. Some relevant points are discussed in Westphal 2008.




model of scientia, thereby seriously distorting our understanding of He-gel’s system of philosophy and entirely occluding one of Hegel’s majorachievements: the development of the first and still the most sophisticat-ed transcendental-pragmatic theory of semantic analysis and of rationaljustification, which solves the Dilemma of the Criterion and justifies re-alism in epistemology and philosophy of science and also strict objectiv-ity regarding practical norms.50 To understand Hegel’s Science of Logic re-quires taking both his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit and his Philosophy ofNature into very close philosophical account. Only then can we appre-ciate how Hegel rejected the top-down deductivist model of justifica-tion (scientia) which is central to Kant’s transcendental idealism, to hislate Transzendentalphilosophie in the opus postumum and to viewing He-gel’s mature absolute idealism as some kind of extension, radicalisationor at least some kind of natural development of transcendental idealism.

9. Conclusion

Transcendental idealism is a valiant, failed effort to satisfy the justifica-tory demands of scientia within the non-formal domains of transcenden-tal philosophy and of empirical knowledge. Hence neither it, nor Kant’slate Transzendentalphilosophie nor his Selbstsetzungslehre cast much illumi-nation on Hegel’s absolute idealism, except by (informative) contrast.

Though convenient, the idea that Hegel’s absolute idealism is an ex-tension or a radicalization of Kant’s transcendental idealism is ill-con-ceived and rests on over-simplifications which can be corrected onlyby careful systematic reconstruction of Hegel’s texts and issues. My sur-mise is that this convenient idea is the product of lecture halls, in whichlecturers had the unenviable task of providing a brief synopsis of Hegel’sextraordinarily compendious, detailed and intricate philosophy. Hegel’sEntwicklungsgeschichte is fascinating and can be very helpful in under-standing his mature views, though only if it is critically reconstructedand assessed in view of Hegel’s philosophical issues and analyses andalso, of course, the details of his often difficult texts and above all hisimportant and identifiable revisions of his views. What Hegel rejectedin his early views and why he rejected it is as illuminating – if notmore so – than what his mature philosophy retains from them. The

50 Regarding Hegel’s practical philosophy, see Westphal 2003b/2007, 2005/2009c and 2009b.




wide-spread assumption that Hegel’s idealism is somehow a direct out-growth or radicalisation of Kant’s transcendental idealism, rooted inKant’s late views about self-positing, short-circuits philosophical under-standing of Hegel’s views in the ways and about the issues indicatedabove. Clinging to the models of intellectual intuition, self-positingor (in some sense) ‘radicalised’ transcendental idealism precludes answer-ing – or even posing – the above questions (§ 7). The considerationspresented here thus raise a final question: Why do so many of Hegel’sexpositors find the (alleged) development or radicalisation of Kant’stranscendental idealism and the models of self-positing and intellectualintuition so attractive?51

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———, 2002/2003. “Die Vielseitigkeit von Hegels Auseinandersetzung mitSkeptizismus in der Phänomenologie des Geistes”. In: Jahrbuch f�r Hegelfor-schung, ed. by. Helmut Schneider, 8/9:145–73.

———, 2003a. Hegel’s Epistemology: A Philosophical Introduction to the Phenomen-ology of Spirit. Cambridge, Mass. , Hackett Publishing Co.

———, 2003b. “Objektive Gültigkeit zwischen Gegebenem und Gemachtem.Hegels kantischer Konstruktivismus in der praktischen Philosophie”. In:Jahrbuch f�r Recht und Ethik/Annual Review of Law and Ethics 11:177–98.

———, 2003c. ‘Hegel’s Manifold Response to Scepticism in the Phenomenologyof Spirit’. In: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103.2:149–78.

———, 2004a. Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism. Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press.

———, 2004b. ‘Must the Transcendental Conditions for the Possibility of Ex-perience be Ideal?’ In: C. Ferrini, ed., Eredit Kantiane (1804–2004): ques-tioni emergenti e problemi irrisolti (Napoli, Bibliopolis), 107–126.




———, 2005. “Von der Konvention zur Sittlichkeit. Humes Begründungeiner Rechtsethik aus nach-Kantischer Perspektive”. In: D. Heidemann& K. Engelhardt, eds., Ethikbegr�ndungen Zwischen Universalismus und Rela-tivismus (Berlin, de Gruyter), 153–180.

———, 2006a. ‘Contemporary Epistemology: Kant, Hegel, McDowell’. TheEuropean Journal of Philosophy 14.2:274–302. Rpt. in: J. Lindgaard, ed.,McDowell: Experience, Norm and Nature (Oxford, Blackwell), 124–151.

———, 2006b. ‘Science and the Philosophers’. In: H. Koskinen, S. Pihlström,& R. Vilkko, eds. , Science: A Challenge to Philosophy? Scandinavian Univer-sity Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 27 (Frankfurt/Main, Lang), 125–52.

———, 2007. ‘Normative Constructivism: Hegel’s Radical Social Philoso-phy’. In: SATS – Internordic Journal of Philosophy 8.2:7–41.

———, 2007–08. ‘Intelligenz and the Interpretation of Hegel’s Idealism: SomeHermeneutic Pointers’. In: The Owl of Minerva 39.1–2:95–134.

———, 2008. ‘Philosophizing about Nature: Hegel’s Philosophical Project’.In: F. C. Beiser, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth Cen-tury Philosophy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), 281–310.

———, 2008–09. ‘Force, Understanding and Ontology’. In: Hegel Society ofGreat Britain 39.1–2: 1–29.

———, 2009a. ‘Hegel’s Phenomenological Method and Analysis of Con-sciousness’. In: K. R. Westphal, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenom-enology of Spirit (Oxford, Blackwell), 1–36.

———, 2009b. “Urteilskraft, gegenseitige Anerkennung und rationale Re-chtfertigung”. In: H.-D. Klein, Hg., Ethik als prima philosophia?, Würz-burg, Königshausen & Neumann.

———, 2009c. ‘From “Convention” to “Ethical Life”: Hume’s Theory of Jus-tice in Post-Kantian Perspective’. In: The Journal of Moral Philosophy 6.2.






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