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The Difference Between Hegel and Schelling on Freedom and Negation
This paper addresses the relationship between freedom and negativity in the early works of G.W.F. Hegel and F.W.J. Schelling. Its guiding concern is to locate the role of negativity (and positivity) in giving ...
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Nothing [Christoph Asmuth; Translator: Niels Feuerhahn]
In contrast to being, there seems to be nothing to say about nothingness. The impression, however, is deceptive. A shrewd sophist, who greatly annoyed Plato, has left us a dazzling piece of ancient rhetoric th...
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Caput Mortuum: Truth, Freedom, and Negation in Fichte’s Institutiones Omnis Philosophiae
Rejecting the tendency to regard Fichte as merely a transitional figure in the development of German idealism, the following paper argues that, in the years following his dismissal from Jena, Fichte will come ...
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On Positive Philosophy: Hegel’s Retort to Schelling
Concentrating on Schelling’s lectures of 1833–1834 regarding the history of philosophy, together with the Berlin lectures of 1842, I will discuss Schelling’s critique of negative philosophy in light of Hegel’s...
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Negation, Contradiction, and Hegel’s Emancipation of Truth, Right, and Beauty
Thinkers have never been able to deny the centrality of negation and contradiction in everything human, despite all their efforts to banish both from the domains of truth, right, and beauty. Unless we properly...
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Through Consciousness Parted from Dream: Alternative Knowledge Forms in Karoline von Günderrode
Karoline von Günderrode’s reputation as a mystical writer makes her a likely candidate as a proponent of a negative philosophy. However, the historical emphasis on Günderrode’s mystical and lyrical writings re...
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Psychoanalysis
This chapter tracks the development of the idea of the unconscious as it emerges from the tensions between Hegel’s and Schelling’s speculative philosophies. It then focuses on Schelling’s speculative unconscio...
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On ‘Individuality’
‘On ‘Individuality,’ is introductory, starting with an outline of my general argument: (1) Hegel engages with a historically important conversation about ‘individuality’ emergent in the late-eighteenth and ear...
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Discovery through Negation: Hegel’s Path in the Phenomenology of Spirit
The Phenomenology of the Spirit depicts a philosophical path to absolute knowledge, which is intrinsically characterized by the paramount function of negation. Nevertheless, the notion of negation is not to be un...
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Nature and Extinction
The natural reality of species extinctions throughout geological time provides challenges for philosophy and human self-understanding. This chapter explores how these realities first became undeniable during t...
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‘Individuality’ in Hegel’s Early Thought
This chapter considers how Hegel’s early thought gradually absorbed ‘individuality,’ with respect to religion, metaphysics and ethics. Beginning with the model of ‘love,’ he embraces the paradox by which individu...
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Reading Kant
This chapter focuses on Jacques Derrida’s forty-year engagement with Kant. Giving Kant a significant place in the early formulation of deconstruction in the 1960s, Derrida spends much of the 1970s responding t...
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From Nichts to Etwas: Transcendental Method and Negation in Hermann Cohen’s Idealism
The goal of this paper is to explain Hermann Cohen´s logic of origin and the role that negativity plays in it. In the first section, we will consider Cohen´s transcendental method. This will lead us to Cohen´s...
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Difference
This chapter considers the question of difference in the context of the relationships between German Idealism and contemporary philosophy. The main focus is Kant and Hegel, on the side of German Idealism, and ...
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‘Individuality’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit (II)
This chapter turns to Chapters VI (‘Spirit’) and VII (‘Religion’) in the Phenomenology. I focus on Hegel’s celebrated interpretation of ‘ethical life’ (Sittlichkeit) as tragedy, epitomized in Sophocles’ Antigone....
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Reading Maimon
This chapter first develops Maimon’s solution to the Kantian problem of the relation between sensibility and understanding, analyzing the central notion of differentials. Second, it traces the impact of this n...
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Negativity in Cassirer: On the Scope and Limits of a Hegelian Reading of The Philosophy of the Symbolic Forms
Negativity is a crucial term in Classical German Philosophy. Whilst for Fichte the negation of the ‘I’ is constitutive for self-consciousness and Schelling terms transcendental philosophy “negative philosophy,...
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Apocalypse
G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Derrida are true masters of a carefully mediated messianic political theology, and what they share is a utilization of the apocalypse, that is, the conviction that without the apocalypt...
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Felix Culpa, Dialectic and Becoming-Imperceptible
Deleuze’s sense of the history of philosophy in Difference and Repetition is manifestly agonistic and counter-dialectic. Against a history of philosophy that has only considered difference as a relation between o...