Published Articles
A prevailing view in the literature on Hegel’s dialectical method is that employing it involves advancing a false account and then modifying it to be closer to the truth. I will call this the Modification View. In this essay, I argue that the Modification View is incorrect. Hegel’s insight, I show, is that one can only explain the objective validity of a form of cognition through employing that very form. Consequently, the dialectical method cannot relate to its subject matter as something given to it, and so cannot involve advancing and then correcting errors in one’s account.
Hegel’s Dialectical Method: A Response to the Modification View
*Published in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy (peer-reviewed); Vol. 50 #6 (Aug 2020): 767-784.
Available here.
Hegel on Kant's Analytic-Synthetic Distinction
*Published in European Journal of Philosophy (peer-reviewed), Vol. 26 #1 (May 2017): 502-524.
Available here.
In this paper I argue, first, that Hegel defended a version of the analytic/synthetic distinction – that, indeed, his version of the distinction deserves to be called Kantian. For both Kant and Hegel, the analytic/synthetic distinction can be explained in terms of the discursive character of cognition: insofar as our cognition is discursive, its most basic form can be articulated in terms of a genus/species tree. The structure of that tree elucidates the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. Second, I argue that Hegel has an interesting and so far unexplored argument for the analytic/synthetic distinction: Hegel argues that the systematic relationship between concepts expressed in a genus/species tree can only be expressed through synthetic judgments. Third and finally, I explore some of the implications that the arguments in the first two parts of the essay have for understanding the way in which Hegel differs from Kant. I argue that Hegel accepts Kant’s point that discursive cognition cannot be used to cognize the absolute. However, Hegel thinks that we can, nevertheless, cognize the absolute. I explore the character of this non-discursive cognition and argue that we can understand Hegel’s glosses on this form of cognition – as simultaneously analytic and synthetic and as having a circular structure – through contrasting it with his account of discursive cognition. As a consequence, I argue that we must give up on the attempts to understand ‘the dialectical method’ and ‘speculative cognition’ on the model of discursive cognition
For two hundred years, people have been trying to make sense of Hegel’s so-called “dialectical method”. Helpfully, Hegel frequently compares this method with the idea of life, or the organic (cf., e.g., PhG 2, 34, 56). This comparison has become very popular in the literature (in, e.g., Pippin, Beiser, and Ng). Typically, scholars who invoke the idea of life also note that the comparison has limits and that no organic analogy can completely explain the nature of the dialectical method. To my knowledge, however, no scholar has attempted to explain exactly where or why the organic analogy falls short. In this paper, I propose to remedy this lack by exploring in depth two different organic models. In brief, I argue that both versions of the organic model require an appeal to something external to the organism, and no such appeal can be made sense of within the dialectical method.
Article Drafts
According to epistemological disjunctivism, perceiving that P puts one in a position to know that P and to know that one has a truth-guaranteeing ground that P. Together, these two claims obviously disarm Cartesian skepticism. Critics of epistemological disjunctivism typically fail to notice that the departure is justified not by what is required to avoid Cartesian skepticism, but rather by what is required to avoid Kantian skepticism as well. After clarifying this argument in favor of epistemological disjunctivism, I draw on Hegel’s writings about skepticism to formulate a novel argument against epistemological disjunctivism which shows that, by its own lights, it fails as a response to Kantian skepticism.
A Hegelian Response to Disjunctivism
A draft is available here.
I offer a new interpretation of the synthesis involve in Kant’s 3rd Analogy. Recent scholarship has shown that Kant’s account in the 3rd Analogy is much more central to his project than had previously been realized. But Kant’s account of the synthesis involved in the 3rd Analogy has not received the attention it deserves. I argue that what Kant says there about the necessary connection between perceptions entails that the whole of all possible perception is prior to and shapes any particular perception I have. This is incompatible with the standard interpretation of the 3rd Analogy, according to which my perceptions are intrinsically unconnected to one another, and become connected to one another only in a transition from perception to experience (via the category of community). My argument is significant not only for a proper understanding of the 3rd Analogy, but also more generally for understanding Kant’s view of the relation between perception and experience.
The Synthesis of Perceptions in Kant’s Third Analogy
A draft is available here.
The Unity of Kant's Forms of Intuition
A draft is available here.
Much recent scholarship on Kant’s first Critique has focused on whether and, if so, how the understanding shapes determinate intuitions. There has been considerably less work on exactly how the understanding might shape the forms of intuition themselves, and most of that work has argued that it simply cannot. In this essay, I clarify how the understanding can shape the forms of intuition. Specifically, I develop an interpretation of Kant’s notions of analytic and synthetic unity according to which the forms of intuition have both analytic unity, contributed by sensibility, and synthetic unity, contributed by the understanding.
I offer an interpretation of Gilles Deleuze’s claim that the subject is fundamentally fractured, drawing on his response to Kant’s Transcendental Deduction and Paralogisms. I will argue that Deleuze accepts Kant’s claims that (1) our judgments are the result of the spontaneous exercise of the understanding, and that (2) time, as a sensible form of objects, cannot be derived from the form of thought. This makes Deleuze out to be more Kantian in his account of judgment and of temporal objects than has heretofore been appreciated. My primary task in what follows, however, is to reconstruct Deleuze’s argument in favor of the claim that the subject is, most fundamentally, fractured by the form of time. My thesis is that Deleuze’s argument is persuasive.
The Fractured Subject: Deleuze’s Response to Kant
A draft is available here.
Our Shared Animality: Why McDowell Needs Hegel's Logical Progression
A draft is available here.
John McDowell aims to respect the plain fact that we share something with mere animals (our animality). But he says frustratingly little about what might ground our recognition of what we share. In this paper, I try to argue that what little he does say is insufficient. To respect the sharp distinction between the kind of intelligibility provided by the natural sciences and the kind of intelligibility provided by the constitutive ideal of rationality (to use Davidson's phrase), we must ground our recognition of what is shared in the (Hegelian) idea of a logical progression from mere animality to rational animality. Only thus, I claim, can we dissolve the confusions that prevent us from recovering the concept rational nature.
Objective Thought: a Reading of the Opening of Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic (§§19-25)
A draft is available here.
My aim in this paper is to motivate the project of Hegel’s Logic. In that work, he offers an account according to which, as he puts it, “logic coincides with metaphysics” (EL §24). As he understands it, and as it was traditionally understood, logic is an account of the nature of thinking, while metaphysics is an account of the nature of being. It is not too difficult to see why a philosopher might think that these two topics are intimately related; but how could someone think they coincide with one another? My strategy for answering this question will be to offer an interpretation of Hegel’s own attempt to motivate his project in the opening sections of the Encyclopedia Logic. My central interpretive claim is that Hegel thinks we are driven to the idea of objective thought (the kind of thinking in which logic coincides with metaphysics) to make sense of the fact that thought is not parochial: that when we think about the world on the basis of perception, we are not restricted to conclusions about how it must seem to us, but we can arrive at how it is in truth. In making this argument, I take aim at Robert Stern's claim that Hegel is a conceptual realist, arguing that Stern misses the way in which, for Hegel, empirical thought involves the activity of changing what is given to us in perception. Because of this change, we are faced with the problem of showing that the result of the change (our thought of the world) is not merely something parochial, a problem that can only be solved (Hegel thinks) if we also possess another form of thought that is not grounded on perception or by reference to what we can perceive. That is, we are driven to the idea of objective thought to make sense of the validity of ordinary, empirical thinking.
Reviews
Kant and His German Contemporaries ed. by Corey W. Dyck, Falk Wunderlich (review)
*Published in the Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 57 #1 (Jan 2019): 173-174.
Available here.