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This article was downloaded by: [University of California Santa Cruz] On: 10 October 2014, At: 13:05 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sinq20 Kant, Skepticism, and Idealism Michael Friedman a a Stanford University , USA Published online: 20 Aug 2006. To cite this article: Michael Friedman (2006) Kant, Skepticism, and Idealism, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 49:1, 26-43, DOI: 10.1080/00201740500497266 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00201740500497266 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

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Page 1: Kant, Skepticism, and Idealism

This article was downloaded by: [University of California Santa Cruz]On: 10 October 2014, At: 13:05Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T3JH, UK

Inquiry: An InterdisciplinaryJournal of PhilosophyPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sinq20

Kant, Skepticism, and IdealismMichael Friedman aa Stanford University , USAPublished online: 20 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Michael Friedman (2006) Kant, Skepticism, and Idealism,Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 49:1, 26-43, DOI:10.1080/00201740500497266

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00201740500497266

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of allthe information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on ourplatform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensorsmake no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views ofthe authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor andFrancis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, inrelation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

Page 2: Kant, Skepticism, and Idealism

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private studypurposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any formto anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use canbe found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Kant, Skepticism, and Idealism

MICHAEL FRIEDMAN

Stanford University, USA

(Received 31 October 2005)

ABSTRACT Skeptical problems arising for Kant’s version of transcendental idealismhave been raised from Kant’s own time to the present day. By focussing on how suchproblems originally arose in the wake of Kant’s work, and on the first formulationsof absolute idealism by Schelling, I argue that the skeptical problems in questionultimately depend on fundamental features of Kant’s philosophy of natural science. As aresult, Naturphilosophie and the organic conception of nature cannot easily beseparated from the deep and insightful response to these problems offered by absoluteidealism.

Post-Kantian idealism starts from a rejection of Kant’s central philosophical

dichotomies or ‘‘dualisms’’—most importantly, the dichotomy between the

active intellectual faculty of understanding and the passive receptive faculty

of sensibility, together with the closely related dichotomy between noumena

or things-in-themselves thought by the pure understanding alone and

phenomena or appearances given to sensibility. And one of the primary

motivations for rejecting this latter dichotomy, in particular, is that it

appears to return us to an objectionable form of skepticism. In a well-known

line of argument going back at least to F. H. Jacobi (first articulated in

1786–87), the complaint is that Kant’s defense of our knowledge of the

phenomenal world against the skepticisms of both Descartes and Hume

leaves us—even if correct—with an unbridgeable skeptical gap between our

knowledge of appearances and our knowledge of reality as it is in itself. By

denying in principle that knowledge of things in themselves is possible, Kant

has not only left our knowledge of a genuinely mind-independent reality

in doubt, he has positively precluded it. Kant’s transcendental idealism

therefore leads to skepticism—or, as Jacobi himself more forcefully puts it,

Correspondence Address: Michael Friedman, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University,

Stanford CA 94305-2155, USA. Email: [email protected]

Inquiry,

Vol. 49, No. 1, 26–43, February 2006

0020-174X Print/1502–3923 Online/06/010026–18 # 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/00201740500497266

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to nihilism, the denial of reality to everything outside the immediate contents

of consciousness.

Important versions of this Jacobian complaint have resurfaced recently

within the Anglo-American tradition. Barry Stroud puts the point this way

in his well-known book on philosophical skepticism:

If I understand the transcendental at all, I find it difficult to dis-tinguish transcendental idealism, in its explanatory power, from the

kind of scepticism that seemed inevitable on Descartes’s argument in

the First Meditation. I do not mean that transcendental idealism is the

same thing as empirical idealism; I mean that it is unsatisfactory as an

explanation of knowledge at the transcendental level in the same way

that empirical idealism is unsatisfactory at the empirical level. It would

not enable me to see any of the assertions or beliefs in science or in

everyday life as instances of knowledge of an independent domain.…[E]verything we know in science and in everyday life has turned out

to be subjective or dependent on human sensibility after all. It is not

knowledge of how things really are, independently of us. When we

move to the transcendental way of thinking we are left with knowledge

that is too centered on us, too subjective, and in that respect not what

we originally aspired to.1

John McDowell self-consciously echoes Stroud in Mind and World:

Once the supersensible is in the picture, its radical independence of our

thinking tends to present itself as no more than the independence any

genuine reality must have. The empirical world’s claim to indepen-

dence comes to seem fraudulent by comparison. We are asked to

suppose that the fundamental structure of the empirical world is

somehow the product of subjectivity, in interaction with supersensible

reality, which, as soon as it is in the picture, strikes us as the seat oftrue objectivity. But how can the empirical world be genuinely

independent of us, if we are partly responsible for its fundamental

structure? It does not help to be told that it is only transcendentally

speaking that the fundamental structure of the empirical world is of

our making.2

And what is especially noteworthy, in this case, is that McDowell also

explicitly invokes Hegelian absolute idealism as the salutary solution to thisskeptical problem.3

A standard Kantian response to this Jacobian complaint is to insist, once

again, on the fundamental distinction between transcendental idealism,

formulated at the transcendental level, and empirical idealism, formulated at

the empirical level. At the latter level Kant is an empirical realist and

Kant, Skepticism, and Idealism 27

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defends our knowledge of mind-independent (in the empirical sense) objects

existing outside of us in space and time. We really know such objects—

physical bodies, for example—and they really are (from an empirical point

of view) independent of our minds. So why should the circumstance that

these same objects are dependent on our sensibility from the transcendental

point of view—that is, they are not noumena or things in themselves—in

any way impugn the status of our empirical knowledge? However, sincemost of those who pursue the Jacobian complaint (Stroud and McDowell,

for example) are perfectly clear about the distinction between empirical and

transcendental levels, this response, by itself, does not appear to take us very

far—we simply end up with philosophical a stand-off. Perhaps a better and

more direct response, therefore, is to remind ourselves what things in

themselves actually are for Kant: objects thought by the pure understanding

alone, entirely independently of sensibility, and thus necessarily not existing

in space or time. Paradigmatic instances of such objects, in fact, areincorporeal, supersensible objects such as God and the soul. By denying, in

principle, that knowledge of such objects is possible (at least from a

theoretical point of view), Kant does not appear thereby to be questioning

the status of our knowledge of the spatio-temporal (phenomenal) objects of

science and everyday life.

Now I do not pretend that this simple and direct response is conclusive—

as a reply to either the original Jacobian complaint or more recent Jacobians

like Stroud and McDowell. But it is well worth exploring, at this point,exactly how the Kantian dichotomy between appearances and things in

themselves (and closely related Kantian dichotomies) can lead to definite

skeptical problems concerning our knowledge of the empirical or

phenomenal world after all. It turns out that such problems, in particular,

were already raised by Kant himself; they were also developed, at virtually

the same time, within the German tradition immediately following Jacobi;

and they were then exploited to the maximum in the first system of absolute

idealism developed by Friedrich Schelling. Moreover, once we view the post-Kantian charge of skepticism in the light of these problems, I shall argue, we

obtain a much deeper understanding of both Kant’s own conception of the

basis for our knowledge of the phenomenal spatio-temporal world and its

characteristically post-Kantian reconfiguration in absolute idealism.

The key step in transforming the Jacobian problem of the thing in itself into

a skeptical problem about our knowledge of the empirical or phenomenal

world was taken by K. L. Reinhold, in his Elementarphilosophie developed

in the late 1780s.4 Reinhold’s principal aim, in fact, was to replace allmetaphysical concerns about the existence of realities outside conscious-

ness with a purely phenomenological version of transcendental philosophy

arising directly from the facts of consciousness themselves. In particular,

we directly find, according to Reinhold, that all conscious representations

as such include reference to both a subject and an object—they have, as

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Husserl will later put it, both a ‘‘subject-pole’’ and an ‘‘object-pole’’. And

this, for Reinhold, is expressed within conscious representation as such by a

dichotomy between the a priori forms of representation, which, according

to transcendental philosophy, are contributed by the subject, and the a

posteriori matter or content of representation, which, according to this

same philosophy, are contributed by the object. But this does not mean, at

least as I understand Reinhold, that we are also viewing both the subjectand the object as metaphysical or transcendent entities (the transcendental

ego and the thing in itself, respectively), whose (transcendent) causal

interactions then produce our conscious representations. The point, rather,

is that the purely immanent distinction between form and content allows

us to reinterpret the distinction between subject and object entirely within

the realm of conscious experience itself.5

However, this immanent reinterpretation of the distinction between

subject and object of conscious representation—which thereby presents uswith an immanent reinterpretation, at the same time, of the notion of

affection by the thing in itself—then opens up the possibility of a parallel

form of skepticism, within conscious experience, about the empirical or

phenomenal world. Even if we are in a position, as transcendental idealism

maintains, to anticipate the form of our knowledge a priori, how do we

know—and know a priori—that the matter or content a posteriori given to

us will actually conform to these forms and thus yield knowledge of

phenomenal objects? Genuine knowledge of phenomenal objects, for Kant,is possible only by a combination or synthesis of a priori forms with

a posteriori given contents, but the latter, according to Kant’s own

conception, are precisely what we are not in a position to anticipate a priori.

How, then, can transcendental idealism ever show that knowledge in Kant’s

own sense is truly possible?

This kind of question about the relationship, within experience, between a

priori form and a posteriori content leads to a transformation from

Jacobian (or Cartesian) skepticism about our knowledge of a genuinelymind-independent reality to a form of Humean skepticism about our

knowledge of necessary connections in nature. Indeed, Jacobi himself had

acknowledged a clear debt to Hume, and Reinhold argued that skeptical

empiricist philosophy is by no means directly refuted by Kant—since Kant

simply assumes a concept of experience as the ‘‘necessary connection of

perceptions’’, which is precisely what Hume denies. But it is in the work of

G. E. Schulze and, especially Salomon Maimon that the Humean challenge

to Kantian transcendental idealism takes center stage. For Maimon, inparticular, the ‘‘given’’ element of experience—its a posteriori content—is

simply defined as that which is not derivable, in its concrete determinateness,

from the purely a priori laws of our cognitive faculty. And it then follows,

for Maimon, that Kant has no genuine answer to Hume. All that Kant has

shown, in the transcendental deduction of the categories (which include

Kant, Skepticism, and Idealism 29

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the category of causality, of course), is that the a priori laws of the

understanding govern all objects of experience in general. But these laws, by

definition, are completely indeterminate with respect to all possible

empirical contents. So there is an unavoidable gap between the very general

laws or principles of the understanding, on the one side, and all more

specific empirical laws of nature, on the other. The transcendental deduction

of the categories—and its further elaboration via the laws or principles of

pure understanding—leaves Humean skepticism about the necessity of all

more specific empirical laws of nature completely untouched.

Indeed, Kant himself is perfectly clear that the argument of the

transcendental deduction still leaves open a gap between the very general

conformity of appearances to the a priori forms of thought there

demonstrated and our actual empirical knowledge of nature.6 To be sure,

we now know that all appearances must conform to the a priori laws or

principles of pure understanding that Kant is in the process of articulating.

But this does not and cannot show that nature must also be governed by any

particular (and therefore more specific) empirical laws. The point can,

appropriately enough, be elucidated most clearly in reference to the second

analogy of experience: the a priori principle that every event must have a

cause. Since the causal relation, for Kant, requires that there be a genuine

law-like connection between the cause and the effect (every event of the

same kind as the cause must be always and necessarily followed by an event

of the same kind as the effect), the principle that every event has a cause

requires that some empirical causal laws (laws of the form just given) must

be found in nature. But it does not and cannot tell us which empirical causal

laws actually obtain; and, in this sense, there is an evident gap between what

the a priori principle of causality requires and the specific empirical laws

that must realize or instantiate this requirement in concreto.

Kant suggests that particular empirical causal laws, if true, are also in

some sense necessary, and that this necessity, in turn, is grounded in the

principles of pure understanding. In an introductory section to the system of

principles Kant puts the point this way:

Even natural laws, when they are considered as principles of the

empirical employment of the understanding, at the same time carry

with themselves an expression of necessity and thus at least the

suggestion of a determination from grounds that hold a priori and

antecedent to all experience. Yet all laws of nature without distinction

stand under higher principles of the understanding, in that they merely

apply these to particular cases of appearances. These principles alone

therefore give the concept that contains the condition, and as it were

the exponent, of a rule in general; but experience gives the case that

stands under the rule. (A159/B198)

30 M. Friedman

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It is not adequate to view the relationship in question between principles of

the understanding and particular empirical laws of nature as simply one of

existential instantiation; for Kant states that any particular empirical law

of nature is in some sense determined by the higher principles of the

understanding it stands under, not simply that it exists. The problem, then,

is to understand how particular empirical laws can be grounded or

determined by the principles of pure understanding they stand under, eventhough they are not, as Kant also explicitly emphasizes, strictly derivable

from these principles.7 In the absence of such a relationship of determina-

tion or grounding, a putative empirical law is not a law after all (for it

cannot count as necessary), but nothing in the transcendental deduction

itself (or any other argument in the transcendental analytic) explains how

this crucial relationship between a priori intellectual form (here the category

of causality) and a posteriori given content (here the particular experiences

underlying a concrete empirical law) is actually put into effect.Kant fills this lacuna in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science,

published in 1786 between the first (1781) and second (1787) editions of the

Critique of Pure Reason. His subject there is what he calls pure natural

science (or the pure doctrine of nature); and he makes it perfectly clear in the

Preface that it is precisely this pure natural science that supplies the a priori

grounds of all properly empirical laws of nature:

Since the word nature already carries with it the concept of laws, andthe latter carries with it the concept of the necessity of all

determinations of a thing belonging to its existence, one easily sees

why natural science must derive the legitimacy of this title only from

its pure part—namely, that which contains the a priori principles of all

other natural explanations—and why only in virtue of this pure part is

natural science to be proper science. Likewise, [one sees] that, in

accordance with demands of reason, every doctrine of nature must

finally lead to natural science and conclude there, because thisnecessity of laws is inseparably attached to the concept of nature, and

therefore makes claim to be thoroughly comprehended. Hence, the

most complete explanation of given appearances from chemical

principles still always leaves behind a certain dissatisfaction, because

one can adduce no a priori grounds for such principles, which, as

contingent laws, have been learned merely from experience.

All proper natural science therefore requires a pure part, on which the

apodictic certainty that reason seeks therein can be based. (4, 468–9)

Moreover, it turns out that the pure part of natural science centrally

includes certain fundamental principles of Newtonian physics: most

importantly, the conservation of the total quantity of matter, the law of

inertia, and the principle of the equality of action and reaction (these three

Kant, Skepticism, and Idealism 31

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Page 9: Kant, Skepticism, and Idealism

are also prominently adduced in the Introduction to the second edition of

the Critique as clear and uncontroversial examples of synthetic a priori pure

natural science).

We can then see how an empirical (and thus not synthetic a priori) law is

grounded in the corresponding principles of pure understanding as follows.

On the one hand, our three synthetic a priori principles of pure natural

science are shown to realize or instantiate the three analogies ofexperience—more precisely, they result from the corresponding analogies

(and thus from the categories of substance, causality, and community,

respectively) by further specifying the objects in question under what Kant

calls the empirical concept of matter (thus, we are dealing with material

substances or bodies, whose fundamental changes consist of motions, and so

on). On the other hand, however, these same three principles of pure natural

science frame Newton’s well-known ‘‘deduction from the phenomena’’ of

the law of universal gravitation from Kepler’s laws of planetary motion—whereby, in Kant’s terminology, Kepler’s mere empirical rules are

transformed into something essentially different, namely, a genuine

empirical law expressing a genuine empirical necessity. In particular,

although Newton’s law of gravitation of course depends on the very

empirical phenomena recorded in Kepler’s laws, it is not simply one possible

hypothesis among many for explaining them. Rather, in the context of the

synthetic a priori principles of pure natural science, Newton’s law of

gravitation is uniquely determined by the empirical phenomena in question,and it thereby acquires a more than merely inductive epistemic status. It is in

precisely this sense that it is now fully grounded in the a priori principles of

pure understanding and therefore counts as necessary.8

However, even if all this is accepted, there is still a fundamental

epistemological gap between the most general laws of nature, governing all

matter or material bodies as such, and the more specific and particular laws

of nature which remain mere empirical ‘‘rules’’ (at least so far as we human

beings are able to comprehend). Kant, in the above passage from the Prefaceto the Metaphysical Foundations, specifically instances the putative laws of

chemistry in this regard; and, several pages later in the Preface, he argues

that chemistry will ‘‘only with great difficulty’’ ever attain the status of a

science in the strict sense, precisely because we do not (and might never)

have an elementary force law governing chemical interactions analogous to

the law of gravitation.9 It follows that chemistry is not—and might never

become—a science in the strict sense; its ‘‘laws’’ are in no sense necessary

but rather merely inductive; and it is not—and might never be—properlyand fully grounded in the a priori principles of the understanding.10 How,

then, can the propositions of chemistry (and, a fortiori, those of all lower-

level sciences) possibly count as genuine empirical knowledge of nature?

It is here that Kant invokes his famous doctrine of the regulative use of

reason. The faculty of reason, in contradistinction to the faculty of

32 M. Friedman

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understanding, generates a priori intellectual representations that cannot be

fully realized in our human spatio-temporal experience. These include the

ideas of God, Freedom, and Immortality, for example, and also, more

relevant to our present concerns, the idea of the systematic unity of all

empirical concepts and principles under the a priori constitutive concepts

and principles already generated by the understanding. This idea of

systematic unity guides our process of inquiry in the more empirical andinductive sciences, without constitutively constraining it, as we successively

ascend from lower level empirical concepts and principles towards higher

level concepts and principles. The goal of this process is an ideal complete

empirical science of nature in which all empirical concepts and principles are

constitutively grounded in the pure categories and principles of the

understanding (as the law of gravitation already is), yet this is necessarily

an ideal we can only successively approximate but never actually attain. And

the paradigmatic application of the regulative use of reason, in both theMetaphysical Foundations and the first Critique, is precisely to contempor-

ary chemistry. Kant sees this chemistry—primarily the phlogistic chemistry

of Georg Stahl as supplemented by the new discoveries in pneumatics but

not yet including Lavoisier—as a purely empirical or experimental art

guided by the regulative use of reason towards an entirely unspecified and

indeterminate future state of affairs in which the experimental results in

question are finally grounded in the fundamental forces of matter in a way

that we are not yet in a position to anticipate.11

Moreover, as is well known, Kant, in the Critique of Judgement, extends

the doctrine of the regulative use of reason to what he now calls the faculty

of reflective judgement, and he now applies this faculty, in particular, to the

case of biology. The problem here, in a nutshell, is that all matter in general

and as such—all matter as the object of our outer senses in space—is

essentially lifeless. This, in fact, is how Kant interprets the law of inertia,

which law, in turn, is itself constitutively grounded by a further specification

of the a priori principle of causality articulated in the first Critique.12

Biology, the study of life, can therefore never be a science in the strict sense

for Kant; it can never be constitutively grounded in the fundamental forces

of matter. The best we can do, in this case, is to extend the doctrine of

the regulative use of reason via the teleological idea of purposiveness

[Zweckmaßigkeit]—an idea which already arises for reflective judgement in

general as it guides our inductive ascent from particular to universal towards

the ideal infinitely distant goal of a complete systematic unity of nature. And

this idea can now be applied to particular objects of nature or ‘‘naturalproducts’’ (i.e., living organisms) in so far as they are conceived, by

reflective judgement, as themselves purposively organized. Yet such a mode

of conception is in no way constitutive of these objects themselves; it is

rather a merely regulative device for guiding our empirical inquiry into

living organisms as far as it may proceed.

Kant, Skepticism, and Idealism 33

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From the point of view of post-Kantian idealism, however, we are now

left with a quite intolerable skepticism concerning most of the phenomena of

nature. For only very few of these phenomena, as we have seen, are actually

constitutively grounded in the a priori principles of the understanding; and,

for the rest, we have at best the otherwise entirely indeterminate hope that

they might be constitutively grounded some day—as in the case of

chemistry, for example. In the case of biology, moreover, the situation isfar worse—for we shall never achieve, according to Kant, a genuine

constitutive grounding of the properties and behavior of even a single blade

of grass. It would appear, then, that the vast majority of natural phenomena

are not—and most likely never will be—objectively or constitutively

grounded at all, and our claims to have rational or objective knowledge

of nature are accordingly cast into doubt.13 It is in precisely this way,

therefore, that beginning with Kant’s own formulation of the problem of the

transcendental deduction, we can finally obtain a definite skeptical problemconcerning Kant’s conception of our knowledge of the empirical or

phenomenal world. And this skeptical problem is in fact closely related, in

the terms of Kant’s own system, to the Jacobian problem of the thing in

itself with which we began. The distinction between constitutive and

regulative principles depends on which a priori principles of pure thought

have a necessary instantiation or schematization in sensibility and which do

not, and this latter distinction is in turn closely related to the distinction

between noumena or things in themselves thought by the pure under-standing alone and phenomena or appearances given to sensibility. In other

words, as Maimon in particular emphasizes, the fundamental problem, for

Kant, ultimately stems from his radical separation between the active

intellectual faculty of understanding and the passive receptive faculty of

sensibility.

The project, then, is to radically reconceive the project of transcendental

philosophy in such a way that, by abandoning Kant’s fundamental

dichotomies (here, in particular, that between constitutive principles of theunderstanding and merely regulative principles of reason and reflective

judgement), we can show that all the phenomena of nature are

transcendentally grounded after all—and therefore count as genuinely

objective knowledge. And it is precisely here that Schelling makes his

decisive contribution to the articulation of absolute idealism. For Schelling,

transcendental philosophy, the story of how human reason successively

approximates to a more and more adequate picture of nature, has a

necessary counterpart or dual, as it were, in Naturphilosophie, the story ofhow nature itself successively unfolds or dialectically evolves from the

‘‘dead’’ or inert matter considered in statics and mechanics, to the essentially

dynamical forms of interaction considered in chemistry, and finally to the

living or organic matter considered in biology. Since nature, on this view,

dialectically unfolds or successively evolves in a way that precisely mirrors

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the evolution or development of our rational conception of nature (and, of

course, vice versa), it follows that there is no possible skeptical gap between

nature itself and our conception of it, or, in Kantian terminology, between

the constitutive domain of the understanding and the merely regulative

domain of reason and reflective judgement. All the phenomena of nature—

including, in particular, both chemical and biological phenomena—are

rationally or objectively grounded in the same way.The key to Schelling’s conception is a dialectical extension and

elaboration of Kant’s original dynamical theory of matter expounded in

the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. That theory had depicted

matter, not as a primitively hard or absolutely impenetrable solid, but rather

as originally constituted by two fundamental forces—the fundamental force

of attraction underlying Newtonian universal gravitation and the funda-

mental force of repulsion underlying impenetrability or resistance to

compression. Matter filling space to a determinate degree of density thenresults from a balance or equilibrium between these two fundamental forces.

But this same balancing or equilibrium, from Kant’s point of view, accounts

only for the most general properties of all matter in general and as such

(properties such as elasticity, density, gravity, mass, and weight, for

example), and it does not suffice to explain the more particular and specific

properties of matter considered in lower level science such as chemistry.

From Schelling’s point of view, in contrast, Kant’s dynamical theory of

the most general properties of all matter as such (which embraces, therefore,even the ‘‘dead’’ or inert matter considered in statics and mechanics) has

already introduced an essentially dialectical element into nature, in so far as

the dynamical constitution of matter in general proceeds from the positive

reality of expansive force (repulsion), through the negative reality of

contractive force (attraction), to the limitation or balance of the two in a

state of equilibrium. Moreover, we now know, as Kant himself did not, that

chemistry can be dynamically grounded by a dialectical continuation of this

progression—as we proceed, more specifically, from the magnetic, throughthe electrical, to the chemical (or galvanic) forms of the basic or original

dynamical process grounded in the fundamental forces of attraction and

repulsion. And, once we have gone this far, it is then a very short step

(particularly in view of the newly discovered parallel interconnections

among electrical, galvanic, and biological phenomena) to view biology, too,

as a further dialectical continuation of the same dynamical process.14

Biology, too, can be a science, for all rational science, as Kant did not see, is

grounded in a single dynamical evolutionary dialectical progression. Thewhole of nature, in this sense, is at once both rational and alive;15 and this

means, in particular, that there actually is life—objectively, not merely

regulatively—in even the very simplest forms of organized matter.16

Schelling’s entrancing vision is fueled by a number of dramatic new

discoveries in electro-chemistry. In particular, the invention of the Voltaic

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pile led to the discovery of current electricity or galvanism, and current

electricity, in turn, led to the discovery of the electrolytic decomposition of

water—whereby oxygen and hydrogen separate out from the water and

accumulate, respectively, at the positive and negative poles inducing the

electrolytic current. Oxygen and hydrogen are thereby associated with

negative and positive electricity, respectively, and this suggests an especially

close link between electrical forces and the fundamental chemical forcesinvolved in combustion. Schelling, along with many other researchers at the

time, took this as evidence for the electrical nature of chemical affinities

quite generally. Finally, the well-known parallels between electrical and

magnetic forces suggested that magnetism, too, is essentially implicated in

chemical interactions (including galvanism) and, more specifically, that

what Schelling called the basic or original form of the dynamical process is

further differentiated, at the level immediately following that of Kant’s two

fundamental forces of attraction and repulsion in general, into magnetism,electricity, and chemical forces (including galvanism).17

It is precisely here, for Schelling, that we can unite the concept of matter

in general as conceived in Kant’s original dynamical theory (the ‘‘dead’’

matter considered in statics and mechanics) with matter as conceived by

Naturphilosophie—as an inexhaustible source of rational life. It is in

precisely this context that we can view chemistry, in Schelling’s words, as a

dialectical ‘‘middle term’’ between mechanism, on the one side, and

biological (ultimately rational) living purposiveness, on the other.18

Indeed, even the inert matter considered in statics and mechanics is already

at least potentially alive, since Kant’s dynamical theory had shown that the

fundamental forces of attraction and repulsion are necessary to all matter in

general and as such, and we have just seen that the original or primary

dynamical process governed by these two forces must necessarily evolve or

develop into first chemical and then biological forms of external nature. In

the end, it is precisely by rejecting the fundamental Kantian contention that

all matter in general and as such is essentially lifeless that Schelling, from hispoint of view, finally overcomes any possibility of a skeptical gap between

our rational conception of nature and nature itself.19

We can deepen our appreciation of both the skeptical gap Schelling finds

here in the Kantian philosophy and Schelling’s efforts finally to overcome it

if we take a brief look at how Kant himself, very late in his career, attempted

to extend his dynamical theory of matter into chemistry.20 This attempt is

visible in unpublished materials from the years 1796–1803 collected in the

Opus postumum (the very years during which Schelling was first developinghis system of absolute idealism), and it involves a new projected work Kant

entitles Transition from the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science to

Physics. By ‘‘physics’’, Kant here means the more empirical or inductive

branches of natural science in which the general empirical concept of matter

articulated in the Metaphysical Foundations is further specified into a variety

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of species and subspecies, and Kant particularly has in mind the new anti-

phlogistic system of chemistry recently developed by Lavoisier. Kant now

holds, contrary to the Metaphysical Foundations, that chemistry has thereby

finally entered the secure path of science, but it has not done so (as the

Preface to the Metaphysical Foundations had speculated) by discovering

an elementary force law underlying chemical interactions. Rather, what

Lavoisier has achieved is a new type of essentially physical chemistry basedon the central role of oxygen in combustion together with the newly salient

caloric fluid or the matter of heat. Kant now attempts to provide an a priori

foundation for this new science by presenting what he calls an aether

deduction: an a priori proof that there is a universally distributed aether or

caloric fluid, constituted by a perpetual oscillatory interaction between the

two fundamental forces of attraction and repulsion, filling all of space. This

universally distributed aetherial medium is supposed to provide an a priori

grounding for the central theoretical construct of Lavoisier’s new chemistryand, at the same time, to serve, in a way that had long been familiar in

eighteenth-century matter theory, as the medium or vehicle for light,

electricity, and magnetism as well. In this way, the totality of forces or

powers of nature—including, above all, the specifically chemical forces—

are, at least in principle, systematically unified.

The a priori representation in question—a universally distributed caloric

fluid or aetherial medium—is, by the standards of Kant’s critical

philosophy, an extremely peculiar one. As a continuum of forces providinga basis for the further specification of the concept of matter in general, it is

a discursive or conceptual representation; as a space-filling continuum,

providing what Kant calls a perceptual ‘‘realization’’ of the pure intuition of

space, it is a sensible or intuitive representation. Moreover, and by the same

token, as an a priori principle for the further specification of the concept of

matter in general it is a constitutive representation; as the ultimate ground

for the systematic unity of all of the forces of matter it is a regulative

representation. It is in this way, in fact, that the ‘‘top-down’’ constitutiveprocedure of the Metaphysical Foundations and the first Critique has

a necessary intersection, as it were, with the ‘‘bottom-up’’ regulative

procedure of the faculties of reason and reflective judgement; and it is in

precisely this way, accordingly, that the skeptical problems arising from the

doctrine of the regulative use of reason that so vexed the post-Kantian

absolute idealists are finally resolved for Kant himself.21

It is important to see, however, that Kant’s own solution stopped

considerably short of absolute idealism—and that, although he was in somesense on the verge of the scientific and philosophical situation addressed by

Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, he did not and could not take the decisive step.

Kant had already considered the problem of extending the dynamical theory

of matter into chemistry, and, at the same time, he had already subjected the

fundamental distinction between constitutive principles and regulative

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principles to a radical reconceptualization. But the crucial new develop-

ments in magnetism, electricity, and chemistry that provided the fertile

empirical soil on which Naturphilosophie actually took root were in fact

unknown to him. Kant, to the best of my knowledge, never engaged with

even the electro-static and magneto-static work of Coulomb, to say nothing

of the electro-chemical research arising from the Voltaic pile. The central

idea of Naturphilosophie in its application to chemistry—that chemicalforces are at bottom electrical in nature—never occurred to Kant; and, as a

result, the idea that one could extend the dynamical theory of matter by

conceiving magnetic, electrical, and galvanic forces as a further dialectical

development of the original dynamical process governing the fundamental

forces of attraction and repulsion was entirely foreign to Kant’s own final

attempt to solve the problem of a ‘‘transition from the metaphysical

foundations to physics’’. Furthermore, although there may be room, with

considerable stretching and straining, to find a place in Kant’s criticalsystem for a representation that combines both constitutive and regulative

aspects, there is no room at all for the grand naturphilosophisch vision of

nature as a whole as the evolutionary dialectical development of a single

(and ultimately divine) rational life. For this idea, of course, entails the total

Aufhebung of all of Kant’s most fundamental distinctions, along with the

critical philosophy itself.

What are the implications of all this for the original Jacobian skeptical

problem with which we began—the idea that Kant’s distinction betweenappearances and things in themselves leaves us with an unbridgeable

skeptical gap between our knowledge of the phenomenal or empirical world

and a reality that is genuinely independent of us? I have argued, in the first

place, that if we are to move beyond a simple philosophical stand-off

between those who find the empirical mind-independence of the phenom-

enal world to be quite sufficient to ground our empirical knowledge and

those who take its transcendental dependence on our cognitive faculties to

threaten this knowledge, we need to look, more specifically, for a concreteskeptical problem afflicting our knowledge of the phenomenal world itself.

Such a problem in fact emerges, both conceptually and historically, in both

the writers on transcendental philosophy immediately following Jacobi and

Kant’s own virtually simultaneous attempts to further resolve the problem

of the transcendental deduction by explaining how the most general laws of

pure understanding serve to ground or determine the more specific empirical

laws of nature in accordance with which the empirical phenomena actually

proceed. This line of thought leads to Kant’s fundamental distinctionbetween constitutive principles due to the pure understanding and merely

regulative principles due to the faculties of reason and reflective

judgement—which, in turn, is closely connected, as we have seen, with the

distinction between appearances and things in themselves. And we are also

led, in following out this line of thought, to a serious engagement with

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Kant’s philosophy of natural science, as articulated especially in the

Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and Opus postumum.

I have further tried to explain, in the second place, how, despite Kant’s

most serious and strenuous efforts to overcome them, fundamental skeptical

problems concerning the ultimate rational grounding of our knowledge of

the phenomenal world can still be raised, and also how, as a result, the

absolute idealism first constructed by Schelling—and later further developed

by Hegel—radically restructured the project of transcendental philosophy

by conceiving nature as a whole as the evolutionary dialectical development

of a single (and ultimately divine) rational life.22 That Kant himself, at the

end of his career, and during the very years in which Schelling first

developed this philosophy, was right on the verge of the scientific and

philosophical situation addressed by absolute idealism, further underscores

and illuminates the seriousness and precise character of the problems in

question. In particular, the organic conception of nature developed by

absolute idealism—however exaggerated and bizarre it might now appear to

us—was, in the particular intellectual context that gave rise to it, a perfectly

reasonable and intelligible response to the combination of deep internal

problems afflicting Kant’s critical philosophy, on the one side, and

revolutionary new scientific developments at the turn of the century (in

electricity, magnetism, chemistry and biology), on the other. And what this

means, finally, is that those who now want to return to absolute idealism in

order to resolve the Jacobian problem must carefully consider whether, and

to what extent, they can really do justice to both the problem in question

and the absolute idealist solution without also embracing—or at least taking

very seriously—Naturphilosophie and the organic conception of nature.23

Notes

1. Stroud, B (1984) The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (Oxford: Oxford

University Press), pp. 166–7.

2. (Harvard, 1994), p. 42.

3. See op. cit., p. 44: ‘‘This is quite contrary to Kant’s intentions, but in spite of his staunch

denials, the effect of his philosophy is to slight the independence of the reality to which

our senses give us access. What is responsible for this is precisely the aspect of Kant’s

philosophy that struck some of his successors as a betrayal of idealism: namely, the fact

that he recognizes a reality outside the sphere of the conceptual. Those successors urged

that we must discard the supersensible in order to achieve a consistent idealism. In fact

that move frees Kant’s insight so that it can protect a commonsense respect for the

independence of the ordinary world.’’ McDowell makes it perfectly explicit a few

sentences later that Hegelian absolute idealism is precisely what he has in mind here—

although he also suggests that we need to ‘‘domesticate the rhetoric of that philosophy’’.

I will return to this last point below (note 23).

4. For extended discussion of the development from Jacobi through Maimon briefly

sketched below see Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant

to Fichte (Harvard, 1987), and chapter 1 of Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der

Kant, Skepticism, and Idealism 39

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Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit. Dritter Band: Die Nachkantischen

Systeme (Bruno Cassirer, 1920).

5. Both Beiser and Cassirer (note 4 above) read Reinhold as making an (illegitimate)

inference from the a posteriori given content of representation to a (transcendent) thing-

in-itself as the cause of this content. However, in view of Reinhold’s repeated insistence

(emphasized by both Beiser and Cassirer) that he is carrying out a purely immanent

phenomenology of conscious representation itself, it seems to me far more charitable to

understand him as proposing a reinterpretation of the very notion of the thing-in-itself

(along with the notion of transcendental affection).

6. It is no wonder then, that Kant, in a well-known letter to Marcus Herz of May 26, 1789,

asserts of Maimon that ‘‘none of my opponents had understood me and the main

question so well’’ (11, 49). Kant, at the time, was intensively engaged in completing the

Critique of Judgement, whose problems, as we shall see in more detail below, are

intimately connected with the gap in question. All references to Kant’s writings and

correspondence, except to the Critique of Pure Reason, are given by volume and page

number of the Akademie edition of Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: de Gruyter,

1902-); the Critique of Pure Reason is cited by the standard A and B pagination of the

first (1781) and second (1787) editions respectively. All translations are my own.

7. See A126–8: ‘‘Although we learn many laws through experience, there are nonetheless

only particular determinations of yet higher laws, among which the highest (under which

all others stand) originate a priori in the understanding itself, and are not borrowed from

experience but rather provide appearances with their law-governedness, and precisely

thereby make experience possible.…To be sure, empirical laws as such can in no way

derive their origin from pure understanding—no more than the immeasurable manifold

of appearances can be adequately comprehended from the pure form of sensibility. Yet

all empirical laws are only particular determinations of the pure laws of the

understanding, under which and in accordance with the norm of which they first

become possible, and the appearances take on a lawful form—just as all appearances,

notwithstanding the manifoldness of their empirical form, nonetheless also must always

be in accordance with the condition of the pure form of sensibility.’’

8. See R 5414 (around 1780) at 18, 176: ‘‘Empirically one can certainly discover rules, but

not laws—as Kepler in comparison with Newton—for to the latter belongs necessity,

and hence that they are cognized a priori. Yet one always supposes that rules of nature

are necessary—for on that account it is nature—and that they can be comprehended a

priori; therefore one calls them laws by way of anticipation. The understanding is the

ground of empirical laws, and thus of an empirical necessity, where the ground of law-

governedness can in fact be comprehended a priori—e.g., the law of causality—but not

the ground of the determinate law. All metaphysical principles of nature are only

grounds of law-governedness.’’ For further discussion of this passage, and the larger

question of empirical causal laws in general, see my ‘‘Causal laws and the foundations of

natural science’’, in P. Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant (CUP, 1992).

9. See 4, 470–1: ‘‘So long, therefore, as there is still for chemical actions of matters on one

another no concept to be discovered that can be constructed, that is, no law of the

approach or withdrawal of the parts of matter can be specified according to which,

perhaps in proportion to their density or the like, their motions and all the consequences

thereof can be made intuitive and presented a priori in space (a demand that will only

with great difficulty ever be fulfilled), then chemistry can be nothing more than a

systematic art or experimental doctrine, but never a proper science, because its principles

are merely empirical, and allow of no a priori presentation in intuition. Consequently,

they do not in the least make the principles of chemical appearances conceivable

with respect to their possibility, for they are not receptive to the application of

mathematics.’’

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10. Compare 4, 468: ‘‘If, however, the grounds or principles themselves are still in the end

merely empirical, as in chemistry, for example, and the laws from which the given facts

are explained through reason are mere laws of experience, then they carry with them no

consciousness of their necessity (they are not apodictally certain), and thus the whole of

cognition does not deserve the name of a science in the strict sense; chemistry should

therefore be called a systematic art rather than a science.’’

11. It is no accident, then, that examples from contemporary chemistry serve as particularly

important illustrations of the regulative use of reason in the Appendix to the

Transcendental Dialectic in the first Critique: see, e.g., A647–7/B673–4, A652–3/B680–

81. For discussion of these examples, see chapter 5 of my Kant and the Exact Sciences

(Harvard, 1992).

12. The statement of the law of inertia and accompanying proof is Proposition 3 of the

Mechanics chapter of the Metaphysical Foundations. The following Remark explains the

connection with lifelessness—viz., the non-existence of any internal principle of change.

See, in particular, the conclusion of this Remark (4, 544): ‘‘The possibility of a proper

natural science rests entirely and completely on the law of inertia (along with that of the

persistence of substance). The opposite of this, and thus also the death of all natural

philosophy, would be hylozoism. From this very same concept of inertia, as mere

lifelessness, it follows at once that it does not mean a positive striving to conserve its

state. Only living beings are called inert in this latter sense, because they have a

representation of another state, which they abhor, and against which they exert their

power.’’ This rejection of ‘‘hylozoism’’ is clearly directed at Leibnizean natural

philosophy.

13. My formulation of this skeptical problem is indebted to Paul Franks, ‘‘What should

Kantians learn from Maimon’s skepticism?’’ in G. Freudenthal, ed., Salomon Maimon:

rational dogmatist, empirical skeptic (Kluwer, 2003), although Franks himself does not

emphasize, as I do, the distinction between constitutive and regulative principles—he

instead formulates what I take to be essentially the same problem by means of a

distinction between scientific judgements and everyday or ‘‘ordinary’’ judgements.

14. For Schelling, this dialectical continuation takes a quite precise and specific form:

corresponding to the magnetic, electrical, and chemical (or galvanic) forms, we then

have, as the ‘‘third potency’’ of the original dynamical process, the biological powers of

reproduction, (nervous) irritability, and sensibility: see Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature,

supplement to book I, chapter 6. In what follows, references to this work (first edition

1797, second edition 1803) are to the second volume of Friedrich Wilhelm Josef von

Schellings Sammtliche Werke (J. G. Cotta’scher Verlag, 1848), and to the translation by

E. Harris and P. Heath (Cambridge, 1988), respectively.

15. See Ideas (1848, 54) (1988, 40): ‘‘Finally, if we comprehend nature as a single whole, then

mechanism, i.e., a past-directed series of causes and effects, and purposiveness

[Zweckmaßigkeit], i.e., independence of mechanism, simultaneity of causes and effects,

stand opposed to one another. In so far as we now unite these two extremes, an idea of a

purposiveness of the whole arises in us—nature becomes a circle that returns into itself,

a self-enclosed system.’’

16. See Ideas (1848, 46–7) (1988, 35): ‘‘This philosophy must admit, therefore, that there is a

graduated development [Stufenfolge] of life in nature. Even in mere organized matter

there is life, but only life of a limited kind. This idea is so old, and has been preserved

until now in the most varied forms up to the present day—(already in the most ancient

times the whole world was [regarded as] penetrated by a living principle, called the

world-soul, and Leibniz’s later period gave every plant its soul)—that one can well

surmise in advance that some ground for this natural belief must lie in the human spirit

itself. And it is in fact so. The entire mystery surrounding the problem of the origin of

organized bodies rests on the circumstance that in these things necessity and contingency

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are united in the most intimate way. Necessity, because their existence is already

purposive, not only (as in the case of the work of art) their form; contingency, because

this purposiveness is nonetheless only actual for an intuiting and reflecting being.’’

17. Hans Christian Oersted, the discoverer of electro-magnetism, was deeply involved with

both the new electro-chemistry and Schelling’s philosophical interpretation of it, and

Oersted’s great discovery was essentially stimulated by this philosophy. See my ‘‘Kant—

Naturphilosophie—Electromagnetism’’ in R. Brain and O. Knudson, eds., Hans-

Christian Oersted and the Romantic Legacy in Science (Kluwer, 2005), for references

and further discussion.

18. See Ideas (1848, 187) (1988, 149): ‘‘Therefore, already in the chemical properties of

matter there actually lie the first, although still completely undeveloped seeds of a future

system of nature, which can unfold into the most varied forms and structures, up to the

point where creative nature appears to return back into itself. Thus, at the same time,

further investigations are marked out, up to the point where the necessary and the

contingent, the mechanical and the free, separate from one another. Chemical

phenomena constitute the middle term between the two. It is this far, then, that the

principles of attraction and repulsion actually lead, as soon as one considers them as

principles of a universal system of nature.’’

19. Schelling is here self-consciously returning to precisely the Leibnizean ‘‘hylozoism’’ Kant

explicitly rejects: compare notes 12, 14, and 16 above. This essentially biological or

organic conception of nature then entails the overcoming of all skepticism in the

sense that the closing of the circle implicated in notes 15 and 18 above (embracing

both mechanism and teleology) means that transcendental philosophy and

Naturphilosophie—spirit and nature—are ultimately identical, in so far as nature itself

gives rise to both life in general and conscious or rational life in particular. See Ideas

(1848, 56) (1988, 42): ‘‘Nature should be the visible spirit, spirit the invisible nature. It is

here, therefore, in the absolute identity of spirit within us and nature outside us, that the

problem of how a nature outside us is possible must be solved.’’

20. I can present only the very briefest outline here. For further details and references see

chapter 5 of my Kant and the Exact Sciences (note 11 above) and ‘‘Kant—

Naturphilosophie—Electromagnetism’’ (note 17).

21. In the Opus postumum itself Kant goes so far as to say that if the ‘‘transition’’ project he

is now embarked on cannot be successfully completed then there is a fundamental ‘‘gap’’

in the critical system. The importance of this idea has been recently emphasized by

Eckart Forster, ‘‘Is there ‘a gap’ in Kant’s critical system?’’ Journal for the History of

Philosophy 25 (1987): 533–55. For further discussion see again chapter 5 of my Kant and

the Exact Science, and also Forster, Kant’s Final Synthesis (Harvard, 2000).

22. I am not here in a position to extend my discussion to Hegel’s later elaboration of

absolute idealism. However, if Frederick Beiser is correct in his recent work, German

Idealism (Harvard, 2002), and ‘‘The Secret of Hegel,’’ in R. Brain and O. Knudson, eds.

(note 17 above), the organic conception of nature arising in Naturphilosophie is just as

central for Hegel as it is for Schelling. The difference is that Hegel adds a much deeper

and more detailed discussion of the psychological, social, and historical stages of the

evolutionary dialectical process.

23. I here have in mind, in particular, McDowell’s appeal to absolute idealism in Mind and

World—see note 3 above, together with the paragraph to which it is appended. As I

point out there, McDowell says that he wants to ‘‘domesticate the rhetoric’’ of absolute

idealism, and what he apparently means by this is that we can simply drop its

commitment to the organic conception of nature in favor of ‘‘a commonsense respect for

the independence of the ordinary world’’. Indeed, in the remainder of his argument

McDowell traces the ultimate roots of the epistemological problem at the center of his

concerns (the opposition between coherentism and the myth of the given) to the modern

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scientific ‘‘disenchantment of nature’’ whereby all rational meaning and value were

removed from external nature and relocated exclusively in the human mind. McDowell

definitely does not want to resolve this problem (as the absolute idealists themselves do)

by ‘‘re-enchanting’’ external nature so that the fundamentally mechanistic categories of

modern natural science no longer adequately describe it. Rather, he wants only

‘‘partially’’ to re-enchant nature so that human nature, in particular, is fully recognized

as ‘‘natural,’’ while the remaining non-human part is just as disenchanted as before. But

this kind of solution would be anathema from the point of view of the absolute idealists

themselves, and what I am calling into question here is whether McDowell’s attempt at

appropriating this tradition ultimately does justice to the actual historical and

conceptual issues surrounding its development. See my ‘‘Exorcising the philosophical

tradition,’’ Philosophical Review 105 (1996): 427–67, for an earlier attempt to come to

terms with Mind and World from an historical point of view; the present paper makes a

related point in the context of a more careful and detailed consideration of the transition

from Kant to absolute idealism.

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