This survey course will cover a relatively small period of the history of philosophy, viz., the period of the 19^th century (1781-1887). Philosophers, then and now, have regarded this period in two disparate ways. Either (1) as the “Dark Ages” of philosophy, as a period when philosophical reflection went astray and surrendered to the beguilements of the metaphysically spurious and the discursively illogical. Or (2) as arguably the most influential period of philosophy, as the period, unlike any other, when philosophical reflection comprehensively and legitimately altered the presumptions of both rationalism and empiricism and took on a most ground-breaking and influential character in the political, cultural, aesthetic, scientific, economic, and social arenas of the modern world. In this course, our study of the period will take the route of (2), but we will briefly explain why (1) is still prominent.

We shall read the works of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Frege. Brief attention may be given to Kierkegaard, Darwin, Peirce, and Du Bois. The focus will be on the connection of judgment with (a) objective, (b) moral, and (c) aesthetic matters. Kant and Hegel affirm this connection of (a), (b), and (c) with judgment, but in substantially different ways. In Kant’s transcendental idealism, a judgment is objective if it determines cognitively the truth value of an object; a judgment is moral if its premise asserts an obligation; a judgment is aesthetic if it expresses a taste only in terms of what others ought to share about an object without cognitively determining the truth value of it. In Hegel’s absolute idealism, an orientation of judgment toward cognition is the same as its orientation toward morality and taste, viz., via the rationality of norms. Any judgment is 1) dependent on a kind of reason-giving and reason-sharing like-mindedness (spirit), i.e., dependent on what is determined or expressed in a rationally presumptive or rationally achieved like-mindedness. Its orientation is 2) linked to spirit's own ongoing or historically developing legislation of the provisionally deficient or sufficient rationality of such norms.

Most post-Hegelian philosophy, however, is very critical of Kant's and Hegel's respective idealisms and their positions on judgment, despite their differences. It either embraces instead novel ways of connecting with (a), (b), and (c) independently of judgment or gives primacy to judgment at the expense of connecting with (b) and (c). Some examples of the former are labor’s and capital’s materialistic connection with (a), (b), and (c) as found in Marx as well as the will’s connection with (a), (b), and (c) from the standpoint of life as found in Nietzsche. The primary example of the latter is the elimination of judgment’s connection with (b) and (c), orienting judgment exclusively to the mathematical concept of function for the purpose of logic and cognition as found in Frege. Indeed this last example is usually taken as signaling the beginning of 20^th century philosophy or, at least, its “analytic” version.

In tracing this philosophical period according to the aforementioned theme, we will look at selections from the following:

1)  Immanuel Kant’s Essay to the 1790 Prize Question—What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? (Selected pages on ERES)

2) G.W.F. Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge (1802). (Xeroxed copy of selected pages)

3) G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1806). (Xeroxed copy of selected pages)

4)  Lawrence Simon, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994) ISBN 0-87220-218-6. $14.95

5)  Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). (Selected pages on ERES)

6) Gottlob Frege’s Conceptual Notation [or Begriffschrift] (1879). (Selected pages on ERES)