Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Group Talk and Workshop (Clinton Tolley, UC San Diego)

The Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Group is delighted to welcome Clinton Tolley as its guest speaker for two separate lectures on May 5 (3-5 PM) and May 6 (12-2 PM). Dr. Tolley is a professor of Philosophy at UC San Diego and works in the areas of the history of modern philosophy, philosophy of culture, and social philosophy. He also serves as affiliated faculty in German studies, Latin American Studies, and the Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science at UCSD. Dr. Tolley coordinates the History of Philosophy Roundtable and the Phenomenology Research Group there, as well as co-coordinating (with Manuel Vargas) the Mexican Philosophy Lab.

Talk Title Lecture 1

(Monday, May 5, 2025, 3-5 PM)

Kant on the Existence of the Objects of the Ideas of Reason

Talk Abstract Lecture 1

The largest part (by far) of the Critique of Pure Reason (roughly half of the 880 page B-edition) is devoted to Kant’s investigation into the possibility that ‘pure reason’ is a source not just of representations, concepts, or ‘thoughts’, but of true cognitions and knowledge about things themselves. While this focus seems fitting, given the work’s title, Kant’s interpreters have been split in several directions as to what Kant takes himself to have accomplished in this section, and also why its task requires so many pages.  In some circles it has been common to see the first 350 pages (in the ‘Aesthetic’ and ‘Analytic’) as having already positively established the limits of human cognition, in terms of the interaction of the faculties of sensibility and the understanding in experience, which leaves to the analysis of pure reason (in the ‘Dialectic’) only the negative task of fending off ‘illusions’ that any further cognition is possible via those concepts (‘ideas’) which are distinctive of pure reason.  Especially of late, however, others have sought to go beyond this sort of ‘negativism’ concerning cognition by pure reason, by highlighting a more positive role in relation to cognition that Kant eventually proposes for pure reason and its ‘ideas’ — namely, their use in ‘regulating’ activity of the understanding itself and its cognitions in experience.  Here I will go farther still and argue that, by the end of the Dialectic, Kant means to establish something even more positive and ‘objective’ than either the ‘negativists’ or even the ‘regulativists’ allow — namely, that pure reason can and does achieve true cognitions and knowledge about the existence of the objects of its ‘ideas’, i.e., achieves a kind of cognition and knowledge of these things themselves.

Talk Title Lecture 2

(Tuesday, May 6, 2025, 12-2 PM)

Kant and Hegel on the Relation of Reason to Spirit

Talk Abstract Lecture 2

It has been a common and effective strategy, especially of late, to try to find pathways into Hegel’s idealism by tracing out the marks of Hegel’s engagement with Kant, in order to then use Hegel’s overlaps with, and departures from, more familiar theses from Kant to provide interpretive guidance for how to understand Hegel’s own position.  Here I want to take the opposite approach, and explore the possibility that Hegel’s speculative development of a philosophy of ‘spirit’, on the basis of his own dialectical examination of reason in the Phenomenology, can function as an interpretive guide for how best to understand the version of ‘spiritualist’ metaphysics that Kant himself ultimately takes to form the contents of reason’s ‘belief’, as a result of his own critique of pure reason.  By reading Kant’s Critique ‘speculatively’, rather than just ‘dialectically’, I will aim, first, to foreground the fact that Kant agrees with Hegel in taking dialectical reflection on reason to provide grounds for a commitment to a conception of the absolute as itself a ‘substance which is subject’, to use Hegel’s own gloss on the term ’spirit’.  I will also aim, secondly, to sharpen the comparative-interpretive question of to what extent (if at all) the Phenomenology’s transition from ‘Reason’ to ‘Spirit’ is meant to be, in and of itself, a critique of the conclusions of Kant’s own critique of reason, if Kant and Hegel ultimately agree that dialectical reflection on reason yields grounds not just for the necessity of the formation of the ‘idea’ of spirit, but also for the rational commitment to the real existence of spirit itself.

The Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Group is a a subgroup of the History of Philosophy Research Group, which focuses on European philosophy in Kant and post-Kantian traditions.