Idealism in Modern Philosophy

Idealism in Modern
Philosophy
PAUL GUYER
AND
ROLF-PETER HORSTMANN
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2023
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2023
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022945794
ISBN 978–0–19–284857–4 (hbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–284858–1 (pbk.)
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848574.001.0001
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 Contents

Preface vii
1. Introduction 1
2. Idealism in Early Modern Rationalism 15
3. Idealism in Early Modern British Philosophy 25
4. Kant 47
5. German Idealism 70
6. The German Response to Idealism I: Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche 110
7. British and American Idealism 125
8. The Rejection of British Idealism 150
9. The German Response to Idealism II: Neo-Kantianism
without Idealism 159
10. Further into the Twentieth Century 174
11. Conclusion 203

Bibliography 207
Index 229
 Preface

We offer here an introduction to idealism in modern philosophy. We focus

on idealism in epistemology and metaphysics, largely excluding idealism in
moral and political philosophy and idealism as a broader social movement,
and we focus on philosophical concepts, theses, and arguments for and
against them rather than speculating on historical causes for the develop-
ment, acceptance, or rejection of such philosophical content. In other words,
this is a work in the history of philosophy, not intellectual history. We do
talk about motives for idealism, however, but what we mean by that is chiefly
arguments; that is, our topic is both full-blown and self-identified idealism
in modern philosophy, meaning by that philosophical views according to
which reality is ultimately mental in some form or other, but also
approaches and arguments characteristic of idealism, particularly in episte-
mology, that have been adopted and accepted by philosophers and philoso-
phies that do not identify themselves as idealist because they are not
committed to the reduction of reality to the mental, or to idealism as
metaphysics. Unlike some previous writers, we do not distinguish episte-
mological and metaphysical idealism as two species of idealism, but we do
distinguish epistemological and metaphysical arguments for idealism, and
argue that the former have been much more widely appropriated and
accepted in modern philosophy, including the so-called analytic philosophy
of the twentieth century, even though that originated in some good part
as a critique of avowed idealism in late nineteenth-century Britain, than is
often recognized.
This book is a significant revision and expansion of our entry on
“Idealism” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In that encyclopedia
article, we perforce eschewed extensive reference to and debate with sec-
ondary literature on the primary sources that we discussed. In the present
work, with the continued aim of providing an accessible introduction to the
topic of idealism, we likewise eschew explicit debate with other commenta-
tors, but we have added references to literature that we think will help
readers dig more deeply into the material that we discuss and lead them
further into the extensive literature on the philosophers and topics that we
discuss. We have provided these references with parentheses in the text
viii 

rather than in foot- or endnotes, using the author-date method of citation.

The references to the works cited as well as to other useful works will be
found in the bibliography, which is divided into two sections covering
primary and secondary sources respectively.
Since our work originally appeared in the Stanford Encyclopedia, our first
debt of gratitude is naturally to the editors of that work, led by Ed Zalta, both
for the original invitation to produce the entry and for permission to reuse
the material from our entry. The Stanford Encyclopedia, a non-profit enter-
prise, has done a profound service for both professional philosophers and a
wider readership of students and interested readers for several decades now,
and has always had a generous policy allowing authors to publish their
material in other formats as well. We worked on this entry following Guyer’s
appointment at Brown University in 2012, developing our approach in several
seminars that we taught jointly at Brown made possible by Horstmann’s
repeated appointments as a Visiting Professor at Brown. We are grateful to
the Humanities Initiative at Brown, to Kevin McLaughlin, Dean of Faculty at
Brown during this period, and to the Brown Department of Philosophy for
their enthusiastic and generous support of these visits. We hope that this book
repays this generosity at least to some degree. We are also grateful to several
colleagues who participated in these seminars or otherwise discussed this
work with us, especially Justin Broackes and Charles Larmore, and to the
Brown students who participated in the seminars.
We would also like to thank jointly the late Margaret Dauler Wilson, who
brought us together as participants in the National Endowment for the
Humanities Summer Institute in Early Modern Philosophy that she directed
in 1974; that was the beginning of what we hope has proven to be a fruitful
professional relationship and what we know has been a treasured friendship
of nearly fifty years. And we would like to thank severally Dieter Henrich,
who was Horstmann’s teacher from the beginning of his university studies
in Berlin to the completion of his doctoral work in Heidelberg, and who
brought Guyer’s studies in Kant to a new level when he made his first visit to
Harvard in the spring of 1973, Guyer’s last semester in graduate school. As a
teacher, mentor, and in Horstmann’s case later a colleague in Munich, and
through his vast array of published works, he has been an inspiration for
both of us as we worked on the topic of idealism.
Finally, we are grateful to Sydney Dever Mendenhall for her generous and
exacting assistance with the proofreading of this book.
Paul Guyer (Brown University), Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Humboldt
Universität Berlin)
 1
Introduction

The terms “idealism” and “idealist” are by no means used only within
philosophy; they are used in many everyday contexts as well. Optimists
who believe that, in the long run, good will prevail are often called
“idealists.” This is not because such people are thought to be devoted to a
philosophical doctrine but because of their outlook on life generally; indeed,
they may even be pitied, or perhaps envied, for displaying a naive worldview
and not being philosophically critical at all. Even within philosophy, the
terms “idealism” and “idealist” are used in different ways, which often makes
their meaning dependent on the context. However, independently of context
one can distinguish between a descriptive (or classificatory) use of these
terms and a polemical one, although sometimes these different uses occur
together. Their descriptive use is best documented by paying attention to the
large number of different “idealisms” that appear in philosophical textbooks
and encyclopedias, ranging from metaphysical idealism through epistemo-
logical and aesthetic to moral or ethical idealism. Within these idealisms one
can find further distinctions, such as those between subjective, objective, and
absolute idealism, and even more obscure characterizations such as specu-
lative idealism and transcendental idealism. It is also remarkable that the
term “idealism,” at least within philosophy, is often used in such a way that it
gets its meaning through what is taken to be its opposite: as the meaningful
use of the term “outside” depends on a contrast with something considered
to be inside, so the meaning of the term “idealism” is often fixed by what is
taken to be its opposite. Thus, an idealist is sometimes taken to be someone
who is not a realist, not a materialist, not a dogmatist, not an empiricist, and
so on. Given the fact that many also want to distinguish between realism,
materialism, dogmatism, and empiricism, it is obvious that thinking of the
meaning of “idealism” as determined by what it is meant to be opposed to
leads to further complexity and gives rise to the impression that underlying
such characterizations lies some polemical or, at least, critical intent.
Within modern philosophy there are generally taken to be two fundamental
conceptions of idealism:

Idealism in Modern Philosophy. Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Oxford University Press.
© Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848574.003.0001
2    

1. Something mental (the mind, spirit, reason, will) is the ultimate

foundation of all reality, or even exhaustive of reality, and everything
considered to be “real” must be taken to be a manifestation of some-
thing mental (even the mental itself ).
2. Although the existence of something independent of the mind is
conceded, everything that we can know about this mind-independent
“reality” is held to be so permeated by the creative, formative, or
constructive activities of the mind (of some kind or other) that all
claims to knowledge must be considered, in some sense, to be a form
of self-knowledge, understood as knowledge that is rooted in contri-
butions by the subject of knowledge.

Idealism in sense (1) has been called “metaphysical” or “ontological

idealism,” while idealism in sense (2) has been called “formal” or “episte-
mological idealism.” The modern paradigm of idealism in sense (1) might be
considered to be George Berkeley’s “immaterialism,” according to which all
that exists are ideas and the minds, less than divine or divine, that have
them. (Berkeley himself did not use the term “idealism,” which entered
English usage from German only later.) The fountainhead for idealism in
sense (2) might be the position that Immanuel Kant asserted (if not clearly
in the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason [1781] then in his
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics [1783] and in the “Refutation of
Idealism” in the second edition of the Critique) according to which idealism
does “not concern the existence of things,” but asserts only that our “modes
of representation” of them, above all space and time, are not “determina-
tions that belong to things in themselves” but features of our own minds.
Kant called his position “transcendental” and “critical” idealism, and it has
also been called “formal” idealism. However, Kant’s position is complicated.
He argues that space and/or time are the necessary forms for our experience
of all objects and events—space and time in the case of external objects and
events, time only in the case of inner states; this is what he calls “empirical
realism.” Our knowledge of space and time in mathematics, particularly
geometry, is the foundation of all ordinary experience and natural science.
But in order to maintain that we have a priori knowledge of this fact and of
the properties of space and time, as in geometry, Kant argues that space
and time cannot be properties of things as they are in themselves, so must
be features only of our own representations of things—this is what he
calls the “transcendental ideality” of space and time, leading to his doctrine
of “transcendental idealism.” Yet Kant never sees any reason to deny
  3

the existence of things as they are in themselves, distinct from our

representations of them, or things in themselves for short, and for this reason
he vigorously rejects the assimilation of his position to that of Berkeley, which
he regards as idealism proper, or “dogmatic idealism.” Kant’s position is thus
an amalgam of idealism and realism, not a straightforward version of idealism
at all. And it contains one important lesson for thinking about idealism: a view
that we know things from our own human point of view can become a trivial
or anodyne tautology that we know things in the way that we know them, not
a form of idealism at all, unless it is accompanied with some reason to believe
that there must be some difference between the way that we know or represent
things and the way that they are in themselves—the view that Kant held
regarding the “transcendental ideality” of space and time. In the absence of
such a claim, many philosophical positions that might look like “epistemo-
logical idealism” turn out not to be versions of idealism after all.
So we will not treat metaphysical and epistemological idealism as two
forms of idealism. Instead, we draw a distinction between metaphysical and
epistemological arguments for idealism, where idealism is always under-
stood to be a metaphysical doctrine, namely that everything that exists is in
some way mental. We thus agree with A. C. Ewing, who wrote in 1934 that
all forms of idealism

have in common the view that there can be no physical objects existing
apart from some experience, and this might perhaps be taken as the
definition of idealism, provided that we regard thinking as part of experi-
ence and do not imply by “experience” passivity, and provided we include
under experience not only human experience but the so-called “Absolute
Experience” or the experience of a God such as Berkeley postulates.
(Ewing 1934: 3)

In other words, while reducing all reality to some kind of human perception, if
that is understood passively, is one form of idealism, it is not the only form—
reality may be reduced to the mental understood to involve activity as well as
passivity, or understood to comprise non-human as well as human mentality.
Thus Willem deVries’s more recent definition of idealism as the general
theory that reduces reality to some form or other of the mental is just:

Roughly, the genus comprises theories that attribute ontological priority to

the mental, especially the conceptual or ideational, over the non-mental.
(deVries 2009: 211)
4    

We also agree with Jeremy Dunham, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Sean Watson
when they write that

the idealist, rather than being anti-realist, is in fact . . . a realist concerning

elements more usually dismissed from reality.
(Dunham, Grant, and Watson 2011: 4)

These elements comprise minds of some kind or other. Idealism is under-

stood in contrast to materialism; while the materialist denies the reality of
mind as anything more than some property of matter, the idealist denies the
mind-independent reality of matter, but hardly denies the reality of mind
(or, on their account, which goes back to Plato, Ideas or Forms as well as
minds; however, we will not be considering pre-modern forms of idealism in
any detail).
We will thus follow Ewing (see his chapters II, IV–V, and VIII) in
distinguishing metaphysical from epistemological arguments for idealism.
Metaphysical arguments proceed by identifying some general constraints on
existence and arguing that only minds of some sort or other can satisfy such
conditions; epistemological arguments work by identifying some conditions
for knowledge and arguing that only objects that are in some sense or other
mental can satisfy the conditions for being known. In particular, epistemo-
logical arguments for idealism assume that there must be a necessary
isomorphism between or even an identity of knowledge and its object that
can obtain only if the object of knowledge is itself mental; we propose that
this claim of necessary identity between knowledge and what is known is the
difference between epistemologically motivated idealism and the metaphys-
ically neutral position that might be associated with philosophers such as
Rudolf Carnap, W. V. O. Quine, and Donald Davidson or even with Kant’s
realism with regard to the existence of things in themselves. Many twentieth-
century philosophers such as those mentioned have held that of course we
always know things from our own point of view, but consider any question
about whether or not our point of view “corresponds” to independent reality
an “external” question, as Carnap put it, which is either meaningless or is at
least not answerable on theoretical grounds. That is, they may see no reason
to positively affirm that reality must match our way of representing it, but
neither do they admit any reason to deny this—their stance is to avoid
metaphysics altogether precisely by omitting any claim to necessary identity
between knowledge and the known. Indeed, that premise might be regarded
as crucial for either idealism or materialist realism as metaphysical
  5

doctrines, for Tom Rockmore has recently argued that materialist doctrines
since the time of Parmenides have also been based on the premise of a
necessary identity between knowledge and the known (Rockmore 2021)—
the difference is just that in the case of materialism, a view about the nature
of the object of knowledge is transferred to the conception of knowing and
the knower on the basis of the presumed identity, while in the case of
idealism the conception of the nature of knowledge and the knower is
transferred to the conception of the object of knowledge on the basis of
the same presumed identity.
It is in order to preserve the distinction between traditional idealism and
positions such as those of Carnap, Quine, and Davidson, or “conceptual”
and “linguistic idealists” such as Nicholas Rescher and Thomas Hofweber
(Rescher 1973; Hofweber 2017), all of which might be considered expres-
sions of the default position in twentieth-century philosophy held by all but
“naive realists” who believe that we necessarily represent reality exactly as it
is, that we define idealism by the claim that reality is in some way or other
fundamentally mental while recognizing epistemological arguments for
idealism as a metaphysical doctrine rather than epistemological idealism
as a distinct form of idealism. Of course metaphysical and epistemological
arguments for idealism can be combined by a single philosopher. As
we will see, Berkeley does so, and so does Kant in arguing for the transcen-
dental idealist part of his complex position. Others separate them, for
example in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British philosophy
F. H. Bradley and J. McT. E. McTaggart constructed metaphysical argu-
ments for idealism, while in the same period the Americans Josiah Royce
and Brand Blanshard offered epistemological arguments for idealism.
In what follows, we will concentrate mainly on the discussion of philo-
sophical theories that either endorse or claim to endorse idealism on onto-
logical and/or epistemological grounds. At some points in its complex
history, however, above all in the social as well as philosophical movement
that dominated British and American universities in the second half of the
nineteenth century and through World War I, idealism in either of its
philosophical forms was indeed connected to idealism in the popular sense
of progressive and optimistic social thought. This was true for figures such as
Bradley and Royce and their predecessors and contemporaries such as
Thomas Hill Green and Bernard Bosanquet. There has recently been con-
siderable interest in British or more generally anglophone idealism as a
movement in social philosophy, or even a social movement, but that aspect
of modern idealism will remain beyond our purview here, even if in some
6    

ways that might be its most important aspect (see treatments of idealism as a
moral, political, and social movement: Mander 2011; Boucher and Vincent
2012; Mander ed. 2000; and Mander and Panagakou eds. 2016).
Our distinction between the view that epistemological and ontological
idealism are two distinct forms of idealism, which we reject, and the view
that that there are distinct metaphysical and epistemological arguments for
idealism, which we accept (which is not to say that we will be endorsing
these arguments themselves!), has not always been clearly made. However,
Josiah Royce, in many ways the leading spokesman for idealism in the
history of American philosophy (see Flower and Murphey 1977: ch. 12;
Kuklick 1977: chs. 8, 14–16; Kuklick 1985a; Oppenheim 2005), pointed in
the direction of our distinction at the end of the nineteenth century. On
Royce’s definitions, epistemological idealism

involves a theory of the nature of our human knowledge; and various

decidedly different theories are called by this name in view of one common
feature, namely, the stress that they lay upon the “subjectivity” of a larger
or smaller portion of what pretends to be our knowledge of things.
(Royce 1892: xii–xiii)

Metaphysical idealism, he says, “is a theory as to the nature of the real world,
however we may come to know that nature” (Royce 1892: xiii), namely a
theory, as he says quoting from another philosopher of the time, based
on the

belief in a spiritual principle at the basis of the world, without the reduction
of the physical world to a mere illusion.
(1892: xiii; quoting Falckenberg 1886: 476)

This looks like a straightforward distinction between epistemological and

metaphysical versions of idealism. But Royce then argued that epistemolog-
ical idealism ultimately entails a foundation in metaphysical idealism, in
particular that “the question as to how we ‘transcend’ the ‘subjective’ in our
knowledge,” that is, the purely individual, although it exists for both meta-
physical realists and idealists, can only be answered by metaphysical idealists
(Royce 1892: xiv). We will argue similarly that while epistemology can entail
idealism, on the assumption that the identity of knowledge and the known
must be in some sense necessary and that this can be so only if the known as
well as knowledge is in some sense mental, this should be distinguished from
  7

the more general and extremely widespread view that our knowledge is
always formed within our own point of view, conceptual framework, or
web of belief. This view may well be, as we have suggested, the default
position of much twentieth-century philosophy, “continental” as well as
“analytic,” but it does not by itself entail that reality is essentially mental.
Our distinction between epistemological and metaphysical arguments for
idealism can also be associated with a more general distinction between two
major kinds of motives for idealism: those that are grounded in self-
conceptions, that is, in convictions about the role that the self or the
human being plays in the world, and those based on what might corre-
spondingly be called world-convictions, that is, on conceptions about the
way the world is constituted objectively or at least appears to be constituted
to a human subject. Concerning motives based on self-conceptions of
human beings, idealism has seemed hard to avoid to many who have
taken freedom in one of its many guises (freedom of choice, freedom of
the will, freedom as autonomy) to be an integral part of any adequate
conception of the self, because the belief in the reality of freedom often
goes together with a commitment to some version of mental causation, and
it is tempting to think that the best or at least the most economical way to
account for mental causation consists in “mentalizing” or idealizing all of
reality, or at least to maintain that the kind of causal determinism that seems
to conflict with freedom is only one of our ways of representing the world.
This is a form of ontological argument for idealism. Motives for idealism
based on world-convictions can be found in many different attitudes toward
objectivity. If one believes in science as the best and only way to get an
objective, subject-independent conception of reality, one might still turn to
idealism, because of the conditions supposed to be necessary in order to
make sense of knowledge of a law of nature or of the normativity of logical
inferences with laws of nature; this would be an epistemological argument
for idealism. Then again, if one believes in the non-conventional reality of
normative facts one might also be drawn to idealism in order to account for
their non-physical reality—Plato’s idealism in the theory of Forms, which
asserts the reality of non-physical Ideas to explain the status of norms and
then reduces all other reality to mere simulacra of the former, a forerunner
of all later idealism, might be considered to offer an ontological motivation
for idealism in its explanation of the reality of norms. An inclination
toward idealism might even arise from considerations pertaining to the
ontological status of aesthetic values—is beauty an objective attribute of
objects?—or from the inability or the unwillingness to think of the
8    

constitution of social and cultural phenomena like society or religion in

terms of physical theory. In short: There are about as many motives and
reasons for endorsing idealism as there are different aspects of reality to be
known or explained.
All this being said, a major obstacle to an adequate understanding of
philosophical theories leaning toward an explicit or implicit endorsement of
idealism is the obscurity of the very term “mental” and associated terms such
as “spiritual,” “mind,” and “spirit” that traditionally play such a central role
in any characterization of idealism. In common usage the term “mental”
does not imply any specific philosophical doctrine. The term ordinarily
characterizes a cluster of properties and states of human beings and perhaps
other “higher” organisms distinguished from other constellations of attri-
butes attached to them falling under the general rubric of physical qualities.
It is normally said of people that that they have not just physical qualities
and abilities such as shape, resistance, bodily mutability, mobility, and so on,
but that they also have mental properties such as the capacity to think, to
speak, to dream, to desire, to request, and so on (for a typical list of mental
qualities, see Descartes 1641: Meditation II; for an argument that human
beings must be conceived as having both “P” and “M” predicates, that is,
both physical and mental properties, see Strawson 1959). In the latter usage
the term “mental” may cover everything that cannot be given a physical
description or where it is at least doubtful whether it can be described in
terms of physical properties. Someone who is thinking, dreaming, desiring,
etc. is said to be engaged in mental activities while someone who is running,
swimming, or eating and drinking is considered to be involved in physical
activities. But from this ordinary adjectival usage of the terms “mental” and
“physical” it seems to be a long way to a substantial philosophical theory.
Common usage may assume that mental properties cannot be described in
physical terms, but takes no position that they cannot consist in or be
explained by physical properties, as for example Descartes did when he
argued that mind and body are two distinct kinds of “substances”
(Descartes 1641: Meditations II and VI). The philosophical implications of
the terms “the mental” or “the mind” as well as the terms “the physical” or
“matter” are not obvious from common usage, nor are the relations between
them. Traditional suggestions about the character of those relations include
relations of dependence or supervenience, which imply that one is ontolog-
ically more basic than the other, of expression or manifestation, which
implies that one is epistemologically more basic than the other, and identity
or sameness in either direction.
  9

The shift from the everyday adjectival application to the philosophical

and substantival use of the terms “mental” and “physical” seems to rely on
the idea that in order to be engaged in activities such as thinking, dreaming,
and desiring one has to presuppose not merely a subject for those predicates,
something that occupies the grammatical position of a thinker or dreamer or
desirer, but a subject that is a specifically mental entity or a mind. This is
supposed to be something ontologically different from an item that is in the
position to participate in activities such running, swimming, and eating and
drinking, activities that presuppose physical entities or bodies. Because of
the presumed difference in kind of the properties they have these entities are
introduced as independent of each other and as each requiring different
descriptions. In the modern period such a jump from the adjectival to the
substantival use of the terms “mental” and “physical” can be traced to
Descartes, who supposed that thought and extension (being extended, e.g.,
having shape and size) are essentially different modes of being, and that any
kind of substance can have only one “essential” mode, thus that mind and
body must be two essentially different kinds of substances. Descartes’s
distinction long maintained its grip on philosophy, even though it was
immediately recognized that his own attempt to explain the obvious fact
of interaction between mental and physical properties and events in the
life of any human being through communication between mind and body at
the point of the pineal gland deep within the brain was outlandish, and
subsequent attempts, such as the “occasionalism” of Nicolas Malebranche
(Malebranche 1674–5) or the “pre-established harmony” of Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
(Leibniz 1714; Wolff 1720; Baumgarten 1739), were not much better.
One way of attempting to sidestep the Cartesian dilemma altogether
was by not starting from the substantival use of the terms “mental” and
“physical.” Instead, the “mental” and the “mind” but also the “physical” and
“body” are conceived in non-substantival terms, rather as activities that
ground what are ordinarily regarded as both physical and mental phenom-
ena. This strategy led not only to a new approach to the physical in Kant
himself, but to a new conception of idealism among the philosophers
following Kant in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany.
According to these post-Kantian idealists, whatever there is has to be
conceived of as manifestations of mental activities. They understand the
basic structure of reality as consisting of the realization of mental activities
in dynamic processes, activities that somehow materialize both in mental
and physical objects standing in different constellations. However, such a
10    

strategy could be pursued in an analogous way with regard to the “physical”

and the “body” as well: As the activities of thinking, dreaming, and desiring
find their expressions or manifestations in the mental domain in the objec-
tified shape of thoughts, dreams, and desires, so too physical forces and
powers could be taken to manifest themselves in the physical domain in the
shape of material objects and their interactions. While the “physicalist”
might then conceive of mental events and states as supervenient on physical
objects as so understood, the idealist sees mental activities as self-standing
and self-explanatory. Although the model for thinking of the mental along
the lines of activities first and substances only afterwards if at all is a
hallmark of idealistic positions, in particular of the post-Kantian German
idealistic doctrines of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the opposite model that
conceives of the physical and bodies in terms of forces and dynamic
processes has been pursued as well. The process ontology of Alfred North
Whitehead (Whitehead 1929) is an example of this way of thinking.
Physicalists too could and did move from a substantival-based conception
of matter, such as Epicurean or early modern atomism, to a conception of
the physical world in terms of activities; indeed, Kant’s own alternative to
atomism in physical theory, which reduces physical reality to attractive and
repulsive forces, could be seen as the grandfather of non-substance-based
physicalism. But remaining with the case of idealism, since such positions
turn on the preference for using the category of activity rather than of
substance for the primary characterization of reality, they can also be
regarded as ontological arguments for idealism understood in the modified,
activity-based sense.
Yet even if we accept the move from the adjectival to the substantival use
of the term “mental” and agree that what is taken to be reality in its entirety
contains more than just matter subject to the laws of physics, we might still
have reservations that in addition to matter there must be mental entities.
This is because the vagueness of the latter term is not removed whether it is
understood in either its substantival or its activity-based sense. What does it
mean to be a mental substance? What does it mean to be the manifestation
of an activity or force? Many people will feel uncomfortable identifying with
any version of idealism. They may reasonably be irritated by the fact that
although idealists prioritize the mental they have little to say about its
characteristics except that it is a non-material element of reality.
However, this is not a problem only for idealist theories; it is also a
challenge to competing materialist and dualist positions as well once they
  11

try to distinguish between different kinds of phenomena and attempt to

capture the difference with the mental-physical distinction. Modern materi-
alists who allow for mental or psychological phenomena in contrast to
physical ones and try to explain the former by the latter, either by stipulating
identity (the Australians like J. J. C. Smart and David Armstrong among
others; see Smart 1963 and Armstrong 1968) or by relying on some sort of
supervenience (e.g., Davidson, Jaegwon Kim, and David Chalmers; see
Davidson 2001; Kim 1993; Chalmers 1996), also face the difficulty of finding
a satisfying description of what they take to be non-physical or mental states.
The same is true of dualists in all periods in the history of philosophy.
Although the proponents of dualism might avoid implausibilities connected
with reductionist or supervenience views, they do not fare much better when
it comes to providing an uncontroversial characterization of what they are
referring to when talking about the mental.
So it is no wonder that what exactly is meant by “mental” depends a great
deal on the general explanatory approach of a metaphysical theory, that is,
whether it establishes its results within a framework that gives priority to
substances over activities or within a setting that favors activities over
substances. These two main tendencies in metaphysical discourse about
reality are independent of all the -isms mentioned so far (idealism, materi-
alism, dualism). The first wants to convince us that everything that can be
addressed has to be addressed in terms of things that have some sort of
stable existence, thus that in the end whenever we deal with anything that
exists we are dealing with substantial entities or things. These substances
have to possess qualities or attributes, among them mental properties like
thinking, perceiving, imagining, and willing and physical ones like exten-
sion, solidity, shape, and motion that are reducible or not to each other or to
some third item. The other tendency starts with the conviction that what is
ultimately real are activities or dynamic processes, paradigmatically in
idealist circles the operation of thinking in any of its exemplary forms like
perceiving, imagining, and willing, understood as activities or dynamic
processes. Thinking as activity somehow expresses itself in what for us
appears in the shape of substantial things with qualities. A preference for
an ontology based on activities or substances does not immediately lead to a
preference for idealism or materialism, but rather determines the conceptual
framework within which the debate between materialism and idealism will
be conceived and conducted.
Thus someone who endorses the substance-attribute structure as the
ultimate ontological framework of any philosophical theory can realize
12    

this endorsement in any of the alternatives mentioned here. Those who

prefer a materialist characterization of the objects of experience will ulti-
mately frame their conception of reality in terms of substantial entities
like matter or its particles, while those who come to a substance-attribute
agenda with idealistic ambitions come up with mind, spirit, or God con-
ceived of as substantial entities or things as the ultimate constituents of
reality. Materialists who are attracted to an ontology of activities or pro-
cesses will characterize reality in terms of physical activities or processes and
only then ascribe them to substantial entities conceived of as moments in
these activities or processes, perhaps even as stalled or frozen moments in
them, as in Kant’s construction of matter from attractive and repulsive
forces (Kant 1786) or Whitehead’s process philosophy (Whitehead 1929).
Idealists attracted to a dynamic framework of activities as fundamental will
conceive of mental activities as autonomous events that might give rise to
substances or result in thing-like appearances but will not take substances of
any kind as the starting point for their theories.
In what follows we are interested in the distinction between substance-
invoking and activity-based ontologies only as a difference between
substance- and activity-based strategies for idealism. Within the period we
consider, from the early seventeenth century to the late twentieth century,
traditional pre-Kantian philosophies (continental rationalism and British
empiricism) insofar as they exhibit idealist tendencies as well as later forms
of idealism such as the British and American idealisms of the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries are dominated by a substance-oriented ontology,
while the classical post-Kantian German philosophers such as Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel favor the ontology of activity. Kant’s own complex
position equivocates not only between idealism and some form of realism
but also between substance- and activity-based ontologies.
We conclude this Introduction with a little history. Although Plato’s term
eidos—“Idea” or “Form”—might have been its eponym, the term “idealism”
became the name for a whole family of philosophical positions only in the
course of the eighteenth century. Even then, those whom critics called
“idealists” did not identify themselves as such until the time of Kant, and
no sooner did the label come into use than those to whom it was applied or
who used it themselves attempted to escape it or refine it. As already
mentioned, Berkeley, the paradigmatic idealist in the British tradition, did
not use the name for his own position, which he called rather immaterialism.
Leibniz did use the term as early as 1702 to contrast Epicurus with Plato,
calling the latter an idealist and the former a materialist because according to
  13

him idealists like Plato hold that “everything occurs in the soul as if there
were no body” whereas on the materialism of Epicurus “everything occurs in
the body as if there were no soul” (Leibniz 1702: 578). In this text Leibniz
does not call his own position idealism but says that it combines both of
these positions; here he was apparently in the mood in which he considered
physical objects to be real objects correlated with mind-like monads, instead
of the mood familiar from such works as his late essays “On the Principles of
Nature and Grace” and “The Monadology,” familiar to later eighteenth-
century philosophers, in which he unequivocally regarded physical bodies as
the mere appearance of harmoniously related monads to each other.
It seems to have been Christian Wolff who first used “idealism” explicitly
as a classificatory term. Wolff, often considered the most dedicated
Leibnizian of his time (although in fact his position was more eclectic than
at least some versions of Leibniz’s) set out to integrate the terms “idealism”
and “materialism” into his taxonomy of philosophical attitudes of those
“who strive towards the knowledge and philosophy of things” in the “Preface
to the other [second] Edition” of his so-called German Metaphysics (Wolff
1720, second edition 1747). Wolff distinguishes between two basic attitudes,
one of which he sees exemplified by the skeptic, the other by what he calls
“the dogmatist.” The skeptic doubts the possibility of knowledge in general
and thus refuses to defend any positive claim at all. By contrast, the
dogmatist puts forward positive doctrines, and these can be divided into
those which posit as fundamental either one single kind of entities [Art der
Dinge] or two different kinds. Wolff names the supporters of the first
position “monists” and the adherents of the second “dualists.” This amounts
to the division of all dogmatic doctrines, that is, all knowledge-claims with
respect to the ultimate constitution of reality, into monistic and dualistic
theories. Here is where the term “idealist” then makes its appearance in
Wolff ’s typology: he distinguishes within the monists between idealists and
materialists. Idealists “concede only spirits or else those things that do not
consist of matter,” whereas materialists “do not accept anything in philos-
ophy other than the corporeal and take spirits and souls to be a corporeal
force.” Dualists, on the contrary, are happy “to accept both bodies and spirits
as real and mutually independent things.” Wolff then goes on to distinguish
within idealism between “egoism” and “pluralism,” depending on whether
an idealist thinks just of himself as a real entity or whether he will allow for
more than one (spiritual) entity; the first of these positions would also come
to be called solipsism, so that solipsism would be a variety of idealism but
not all idealism would be solipsism.
14    

Wolff ’s way of classifying a philosophical system was enormously influ-

ential in eighteenth-century Continental philosophy—for example, it was
closely followed by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in his 1739 Metaphysica,
which was in turn used by Kant as the textbook for his metaphysics
(and anthropology) lectures throughout his career, and whose definition of
dogmatic idealism, as contrasted to his own “transcendental” or “critical”
idealism, would also be that it is the position according to which there
are only minds—and so it is no surprise that almost all talk about idealism
was heavily influenced by Wolff ’s characterization. This is so because it
well reflects the main metaphysical disputes in seventeenth- and early
eighteenth-century philosophy on the Continent. In terms of Wolff ’s dis-
tinctions, these disputes can be framed as disputes between (a) monists and
dualists and then, among monists, (b) idealists and materialists; positions in
this debate were often influenced by perplexities surrounding the ontological
question of the possibility of interaction of substances, although they were
also influenced by the (epistemological) debate over innatism. Although
neither dualism, whose main representative was Descartes (who asserted
the existence of both res cogitans and res extensa), nor monism, allegedly
though debatably represented by Spinoza in its materialistic version
(substantia, deus, natura) and by Leibniz in its idealistic form (monad,
entelechy, simple substance) succeeded in finding satisfying answers to
this and related questions, in the early modern era these disputes shaped
the conception of what the object of metaphysics (metaphysica generalis sive
ontologia) was supposed to be.
 2
Idealism in Early Modern Rationalism

Prior to Wolff, neither defending nor refuting idealism seems to have been a
central issue for rationalist philosophers, and none of them called them-
selves idealists. Yet what are by later lights idealistic tendencies—concepts
and premises for arguments that would later be taken to lead to idealism—
can nevertheless be found among them.
While Descartes’s “first philosophy” clearly defends dualism, he takes his
target to be skepticism rather than idealism, and thus from our point of view
he is concerned to resist the adoption of epistemological grounds for
idealism. Spinoza is often although controversially thought to defend a
form of materialism, but takes his primary target to be pluralism as con-
trasted to monism. Leibniz does not seem overly worried about choosing
between idealist and dualist forms of his “monadology” (Adams 1994
regards Leibniz as having consistently moved toward idealism over the
course of his career, while Garber 2009 presents him as remaining more
equivocal on the topic), but his view that the states of monads can be only
perceptions and appetitions (desires) suggests a metaphysical argument for
idealism, while his famous thesis that each monad represents the entire
universe from its own point of view might be taken to be an epistemological
ground for idealism, even if he does not say as much. Nicolas Malebranche’s
theory of “seeing all things in God” might be the closest we find to an explicit
assertion in seventeenth-century philosophy of an argument for idealism on
both epistemological and ontological grounds, and thus be taken as a
forerunner of the “absolute” idealism of the nineteenth century. While
from a later point of view it may seem surprising that these rationalists
were not more concerned with explicitly asserting or refuting one or both
approaches to idealism, they were more focused on theological puzzles about
the nature and essence of God, metaphysical questions as to how to reconcile
the conception of God with views about the independence or freedom of
finite beings such as ourselves, and epistemological problems as to the
possibility of knowledge and certainty. Once Descartes had distinguished
mental and physical substances, his successors certainly worried about how
two such different kinds of things can interact, and Leibniz adopted the idea

Idealism in Modern Philosophy. Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Oxford University Press.
© Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848574.003.0002
16    

of a pre-established harmony among the perceptions and “appetitions”

(desires) of different monads as his solution to this problem; but having
associated the concept of idealism with Plato’s doctrine of the existence of
ideas separate from ordinary particulars, he did not seem to conceive of his
own solution to the problems of the nature of and interactions between finite
substances as itself a form of idealism.
However, if one situates their positions within the framework provided by
Wolff it is not that difficult to find traces of idealism derived from both
ontological and epistemological grounds in them. With respect to their
metaphysical or ontological teachings, this claim may seem surprising.
While according to Wolff idealists are representatives of a species of meta-
physical monism, Descartes is one of the most outspoken metaphysical
dualists in the history of philosophy. Hence to impute idealistic tendencies
to Descartes’s metaphysics seems like an elementary error. And in the case
of Spinoza one could argue that although he definitely is a (very radical)
monist and thus could count as an idealist within Wolff ’s taxonomy, he is
instead traditionally considered to be a materialist in Wolff ’s sense.
Consequently, it appears as if there is no basis for burdening either
Descartes or Spinoza with idealism as defined by Wolff. Leibniz, meanwhile,
often seems unwilling to commit himself to idealism even though that is the
most natural interpretation of his monadology, while only Malebranche, as
noted, seems to come close to explicitly asserting epistemological and
perhaps ontological arguments for idealism as well.
Nevertheless, both Descartes and Spinoza provide a starting point for
their metaphysical doctrines with their conceptions of God, a starting point
that is already infected with idealistic elements if idealism is understood as
implying a commitment to the primacy or at least the unavoidability and
irreducibility of mental items in the constitution and order of things in
general. Both agree that in order to gain insight into the constitution of the
world one has to find out what God wants us, or maybe better: allows us to
know about it (see, e.g., Descartes 1641: Meditation IV, paras. 7–8 and
especially 13; Spinoza, Ethics I, XVI). They also agree that the world is
created by God although they have different views as to what this means.
Whereas Descartes thinks of God as existing outside the world of the
existing things He created (see Meditation III, paras. 13 and 22) Spinoza
holds that whatever exists is just a peculiar way in which God is present (see
Ethics I, XXV, Corollary). Of all existing things all that God permits us to
know clearly and distinctly is (again according to both Descartes and
Spinoza) that their nature consists either in thinking or in extension. This
      17

claim can be seen as providing in the case of Descartes the basis for his
justification of ontological dualism. His distinction between extended and
thinking substances is not just meant to give rise to a complete classification
of all existing things in virtue of their main attributes but also to highlight
the irreducibility of mental (thinking) substances to physical or corporeal
(extended) substances because of differences between their intrinsic natures
(see, e.g., Meditation VI, para. 19, and Principles of Philosophy I, §§51–4).
The opposite, that is the non-reducibility of physical to mental substance,
would also be true, but of less importance to subsequent idealists. In the case
of Spinoza, thinking and extension refer not only to attributes of individual
things but primarily to attributes of God (see Ethics II, Propositions I, II, and
VII, Scholium), making them the fundamental ways in which God himself
expresses his nature in each individual thing. This move gives rise to his
ontological monism because he can claim that all individual things are just
expressions of God’s presence in modes of these two fundamental attributes.
Although the idea that God is the creator of the world of individual
existing things (Descartes) or that God himself is manifested in every
individual existing thing (Spinoza) might already be considered to be suffi-
cient as a motivating force for subsequent disputes as to the true nature of
reality and thus if God himself is conceived in mentalistic terms might have
given rise to what were then called “idealistic” positions in ontology, other
peculiarities within Descartes’s and Spinoza’s position might well have led to
the same result, that is, to the adoption of idealism on ontological grounds.
Denial of the corporeality of God might especially have been such a motive.
Whereas Descartes vigorously denies the corporeality of God (Principles of
Philosophy I, §23) and hence could be seen as starting an argument for
idealism insofar as God is seen as the only truly independent substance (see
Hatfield 2018), Spinoza vehemently insists on God’s corporeality (Ethics I,
Proposition XV, Scholium) and thus could be taken to be in favor of
materialism. Sir Isaac Newton is another seventeenth-century thinker who
conceives of God as present throughout the universe, and thus is taken to
insist on the corporeality of God. But if God were already conceived of as
essentially mind-like, then the theory of divine omnipresence could just as
easily be the beginning of an argument for idealism.
Things are different when it comes to epistemological grounds for
idealism. Descartes’s and Spinoza’s views of knowledge seem to be based
on versions of the traditional conception of truth as adequatio rei et intel-
lectus. They hold that knowledge should accommodate itself to reality, and
thus hardly seem to be paradigms for conceptions according to which
18    

knowledge is rooted in a cognizing subject actively contributing to the

constitution of the object of knowledge—the conception of knowledge that
Kant would subsequently present as the “Copernican” alternative to that
traditional view (CPuR B xvi–xvii). Both Descartes and Spinoza think of
knowledge as the result of a process in which we become aware of what
really is the case independently of us with respect to both the nature of
objects and their conceptual and material relations. Descartes and Spinoza
take cognition to be a process of grasping clear and distinct ideas of what is
the true character of existing things rather than a process of contributing to
the formation of their nature. According to Descartes the sources of our
knowledge of things are our abilities to have intuitions of the simple nature
of things and to draw conclusions from these intuitions via deduction (Rules
for the Direction of the Mind Rule III, para. 4ff.). For him the cognitive
procedure is a process of discovery by finding clear and distinct ideas (see
Discourse on the Method, Part 6, para. 6) of what already is out there as the
real nature of things created by God (Discourse, Part 4, paras. 3 and 7). In a
similar vein, Spinoza thinks of knowledge as an activity that in its highest
form as intuitive (or third genus of) cognition leads to an adequate insight
into the essence of things (Ethics II, Proposition XL, Scholium II, and Ethics
V, Propositions XXV–XXVIII), an insight that gives rise to general concepts
(notiones communes) on which ratiocinationes, that is, the processes of
inference and deduction, are based (Ethics II, Proposition XL, Scholium I)
the results of which provide the second genus of cognition (ratio). Thus the
problem for both Descartes and Spinoza is not so much that of the episte-
mologically motivated idealist, that is, to uncover what we contribute
through our cognitive faculties to our conception of an object, rather their
problem is to determine how it comes that we very often have a distorted
view of what there is and are accordingly led to misguided beliefs and errors.
Given what they take to be a basic fact that God has endowed us with the
capacity to know the truth (albeit within certain limits), that is, to know to a
certain degree how or what things really are, this interest in the possibility
of error makes perfectly good sense (Meditation IV, paras. 3–17; Principles
of Philosophy I, 70–2; Ethics II, Proposition 49, Scholium). So neither
Descartes nor Spinoza seem to be groping toward an epistemological argu-
ment for idealism.
At first glance, neither does Leibniz. In his project for a “universal
characteristic,” Leibniz can be regarded as having taken great interest in a
method for inquiry, but he does not seem to have taken much interest in the
epistemological issue of skepticism or the possibility of knowledge, and thus
      19

did not explicitly characterize his famous “monadology” as an epistemolog-

ical basis for idealism. But Leibniz’s ontology can be seen as pointing toward
idealism. He took great interest in the ontology of substances, following
Descartes in conceiving of God as the infinite substance and everything else
as finite substances—in contrast to Spinoza, whom he visited before the
latter’s death, he firmly rejected a single-substance monism, that is, one in
which finite substances are mere manifestations of God’s nature rather than
independent creations by God. And from there the logic of his monadology
clearly points toward idealism even if Leibniz did not acknowledge it. One
explicitly ontological argument for the monadology that Leibniz frequently
deploys is that in order to avoid an infinite regress everything composite
must ultimately consist of simples, but that since space and time are
infinitely divisible extended matter cannot be simple while thoughts, even
with complex content, do not literally have parts, nor do the minds that have
them, so minds, or monads, are the only candidates for the ultimate con-
stituents of reality. Thus the late text entitled “The Monadology” begins with
the assertions that

The monad which we are here to discuss is nothing but a simple substance
which enters into compounds,

that

There must be simple substances, since there are compounds, [and] the
compounded is but a collection or an aggregate of simples,

but that

where there are no parts, it is impossible to have either extension, or figure,

or divisibility and conversely where there is simplicity there cannot be
extension or figure or divisibility. (“Monadology,” §§1–3)

Yet monads must have some qualities in order to exist (§8) and to differ
from one another, as they must insofar as they are numerically distinct (§9),
and if the fundamental properties of matter are excluded, this leaves only the
fundamental properties of mind, which Leibniz holds to be perception, “The
passing state which enfolds and represents a multitude in unity” (§14) and
appetition, “the internal principle which brings about change or the passage
from one perception to another” (§15; all from PPL 643–4). This argument
20    

clearly seems to imply that all finite substances are ultimately mental in
nature (and the infinite substance, God, is obviously mental in nature); thus
it seems to be a paradigmatic ontological argument for idealism, from which
an epistemological complement would automatically follow, since if there is
knowledge of reality at all, which Leibniz hardly seems to doubt, and reality
is ultimately mental, then knowledge too must be of the mental. Leibniz
would not be arguing from the premise that knowledge must be identical
with the known, thus that reality must be mental because knowledge is, but
would rather be concluding with this identity: since reality itself is mental, it
is after all identical (in kind) with knowledge.
Yet Leibniz sometimes seems to be trying to avert such a conclusion
by appeal to his idea of “pre-established harmony,” and this is possible
because he himself interprets this idea in two different ways. Early in his
career, in such texts as “Primary Truths” (1680–4) and the “Discourse on
Metaphysics” (1686) (both texts unpublished in Leibniz’s lifetime and not
known to his immediate successors such as Wolff and Baumgarten), Leibniz
introduces the doctrine of pre-established harmony on truth-theoretical
grounds. His argument is that everything that is true of a substance is so
because the predicate of a true proposition is contained in the complete
concept of its subject and because that complete concept reflects the proper-
ties or “traces” in the substance that is that subject; that there are true
propositions linking every substance in the world to every other, thus the
complete concept of each substance must be a complete concept of the
universe itself and each substance must bear within itself as properties traces
of every other in the universe; and thus that each substance must reflect, or,
as mental, represent the entire universe. Yet since (finite) substances are also
defined as existing independently of one another (although not existing
independently from the infinite substance, God), there is a question as to
why each should truthfully represent all the others, which Leibniz answers
by appeal to the idea of a pre-established harmony: although considered
from the point of view of the concept of substance it does not seem necessary
that every substance truly represent all the others, in his goodness, thus in
his preference for a maximally harmonious world, God has nevertheless
made it such that they do.
In this mood, Leibniz tends to explain the existence of body as an artifact
of the fact that each monad represents the world from its own point of view:
physical locations and the bodies that occupy them are just the way in which
the difference in the points of view of the monads is represented by them,
but have no deeper reality; or, as Leibniz often says, space, spatiality, and
      21

bodies are just phenomena bene fundata, that is, “well-founded modes of our
consideration” (PPL 270).
Perhaps Leibniz obscured the completely idealist implications of his
monadology from himself and some followers as well by the ambiguity of
his conception of the pre-established harmony among all substances, an
assumption that itself does not turn on any epistemological premise but on a
theological premise, that of God’s benevolence, which might be considered
metaphysical in character. In many places, Leibniz considers the appearance
of spatial relation to be nothing but the way in which the pre-established
harmony between monads that properly speaking have only mental proper-
ties appears to those monads, and thus considers space and everything
insofar as it seems spatial to be phaenomena bene fundata, an obvious source
for Kant’s later conception of the spatio-temporal realm as merely phenom-
enal. Sometimes, however, Leibniz wrote as if the mental and the physical,
that is, the spatially extended, are two separate realms, each of which evolves
according to its own internal principles, but with a pre-established harmony
between them creating the appearance of interaction between them.
Sometimes Leibniz interpreted his pre-established harmony in a monisti-
cally idealist way, sometimes in defense of metaphysical dualism. Perhaps
Leibniz was genuinely undecided between two interpretations of the pre-
established harmony and two conceptions of the reality of body, sometimes
being a committed idealist and sometimes a dualist. As we will see later, even
among the most committed absolute idealists of the nineteenth century it is
not always clear whether they are actually denying the existence of matter or
only subordinating it to mind in one way or another. But his basic concep-
tion of the monads, which did not seem to vary much between 1686 and
1714, entailed idealism, whether Leibniz liked this result or not. (So in the
end we agree with Adams 1994.)
Leibniz’s monadology can thus be seen as a forerunner of an ontological
argument for idealism that brings an idealist epistemology in its train. His
conception of space and time as phenomena bene fundata was clearly a
forerunner of Kant’s conception of the transcendental ideality of space and
time, if not of the whole package of his transcendental idealism, which also
affirms the existence of things in themselves of unknowable nature, which
are therefore not all determinable as mental or having representations,
except perhaps in our own case. But as we have just seen, Leibniz did not
himself unequivocally affirm idealism, and as we will shortly see subsequent
Leibnizians such as Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten argued for dualism and
for a corresponding interpretation of pre-established harmony.
22    

Nicolas Malebranche was also a dualist, committed to the existence of

both mind and body, and an occasionalist, who held that since causation is
necessary connection and the only truly necessary connection is between
God’s intentions and their effects, bodies cannot directly cause modifica-
tions of minds (or each other) but rather there can be a causal relation
between body and mind only if God intends the mind to undergo a certain
modification upon the occasion of a certain change in a body (hence the
term “occasionalism”). This is a metaphysical argument. His further doc-
trine that the mind sees all things in God, however, can be seen as an
epistemological argument, for it depends on his particular view of what
modifications the mind undergoes in perception. He holds that sensations
are literally modifications in the mind, but that they are highly indetermi-
nate, or in later terminology lack determinate intentional objects, and that
genuine understanding occurs only when and to the extent that the deter-
minate ideas in the perfect intellect of God are disclosed to finite, human
minds, to the extent that they are—the ideas in the mind of God can never be
disclosed completely to mere humans, since we are merely finite and in
particular because our perception of ideas in the mind of God is distorted by
our bodies. Malebranche’s position can be considered a theological form of
Platonism: Plato held that the true Ideas or Forms of things have a kind of
perfection that neither ordinary objects nor representations of them in
human minds do, and therefore must exist someplace else; Malebranche
takes the obvious further step of supposing that perfect ideas can exist only
in the perfect intellect of God. He then supposes that human thought is
intelligible to the extent that these ideas are disclosed to it, on the occasion of
various sensations themselves occasioned by God but not literally through
those sensations. The crucial point is that genuine understanding consists in
the apprehension of ideas, even though these are literally in the mind of God
rather than of individual human beings, rather than in the direct apprehen-
sion of physical objects, even though the latter for a Cartesian dualist
like Malebranche do exist. Malebranche’s position thus suggests an episte-
mological argument for idealism, that our own idea can apprehend only
other ideas, even if imperfectly, although Malebranche remains a dualist.
Malebranche had significant influence on both Berkeley and Hume,
although neither the former and certainly not the latter accepted his position
in its entirety. His position that knowledge consists in individual minds
apprehending ideas in some greater mind would also be recreated by
idealists as late as T. H. Green and Josiah Royce in the second half of the
nineteenth century, as we will later see.
      23

But we have much to cover before we come to those later versions of

idealism, earlier or later. Before we turn to idealist tendencies even in earlier
British thought, one last word about idealism within pre-Kantian rationalist
philosophy is in order. As earlier mentioned, dualism rather than idealism
became the default position of the German successors to Leibniz, the so-
called “Leibniz-Wolffians” who dominated the teaching of philosophy in
many German universities for fifty years from the third decade of the
eighteenth century until the time of Kant and in some cases even beyond,
and they correspondingly opted for the interpretation of the pre-established
harmony as a relation between minds and bodies rather than among minds
or monads alone. It may also be noted that defending dualism by means of
an explicit “refutation of idealism” became the norm among these philoso-
phers. This may be seen in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Metaphysica of
1739, which would become Kant’s textbook for his lecture courses in
metaphysics and “anthropology” (a combination of empirical psychology,
one of Baumgarten’s topics in the Metaphysica, with material, for better or
worse, on differences between sexes, cultures, and races) until the very end
of the eighteenth century. Baumgarten accepts that the ultimate constituents
of the world must be simples, hence monads of some kind. But he does not
suppose that monads are necessarily minds or intellects, hence a dualism of
monads is at least possible. Idealism would be the position that there are
only intellectual monads; thus Baumgarten says that

An intellectual substance, i.e., a substance endowed with intellect, is a spirit

(an intelligence, a person) . . . Whoever admits only spirits in this world is
an idealist. (Metaphysics, §402; Baumgarten [1739] 2013: 175–6)

Baumgarten follows Wolff in distinguishing between two possible forms of

idealism, first egoism, which admits the existence of only one spirit, that of
the person contemplating such a doctrine (what is now called solipsism),
and then idealism proper, which allows the existence of multiple spirits. But
both are refuted by the same argument. This argument builds on a
Leibnizian principle not hitherto mentioned, the principle of plenitude, or
the principle that the perfection of the most perfect world, which given his
combination of benevolence with omniscience is the only one that God
could have created, consists in the maximal variety of the universe compat-
ible with its unity or coherence (e.g., “Monadology,” §58, PPL 648), which
was in turn the basis of one of Leibniz’s arguments for the identity of
indiscernibles. Baumgarten then argues simply that a universe that contains
24    

not only more substances but also more kinds of substances rather than
fewer is a more perfect universe, and necessarily exists in preference to the
other; and a universe that contains not only multiple minds rather than a
single mind but also bodies in addition to minds is therefore a more perfect
universe than either of the former would be, and is therefore the kind of
world that actually exists. In his words,

the egotistical world, such as an egoist posits, is not the most perfect. And
even if there is only one non-intellectual monad possible in itself that is
compossible with spirits in the world, whose perfection either subtracts
nothing from the perfection of the spirits, or does not subtract from the
perfection of the spirits so much as it adds to the perfection of the whole,
then the idealistic world, such as is posited by the idealist, is not the most
perfect (Metaphysics, §438; Baumgarten [1739] 2013: 183)

and hence not the kind of world that exists. No one outside of the immediate
sphere of Leibnizianism would ever again proffer such a refutation of
idealism. But both Baumgarten’s recognition of idealism and his refutation
of it in a university textbook make it clear that by the middle of the
eighteenth century idealism had become a standard topic for philosophical
discussion, a position it would retain for another century and a half or more.
 3
Idealism in Early Modern British
Philosophy

The relation between ontological and epistemological arguments for

idealism is complex. Idealism can be argued for on ontological grounds,
and then bring an epistemological argument in its train. Or an epistemo-
logical argument can be offered independently of ontological assumptions
but lead to idealism, especially in the hope of avoiding skepticism. The first
option may have been characteristic of some rationalists, such as Leibniz in
his more strictly idealist mood. Both forms of argument are found within
early modern British philosophy. Hobbes and Locke certainly did not think
of themselves as idealists, or would not have had the term been available to
them: as far as ontology is concerned, Hobbes was a convinced materialist,
and Locke seems to have been content with Cartesian dualism, although he
was not as dogmatic about it as Descartes was, and in particular had no use
for the idea that substances can have only one essential attribute, either only
thought or only extension: it would exceed the boundaries of our knowledge
to assert that God could not have “superadded” the capacity for thought to
matter had he wanted to, and indeed for Locke the distinction between mind
and body is a matter of “probability,” not strictly speaking knowledge at all,
which for him would have to be knowledge of necessary identity or differ-
ence (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, ch. III, §6).
Nevertheless, both Hobbes and Locke make moves in what we would
consider their theories of knowledge or epistemologies—another term they
did not use—that could and would subsequently be enlisted in the cause of
idealism proper, for example by Berkeley. The Irishman argues for idealism
by extension from epistemological grounds that he finds in Locke, and then
adds ontological considerations in order to avert skepticism, although he
calls his position immaterialism rather than idealism. Berkeley’s contempo-
rary Arthur Collier, who explicitly denies the existence of mind-independent
matter without giving his own position any name at all, argues first in
an epistemological mood, then moves from epistemology to ontology.
Hume’s position in this history is complicated. Although he does not call

Idealism in Modern Philosophy. Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Oxford University Press.
© Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848574.003.0003
26    

himself either an immaterialist or an idealist, he nevertheless accepts

epistemological considerations that had led to idealism in the hands of
Berkeley. At the same time, he purports to be providing a “science of
man” that explains our ordinary beliefs about things by means of our own
psychology without revising or replacing them by any traditional metaphys-
ical positions at all; yet he also resists what he regards as a natural tendency
to dualism and replaces it with a “bundle theory” of both the mind and
objects that seems closer to idealism than to anything else. As complex as
Hume’s position is, we will see in the next chapter that Kant’s famous
relation to Hume is equally complex: while he will criticize Hume’s expla-
nation of our belief that every event has a cause, he will also take up Hume’s
critical attitude toward metaphysics; yet he will also assert on practical
grounds, as necessary conditions of the possibility of morality, rational
“belief ” in some of the very same metaphysical theses that he agrees with
Hume cannot, to put it in Kant’s terms, be asserted on theoretical grounds.
Hobbes was a dogmatic materialist, yet also held a conception of knowl-
edge as based on insight into necessary connections among terms—
concepts—that could associate him with other rationalists. Locke would
agree with Hobbes that genuine knowledge would consist entirely in insight
into necessary connections revealed by what we might think of as transpar-
ent concepts of objects and their properties, but held that the lesser, merely
probable knowledge that we humans have is based on observations of
similarities and differences among what we might consider the more opaque
ideas that we obtain from observation—the foundation of British empiri-
cism in the wake of Francis Bacon. The British philosophers were all hostile
toward dogmatic metaphysics of the kind epitomized in Germany by Wolff,
although until the time of Hume, who had some familiarity with Leibniz, the
metaphysics with which they were familiar were those of Descartes and
Malebranche, Aristotelian scholasticism, and Neoplatonism, which had
become domesticated in Britain through the work of the Cambridge
Platonists in the second half of the seventeenth century (with whom Locke
was nevertheless personally close, ending up in the last decade of his life
living as a lodger in the household of Lady Damaris Masham, the daughter
of Ralph Cudworth, one of the most prominent of the Cambridge
Platonists). All of these movements fed into the general movement of
rationalism, while the British philosophers, typically lumped together
under the rubric of empiricism in spite of their own differences, all believed,
albeit for different reasons, that the doctrines put forward by dogmatic
metaphysicians rest on a totally unfounded conception of knowledge
       27

and cannot survive rational scrutiny (empiricists might themselves be con-

sidered critical rationalists). Thus the primary task of philosophy for these
philosophers became that of providing a theory of knowledge based on an
adequate assessment of the constitution of human nature, for they were
interested in knowledge only as a human achievement. However, it is not
human nature in general that is of interest in this context but the workings of
those human powers or faculties that are responsible for our human ability
to make highly probable if not necessarily true claims to knowledge of
the world. As Locke puts it at one point, the “simple ideas” that are the
foundation of all our knowledge “are not fictions of our Fancies, but the
natural and regular productions of Things without us, really operating upon
us; and so carry with them all the conformity which is intended; or which
our state requires”:

For they represent to us Things under those appearances which they are
fitted to produce in us: whereby we are enabled to distinguish the sorts of
particular Substances, to discern the states they are in, and so to take them
for our Necessities, and apply them to our Uses. (Essay IV.IV, §4)

At the very least, how things appear to us is the basis of our knowledge of
them and sufficient for our successful interaction with them—Locke might
be seen as an ancestor of later pragmatism as much as idealism. And the
faculties that shape how things appear to us were attributed by the British
philosophers as well as by their Continental counterparts to what was called
“spirit” or “mind” (mens, consciousness, Bewußtsein), an attribution that
resulted in moving the “operations of the mind” into the center of philo-
sophical attention. Reflections on the conditions of the possibility of knowl-
edge certainly pushed Hobbes and Locke away from any form of naive
realism in spite of their ontological commitments to materialism or dualism
respectively, while Berkeley concluded that their epistemology would lead to
a skepticism that could be avoided only by his own more radical “immate-
rialist” ontology. Hume’s position remains complex and for this reason
controversial. His thesis that our beliefs in causation, external objects, and
even the self are all founded on “custom” and imagination rather than
“reason” may be considered an epistemological position without ontological
implications, thus not an argument for idealism; but while he sometimes
seems to attempt to avoid commitment on ontological questions altogether,
at other times, as in his argument that the existence of external objects in
addition to our impressions is only a fiction, he comes close to inferring
28    

idealism from his version of empiricism by leaving no room for our

knowledge of anything other than ideas—or, by identifying the objects of
knowledge as our own ideas, identifying knowledge with what is known.
Berkeley overtly asserted the same with his famous slogan esse est percipi, “to
be is to be perceived.” That is an identity statement in form as well as
substance. In spite of their differences, all of the leading British philosophers
from Hobbes up to and including Hume insisted that the highest priority for
philosophy is to give an analysis of the conditions and the origin of knowl-
edge, and the way that they conceived of these conditions could imply
idealism. Neither Hobbes nor Locke drew such a conclusion, to be sure.
But Berkeley welcomed the metaphysical consequence of immaterialism that
he drew from his analysis of the conditions of knowledge, and while Hume
remained allergic to metaphysical speculations—as he famously said in his
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, any volume of “divinity or school
metaphysics” that contains neither “abstract reasoning concerning quantity or
number” nor “experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and exist-
ence” should be “commit[ed] then to the flames” (Section 12, Part 3)—and
adopted the stance of a human psychologist avant la lettre rather than that of
a metaphysician, his treatment of the “double existence” of external objects
beyond the bundle of impressions and ideas that constitutes the mind as a
philosophical fiction could certainly be interpreted as a case of idealism.
These idealist implications of some of the main convictions in epistemol-
ogy among the British philosophers can easily be confirmed, starting with
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). As Hobbes points out in the chapters
“Of Philosophy” and “Of Method” in the first part (“Computation or
Logic”) of the first section “De Corpore” (Concerning Body) of his
Elements of Philosophy (1655), knowledge is the result of the manipulation
of sensory input based on the employment of logical rules of reasoning
(ratiocination) in acts of what he calls “computation.” He describes the
details of this process most succinctly in a short passage in chapter 6 of
the first part (“Human Nature”) of his The Elements of Law, Natural and
Politic (1640), his first major philosophical work. After distinguishing what
he calls “sense, or knowledge original” from “knowledge . . . which we call
science,” he goes on to “define” knowledge “to be evidence of truth, from
some beginning or principle of sense” and formulates four principles that
are constitutive of knowledge:

The first principle of knowledge therefore is that we have such and such
conceptions; the second, that we have thus and thus named the things
       29

whereof they are conceptions; the third is, that we have joined those names
in such manner, as to make true propositions; the fourth and last is, that we
have joined those propositions in such manner as they be concluding.
(Elements of Law I.6.4)

The message is straightforward with respect to both the basis and

the formation of knowledge: senses (sensations) are basic to our acquisition
of knowledge in that they lead to conceptions (representations) to
which we attach names (concepts) which we then put together into proposi-
tions which, if true, already constitute knowledge, and from which
there arise further knowledge if we draw conclusions in an orderly way
from them.
Although the account given by Hobbes of the origin and the formation of
knowledge is rightly called empiricist because it traces all knowledge back to
the senses or sensations and their non-sensory causes, that is, to what he
calls “things without us,” it is by no means directly committed to either
idealism or dualism; on the contrary, Hobbes’s preferred ontological posi-
tion is materialism. Nevertheless, his account may lead to an early form of
epistemologically motivated idealism. This is so because although Hobbes
makes no claims as to either the constitution and the reality of what causes
sensations or to any specific contribution on the part of the subject of
knowledge to what we take to be the “accidents or qualities” of objects, he
states, again most explicitly in the part on “Human Nature” in The Elements
of Law, (1) that there are causes of our sensations which by way of their
motions give rise to what we sense as qualities, but (2) that these qualities
only have the status of “seemings and apparitions.” In his own words: “The
things that really are in the world without us, are those motions by which
these seemings are caused” (Elements of Law I.2.10). While he is confident
that there are external objects, and thus has no intention of affirming
idealism, nevertheless because in Hobbes’s opinion we could have concep-
tions of these seemings even if there were no objects around (Elements of
Law I.1.8) there is for him no basis on which to found any metaphysical
claims to the real existence of an external world or any epistemological basis
for claiming knowledge of the real constitution of a subject-independent
world or its real existence. Thus, Hobbes’s epistemology allows him at most
agnosticism about the existence of objects other than our representations of
them, even if it does not force him into outright idealism. This is nicely
confirmed by a passage from Part II (“The First Grounds of Philosophy”)
where he declares:
30    

Now things may be considered, that is, be brought into account, either as
internal accidents of our mind, in which manner we consider them when
the question is about some faculty of the mind; or as species of external
things, not as really existing, but appearing only to exist, or to have a being
without us [emphasis added]. And in this manner we are now to
consider them. (Elements of Law II.7.1)

In spite of hospitality toward dualism, an explicit argument for an

agnostic attitude with respect to the ultimate constitution of reality is also
characteristic of John Locke (1632–1704). In “The Epistle to the Reader” that
prefaces An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) Locke
denounces rationalist metaphysics as a “Sanctuary of Vanity and
Ignorance,” and at the outset of the first chapter of the first book of the
Essay he declares that:

I shall not at present meddle with the physical consideration of the mind;
or trouble myself to examine, wherein its essence consists, or by what
motions of our spirits, or alterations of our bodies, we come to have any
sensation by our organs, or any ideas in our understandings; and whether
those ideas do in their formation, any, or all of them, depend on matter or no
[emphasis added]: These are speculations, which, however curious and
entertaining, I shall decline. (Essay I.I, §2; see also II.XXI, §73)

Instead, he restricts his investigation to the “purpose to enquire into the

original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge” (Essay I.I, §2). Such an
investigation presupposes an acquaintance with our own minds, and thus
according to Locke the most pressing task is to understand the mind or the
understanding itself. And because for Locke ideas are the sole material for
processing by the mind, the most pressing task for understanding the
possibility of knowledge is to give an account of “how he [the mind]
comes by them [the ideas]” (Essay II.I, §1). There is no need to go into the
details of Locke’s conception of how the mind gets ideas and what the
understanding does with them in order to arrive at knowledge. Although
his description of these processes differs in some interesting ways from the
model Hobbes proposes, in the end both Hobbes and Locke share the view
(1) that whatever we can know depends on our having ideas which must be
somehow based in sensation, (2) that there must be some external cause
(Hobbes) or some source of affection (Locke) which gives rise to sensory
ideas, yet (3) ultimately we are ignorant about the real constitution of these
       31

causes and these sources. What we know is the content and structure of our
own ideas, although we have no reason to deny the existence of external
objects and we may even assume that in some regards external objects
resemble our ideas of them, namely in the case of primary qualities such
as shape, size, solidity, and number, at least in kind if not in detail. (That is,
Locke assumes, the microscopic particles of which bodies are hypothesized
to consist must have some shape, size, etc., but there is no reason to think
that those qualities resemble the particular versions of them that we perceive
in macroscopic objects.)
Point (3) is obviously important for the question whether Locke’s con-
ception of the operations of the mind is dualist or actually idealist. As in the
case of Hobbes, Locke’s position was intended to be neutral against and
compatible with all these alternatives and he wanted to remain agnostic with
respect to them. This is clear from his account of substance and from his
remarks concerning the limits of knowledge. Substances, Locke famously
holds,

are such combinations of simple Ideas, as are taken to represent distinct

particular things subsisting by themselves. (Essay II.XII, §6)

If one analyzes our concept of a substance one

will find he has no other Idea of it at all, but only a Supposition of he knows
not what support of such qualities, which are capable of producing simple
Ideas in us. (Essay II.XXIII, §2)

Locke has a short argument for this supposition: while we cannot make
sense of the idea of unsupported qualities or ideas subsisting by themselves
and therefore must assume some support or “substratum” for them, the
general idea of substance in the ideas of all particular kinds of substances,
nevertheless since we know that “a certain number of these simple Ideas go
constantly together” or “exist together” only from experience we have no
source for and therefore cannot make any sense of the idea of an additional
support or “substratum” for these ideas (Essay II.XXIII, §§2–3). Although
Locke thinks of this argument as compelling, he sees quite well that it neither
justifies nor excludes any claim as to what a substance or a thing really is,
what its nature or constitution consists in. Thus he never tires of emphasiz-
ing that we have only a confused idea of substance (a claim also made by
Leibniz about three-quarters of our knowledge, although he held that we
32    

have a clear concept of what substance is), and repeats quite often (at least
three times in Essay II.XXIII alone) that

Whatever therefore be the secret, abstract nature of substance in general,

all the ideas we have of particular distinct sorts of substances, are nothing
but several combinations of simple ideas, co-existing in such, though
unknown, cause of their union, as makes the whole subsist of itself.
(Essay II.XXIII, §6)

He restricts this agnostic attitude not just to corporeal substances or bodies

but extends it to spiritual substances or minds as well:

It is plain then, that the idea of corporeal substance in matter is as

remote from our conceptions and apprehensions, as that of spiritual
substance or spirit; and therefore from our not having any notion of
the substance of spirit, we can no more conclude its non-existence,
than we can for the same reason deny the existence of body; it
being as rational to affirm there is no body, because we have no clear
and distinct idea of the substance of matter, as to say there is no spirit,
because we have no clear and distinct idea of the substance of a
spirit. (Essay II.XXIII, §5)

This criticism of any metaphysical claims concerning the ultimate constitu-

tion of reality is accompanied by a more general warning against overstep-
ping of the natural limits of our cognitive faculties. According to Locke it is
just a fact about human nature that there are limits to the powers of the
understanding. In what might be regarded as an anticipation of later prag-
matism, Locke holds that the cognitive powers that have been upon us by
God are intended to be sufficient only for us to know “Whatever is necessary
for the Conveniences of Life, and Information of Virtue” (Essay I.I, §5; see
also II.XXIII, §12); unlike Descartes, he makes no presumption that his
benevolence requires God to give us clear and distinct ideas of the essence of
anything. Rather, we should accept that the nature and the constitution of
substances both corporeal and spiritual are beyond our cognitive grasp and
take this as a hint that God has set limits to what we can know because he
sees no reason for us to know everything. Even if the powers He endowed us
with would be magnified infinitely we still would remain clueless as to what
substances really are because we still would be stuck in a world of qualities
(this is one way of reading Essay II.XXIII, §12). Thus, in the end
       33

metaphysical knowledge of any kind is beyond our reach. Yet this is nothing
for us to be concerned about:

For, though the comprehension of our understandings comes exceeding

short of the vast extent of things; yet we shall have cause enough to magnify
the bountiful author of our being, for that proportion and degree of
knowledge he has bestowed on us, so far above all the rest of the inhabi-
tants of this our mansion. (Essay I.I, §5)

For Locke, ontological agnosticism is an expression of piety. Locke’s position

may be regarded as a theological expression of the most fundamental
epistemological motivation for idealism: no matter how much we know
about objects and at what level of detail, we still know them only from our
own, human point of view, but whether objects exist beyond our experience
of them is really none of our business. But neither is Locke prepared to assert
that only spirits or minds exist; that too would exceed the bounds of human
knowledge.
Locke’s attitude to metaphysics altogether is thus agnostic. (The classic
argument that Locke’s premises lead to a skepticism about the existence of
anything other than ideas was offered by T. H. Green in his introductions to
Hume’s Treatise in 1874, reprinted in Green 1885–8: volume 1; Alexander
1985 makes the argument that Locke should be taken as a convinced
advocate of corpuscularian science; Stuart 2013 argues that Locke was a
committed dualist, although interestingly he argues that for Locke it is the
existence of God rather than our own minds that proves that minds must be
immaterial [250–64].) But Locke’s agnosticism with respect to the ultimate
constitution of substances and things or of the fundamentum in re of “the
ideas thereof ” characteristic of Hobbes and Locke is challenged forcefully by
George Berkeley (1685–1753), for whom their agnosticism becomes a form
of skepticism and even impiety. In his Treatise Concerning the Principles of
Human Knowledge (1710) Berkeley raises doubts about whether the agnostic
stance of Hobbes and Locke can be upheld consistently given the way they
think about the origin and the properties of ideas. Although in his Treatise
Berkeley does not mention Hobbes at all and addresses Locke not by his
name but by formulas like “esteemed philosopher” and “learned author”
(1710: Introduction, §11) only a few times, it is clear that he wants
to confront Locke especially with a painful choice: either his conception
of a substance or a thing has “no distinct meaning annexed to” it (1710:
Part I, §17) and is nonsense, or he has to endorse not just epistemological
34    

agnosticism but full-blown idealism or, in Berkeley’s term, immaterialism.

In other words, Berkeley’s point is that Locke cannot afford to be agnostic
with respect to the metaphysical status of substances and things if he wants
us to think of ideas as the immediate objects of human knowledge. His
English contemporary Arthur Collier (1680–1732) would make a similar
argument.
Berkeley offers both epistemological and metaphysical arguments for his
immaterialism. His epistemological arguments begin from the premise that
ideas and only ideas are the objects of human knowledge, a presupposition
that he at least considered uncontroversial. Although his taxonomy of the
different kinds of ideas deviates in some ways from Locke’s classification, he
agrees with Locke that ideas exist only “in the mind” (1710: Part I, §2). He
takes the mind to be a “perceiving, active being” which itself is not

any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they
exist or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived.
(1710: Part I, §2)

From these stipulations he derives his most fundamental and famous

claim (1) that “the existence of an idea consists in being perceived” (1710:
Part I, §2) or that for ideas “their esse is percipi” (1710: Part I, §3) by the
perceiving, active mind. This is the premise for Berkeley’s conviction that
the assumption that there even might exist unperceived objects or things is
meaningless. Rather, he restricts existence to what is perceivable or, even
more narrowly, to what is actually perceived: If the only objects that exist for
a mind—whether it is my own mind or the mind of other human beings or
the divine mind—are ideas because there is nothing else that can exist for the
mind, then the very concept of something that exists but is not for the mind
or is unperceived is a contradiction in terms. Thus if, as Berkeley supposes
Locke does, one thinks of things as consisting of collections of ideas, he asks
how could one take a thing to be something other than ideas and neverthe-
less to exist? This question underlies Berkeley’s confidence in what is often
referred to as his “master argument,” the argument that one cannot conceive
of anything existing unconceived because in trying to do so one is still
conceiving of the object (1710: Part I, §23). This seems open to the obvious
objection that he is confusing the content of a proposition (e.g., “The earth
may still exist after the extinction of all conscious life”) with the act of
entertaining (“conceiving”) such a proposition, which of course cannot take
place except in a conscious being; but if he is already committed to the
       35

thought that objects of knowledge are nothing but ideas, it is at least

understandable that he should overlook this distinction. (Rickless 2013:
128 notes this dependence. Dicker 2011 calls the “master” argument
Berkeley’s “argument from the ego-centric predicament,” 139–45. For
other treatments of Berkeley’s immaterialism see Tipton 1974; Pitcher
1977; and Winkler 1989.)
The second conviction on which Berkeley rests his case in favor of
idealism is the more strictly metaphysical claim (2) that “an idea can be
like nothing but an idea” (1710: Part I, §8; Dicker 2011: 149–69; Rickless
2013: 120–7). Although this claim is initially put forward in the context of
his well-known criticism of Locke’s primary-secondary-quality distinction,
it is equally relevant for his denial that there are things “without the mind.”
The reasoning on which this claim is based is the following: For two items to
stand in the relation of likeness they must have something in common.
However, if an idea is mind-dependent and if ideas are all there is for the
mind, then what is “without the mind” must be different in every respect
from an idea. Thus a relation of likeness cannot obtain between ideas “in the
mind” and things “without the mind.” Berkeley puts this point quite bluntly
by appealing to observation:

If we look but ever so little into our thoughts, we shall find it impossible for
us to conceive a likeness except only between our ideas. Again, I ask
whether those supposed originals or external things, of which our
ideas are the pictures or representations, be themselves perceivable or
no? if they are, then they are ideas, and we have gained our point; but if
you say they are not, I appeal to any one whether it be sense, to assert a
colour is like something which is invisible; hard or soft, like something
which is intangible; and so of the rest. (1710: Part I, §8)

To be sure, the last step of this argument depends on the presupposition that
external objects could not be colored, hard or soft, etc., in themselves, or that
these sorts of properties are properties of ideas only. The likeness argument
cannot stand without that assumption, so cannot count as an entirely self-
standing argument for Berkeley’s immaterialism.
There is a third metaphysical claim that is essential to both Berkeley’s
criticism of Locke and the idealistic position he is going to adopt for himself.
This is the claim (3) that ideas are passive and causally inert, that is, they can
neither produce nor alter another idea (1710: Part I, §25). This claim he also
purports to base on observation:
36    

whoever shall attend to his ideas, whether of sense or reflection, will not
perceive in them any power or activity; there is therefore no such thing
contained in them. A little attention will discover to us that the very being
of an idea implies passiveness and inertness in it, insomuch that it is
impossible for an idea to do any thing, or, strictly speaking, to be the
cause of any thing. (1710: Part I, §25)

Perhaps this is intended as an epistemological premise for an ontological

claim. Be that as it may, again the primary function of this claim is to
discredit a Lockean view according to which we have to think of the primary
qualities of things—which are contents of the most fundamental ideas we
have of them—as the causes of sensations or of sensory ideas. It is, however,
also meant to support the untenability of the assumption that agnosticism
with respect to the real existence of mind-independent things is a viable
option for anyone who accepts Locke’s model of how and by what means we
acquire knowledge of objects.
Berkeley’s criticism of Locke’s theory of substance is not conducted for its
own sake. On the contrary, it is meant to establish what Berkeley considers
the unavoidable metaphysical consequence of a position that takes ideas “in
the mind” to be the only material for the operations of the mind in its
acquisition of knowledge, a position that he of course accepts. This meta-
physical consequence consists in a thoroughgoing idealism or “immaterial-
ism” with respect to the nature and constitution of things or substances.
Berkeley’s way of establishing this result is open to many questions.
However, the basic outline of his overall argument can be sketched thus: If
existence is restricted to ideas (and minds) and if, what is undoubtedly the
case, things or substances exist, then things or substances must be ideas (or
minds) too. Now, as Locke had shown, we certainly have ideas of particular
kinds of things or substances, such as gold and lead, humans and sheep,
which are distinguished by our ideas of their various properties, but we have
only a confused and obscure idea of substance in general, which we suppose
to underlie whatever collection of ideas we take to be a thing or a substance
of one kind or another. The idea of substance in general must be included in
our ideas of particular kinds of substances, but this idea is fundamentally
problematic. Yet if we cannot have any ideas of things or substances other
than our ideas of their properties, which clearly do exist in minds, then the
only clear ideas of things that we have is as ideas. And then if things so
understood do not always seem to exist in our own individual, human
minds, which is also obvious, then such things must be ideas in some
       37

other non-human, that is, divine mind. This divine mind cannot be itself an
idea because it must be conceived as an active principle that can be the cause
of ideas, a principle of which we can have no idea but only a “notion” (1710:
Part I, §26, §27; Dicker 2011: 252–80). Therefore, the very fact that we take
things or substances to be real commits us to the claim that things are ideal
entities perceived by the mind of God. Idealism, one could say, is the only
tenable basis for a realistic stance for Berkeley, but it leads to a realism about
minds, human and divine, rather than of what he always calls material
substance. And if one were to accept his interpretation of causality as a
relation between ideas in terms of his theory of marks and signs, in partic-
ular his theory that what we think of as ideas of objects are signs of (God’s
plan for) future possible ideas for us, a view obviously influenced by
Malebranche (cf. 1710: Part I, §65f.), then one would also have to agree to
idealism. In Berkeley’s view, the only alternative to idealism is not materi-
alism but skepticism.
Berkeley’s argumentation for his immaterialism was much more of a mix
of epistemological and metaphysical considerations than Leibniz’s purely
metaphysical arguments. When Berkeley makes arguments in his Three
Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) such as that heat might be
thought to exist outside the mind, while pain is surely thought to exist only
within the mind, yet “they are both immediately perceived at the same time,
and the fire affects you with only one simple, or uncompounded idea,” so
that “the intense heat immediately perceived, is nothing distinct from a
particular sort of pain” (Berkeley, Three Dialogues, in Berkeley 1948–57: 2:
176), and is thus as mental as the pain is, this might be considered a
metaphysical argument, namely that since heat and pain cannot be sepa-
rated, they must be one and the same thing, and since pain is clearly mental,
so must be heat (see Dicker 2011: 90–100). But it might also be considered
an epistemological argument, namely that if we cannot know heat without
knowing pain, then heat and pain must be the same thing, and since the
latter is mental, or an idea, the former, and in due course other supposedly
physical properties, must also be mental. Some of Berkeley’s arguments in
the somewhat more technical Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human
Knowledge might also be considered epistemological, such as the “master
argument” on which he claims he is “content to put the whole upon,”
namely that you cannot conceive of anything existing unconceived because
you cannot do this without conceiving yourself conceiving it, so in fact no
conceiving or perceiving is ever anything more than “framing in your mind
certain ideas” (Berkeley 1710: Part I, §§22–3, in Berkeley 1948–57: 2: 50),
38    

that too turns on claims about what we can conceive or perceive. But when
Berkeley claims that “the existence of an idea consists in being perceived”
and “an idea can be like nothing but an idea” (Berkeley 1710: Part I, §3, §8,
in Berkeley 1948–57: 2: 42, 44), those are metaphysical claims, made on the
basis of assumptions about the very nature of ideas. It is not that we have no
way of knowing whether an idea could exist without being perceived, or
whether it could be like something that is not an idea; it is that these are not
even possible, at least in Berkeley’s view. His further claim that ideas are
passive, causally inert, thus that they can neither produce nor alter other
ideas (Berkeley 1710: Part I, §25, in Berkeley 1948–57: 2: 51), is also a
metaphysical rather than epistemological claim, although it might also
lead only to a parasitical argument: it could ground an argument that
nothing outside our ideas could cause them only if it were already supposed
that the only candidate for anything outside our ideas was more ideas, which
by the metaphysical premise could then not cause our ideas. But idealism
would already have been presupposed in such an argument.
This argument might also cause difficulties for Berkeley’s theology. Faced
with the question of why we think objects have continued existence when
our ideas of them do not, Berkeley appeals to the divine mind, infinite in
capacity, that has all ideas all the time. But if one idea does not cause
another, God’s ideas cannot cause our ideas, so the solution can only be
that of Nicolas Malebranche: that we humans directly perceive, though only
intermittently, the ideas in the mind of God. Of course, then we are
perceiving something outside our own ideas, so this may be problematic
for Berkeley. However, this does not have to be discussed here. The relevant
point here is just to emphasize that he offers epistemological as well as
metaphysical arguments for idealism.
Up until the point at which he introduces the mind of God into his
argument, all of Berkeley’s epistemological considerations might be thought
of as expressions of the basic insight that we can only conceive of reality
from our own point of view, which are then extended into full-blown
idealism in order to avoid the whiff of agnosticism or skepticism and
supplemented with the existence of a divine mind in order to satisfy
our ineliminable tendency to believe in the existence of something
more than just one’s own mind or even of human minds in general. We
will later see that the tendency to preserve both the impulse to idealism
and the conviction that there is something more than ordinary human
minds by positing a more than human mind is characteristic of many
versions of idealism until the end of its glory days at the beginning of
       39

the twentieth century. As we will see, this tendency is definitely absent from
the philosophy of David Hume.
Before we turn to Hume, however, a look at Arthur Collier, a close
contemporary of Berkeley who also defended idealism, will be in order.
Arthur Collier was a much more obscure clergyman than Berkeley. He
published his Clavis Universalis: Or, A New Inquiry after Truth, Being a
Demonstration of the Non-Existence, or Impossibility, of an External World
in 1713, the same year that Berkeley’s Three Dialogues appeared and three
years after Berkeley’s Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge;
however, he states that he had originally conceived his position a decade
earlier, so before he could have read Berkeley. Although the work was not
widely read, it was translated into German by Johann Christian Eschenbach
in 1756, and then noticed by Thomas Reid and following him Dugald
Stewart. It was republished in English in 1837 along with Collier’s other
philosophical work, A Specimen of True Philosophy, in a collection of
Metaphysical Tracts edited by Samuel Parr, and then again in 1909, edited
with an introduction by Ethel Bowman. By “external,” mentioned in the title
of his book, Collier meant “independent, absolute, or self-existent,” and his
position is that “all matter, body, extension, &c.” (which he also frequently
calls “expansion”) depends “on mind, thought, or perception, and that it is
not capable of an existence, which is not thus dependent” (Collier 1713
[1909: 6]). Collier’s position is thus full-throated idealism, which he empha-
sizes is neither skepticism nor a denial that bodies exist, but the position that

such and such bodies, which are supposed to exist, do not exist externally;
or in universal terms, that there is no such thing as an external world.
(1713 [1909: 9])

Collier argues for his idealism on both epistemological and more purely
metaphysical grounds. His work, although a footnote in the history of
philosophy, is interesting precisely because it so clearly illustrates the dual
strategies for arguing for idealism.
Collier’s most purely epistemological argument is that we are all familiar
with (visual) experiences that are assumed to be of external objects but
which do not differ from similar experiences that are clearly not of external
objects, yet that there is no discernible difference between the latter and the
former, thus that if the latter are in or entirely dependent upon the mind,
then so must be the former. His argument might be thought to be a variant
of Descartes’s argument that there is no obvious difference between the
40    

contents of dreams and veridical perceptions, at least when they are

considered in isolation, although Collier uses examples such as those of
imaginary beings, chimeras or centaurs (1713 [1909: 17]), which he sup-
poses we (visually) represent just as vividly (his term, anticipating Hume) as
other objects, secondary qualities (1713 [1909: 21–2]), cases of double
vision, cases of experiences which change, such as different phases of the
moon, when no one would believe that the external object is changing (1713
[1909: 33]), and mirror images, which everyone believes exist in the mind,
not in the piece of glass outside us, and yet are indiscernible from other
images of their objects. He also equates being visible with being “present to
the mind,” and asks how something could be present to the mind if it were
elsewhere from the mind (1713 [1909: 35]). He infers that to be visible is to
be in or dependent upon the mind, and thus that to be outside of the mind
would necessarily be to be invisible (1713 [1909: 56]).
This begins the more purely metaphysical part of Collier’s argument: that
to be visible is to be in the mind we can consider an epistemological premise,
but then he argues that nothing can be both visible and invisible at the same
time, which is of course quite true independently of epistemology. A further
argument he makes is that since God can give created minds any ideas
directly, it would be needless for him to give us our ideas indirectly, by
creating independent objects to cause ideas in us, and God does nothing
useless (1713 [1909: 60–2]). This is a metaphysical, in this case theological,
argument, directed against the occasionalists Nicholas Malebranche and his
English follower John Norris rather than against Locke. The most interesting
of Collier’s metaphysical arguments for idealism, however, take the form of
antinomies, and have sometimes been held to anticipate Kant’s first and
second antinomies (Bowman in Collier [1713] 1909: xxiv). Collier argues
that there are sound arguments that an external world must be both finite
and infinite in “expanse” or extension (1713 [1909: 63]), that it must be both
finitely and infinitely divisible (1713 [1909: 68]), and that it must both be in
motion as a whole and have moveable parts, but also cannot be either of
these (1713 [1909: 78]). Since the concept of an external world is in these
ways contradictory, such a thing cannot exist. It is striking, however, that
Collier does not actually provide the arguments for what would become the
theses and antitheses of Kant’s first two antinomies, instead providing only a
version of Zeno’s paradox to prove the impossibility of moving parts within
an extended universe, an antinomy that Kant does not take over.
It is not inconceivable that Kant knew of Collier’s work through
Eschenbach’s translation, although there is no direct evidence for that. It is
       41

more likely that Collier’s argument that the difference between what we
ordinarily take to be a veridical perception and a mere imagination or
hallucination is merely a matter of vividness, and that the latter can become
as vivid as the former and thereby undermine any use of vividness as a
criterion of externality (1713 [1909: 19–20]), could have been known to
Hume and influenced his formulation of the distinction between impres-
sions and ideas in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). So at this point
we can turn to Hume.
Whether or not David Hume (1711–76) learned from Collier, he learned
a great deal from Berkeley, above all his empiricist epistemology. He tried to
avoid Berkeley’s outright commitment to idealism, but there are parts of
Hume’s philosophy that it is difficult to read as other than idealist. Hume’s
view that our knowledge consists of our ideas, our recognition of “philo-
sophical” relations among them, such as identity and difference, and our
recognition of “natural” relations among them such as causation, which are
established by imagination and custom, could constitute an epistemological
ground for idealism—causality, in particular, which Hume regards as the
basis of all our knowledge of existence, is reduced to a way of feeling and
thinking, in other words a state of mind. But depending on how he is read,
Hume either accepts the skepticism about possible external objects that
Berkeley tries to avoid with his ontology that renders any external objects
other than other human or divine minds impossible, or else holds that even
if there are valid arguments for skepticism it is psychologically impossible
for human beings to remain in a skeptical frame of mind, thus we naturally
even if not rationally believe in the existence of objects apart from our ideas
of them. (The “skeptical” reading of Hume which prevailed in the eighteenth
century and was extensively stated in Green 1874, has in recent years been
defended in Flew 1961, Fogelin 1985, and De Pierris 2015; the “naturalist”
reading, that Hume is explaining our beliefs without attempting to under-
mine them, goes back to Kemp Smith 1941 and more recently Stroud 1977.
Garrett 1997 presents Hume as using skeptical arguments to advance his
naturalism, while Loeb 2002 sees Hume as starting from naturalism but
lapsing into skepticism. Russell 2008 sees both skepticism and naturalism as
moments in Hume’s attack upon religion, or defense of “irreligion.”)
However, in those passages, prominently in Book I, Part IV of his early
Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), where Hume entertains a kind of
monism that sees both “minds” and “objects” as nothing but different sets or
“bundles” of one sort of thing, namely, perceptions, impressions and their
paler copies, ideas, his position might seem much like Berkeley’s idealism,
42    

with the difference that while he reduces all reality to mental states like
impressions and ideas he does not see these as properties that must inhere in
substantial minds any more than in substantial bodies. For Hume, both of
these are fictions that we introduce in order to explain continuities among
those impressions or ideas—although it may be difficult to explain who is
introducing those fictions without resorting to substantial minds after
all, in which case it is hard to see how Hume’s position ultimately differs
from Berkeley’s except in his aversion to actually asserting a metaphysical
thesis.
Hume’s potentially idealist approach to causation is clearly on view in his
1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Knowledge, which was quickly translated
into German and would eventually provide Kant with the stimulus for his
own aprioristic rather than empiricist argument for idealism with regard not
only to causation but to all of what he called the categories of pure reason,
including especially substance and interaction as well as causation. But since
Kant was not completely familiar with the contents of Hume’s earlier
Treatise of Human Nature, he did not know, or at least acknowledge, that
Hume too had generalized his approach to causality to the cases of mind and
body, nor did he know that Hume may have tried to sidestep Berkeley’s
commitment to substances but not his idealism altogether by his theory of
both minds and bodies as bundles of perceptions. Kant would try to avert
Berkeley’s version of idealism by a different stratagem, but before we come
to that we must consider Hume’s position more fully. Hume accepted from
Locke and Descartes before him that the immediate objects of consciousness
are what they had called ideas, although he reserves that word for copies or
subsequently recalled perceptions rather than the originally experienced
perceptions that he calls impressions. He also adopts the view of his pre-
decessors that knowledge lies in the recognition of relations among impres-
sions, ideas, or both, and divides those relations into two kinds,
philosophical and natural. Philosophical relations are those immediately
evident on reflection on or comparison of particular ideas, and include
resemblance, identity, spatial and temporal relations such as above and
below or before and after, number and degree, and logical contrariety
(Hume 1739–40: I.I.5), while natural relations are those that are not imme-
diately evident on reflection on a single impression or idea or in a single
comparison of any number, but which instead become evident, or more
properly are formed, only through repeated experience. Hume’s best-known
argument is then that causation is not a philosophical but a natural relation:
the causal relation comprises temporal succession, spatial contiguity, and
       43

necessary connection, and while the first two are philosophical relations that
are immediately apparent, the necessary connection between different
ideas—those of a cause and its separate effect—is, unlike the necessary
identity of two qualitatively similar ideas, not immediately apparent, as
Hume puts it, to reason (1739–40: I.III.2), but instead grows only out of
repeated experience: The repeated experience of qualitatively similar pairs of
impressions causes them to become linked in the mind, as we would
ordinarily say, or at least in consciousness, as the careful Hume should say
at most (1739–40: I.III.6). In fact, Hume’s argument is that repeated expe-
rience itself has two effects: it creates a habit of thought such that upon the
presentation of an impression of one kind that has repeatedly been experi-
enced in spatial and temporal conjunction with one of another kind,
a vivid version of the idea of the kind of impression with which the first
kind of impression has been repeatedly associated immediately occurs—this
is the essence of causal inference or belief, because a belief is nothing but an
idea that is almost as vivid and forceful as the impression of which it was
once a copy (1739–40: I.III.7–8; this is the thought Hume could
have learned from Arthur Collier)—and second, there is an actual feeling
of the mind (as we would ordinarily say) being tugged from the one
impression to the other idea—this is the basis of the idea of necessary
connection, a connection which the mind then “spreads” upon its objects
to form the idea of a necessary connection among them or their states
(1739–40: I.III.14). (A systematic treatment of Hume on causation is
Beebee 2006, while Stove 1973 focuses specifically on Hume’s account of
induction.)
Hume’s account of our idea of and belief in causation might be considered
to already take one step toward idealism by relocating the relation of
causation from the external objects where we would ordinarily suppose it
to obtain to the mind, which we would ordinarily suppose knows but does
not constitute the relation known. In Hume’s words,

Tho’ the several resembling instances, which give rise to the idea of power,
have no influence on each other, and can never produce any new quality in
the object, which can be a model of that idea [of power or causation], yet
the observation of this resemblance produces a new impression in the
mind, which is its real model. . . . Necessity, then, is the effect of this
observation, and is nothing but an internal impression of the mind, or a
determination to carry our thoughts from one object to another.
(1739–40: I.III.14, para. 20)
44    

Several things may be noted about this theory. For one, if it had been
Hume’s intent to raise a general skepticism about causation, based on the
famous worry about induction that he himself raises, especially in the
subsequent Enquiry, namely that an assertion of causality claims that future
impressions will occur in the same patterns as past ones but there is no basis
“in reason” for assuming that the future will resemble the past, then the
relocation of causation from the domain of objects to the domain of the
mind should make no difference, because we have no more reason to believe
that the mind will behave the same way in the future as it has in the past than
we do to believe that about anything else. So we must either believe that
Hume is very confused, not realizing that his skepticism about induction as
applied to external objects must undermine our confidence in his applica-
tion of induction to the mind itself, or else that he is very arch, and that he
means us to do his skeptical work for him by carrying over skepticism about
induction to the case of the mind itself, or else that he is not really worrying
about issues of justification and thus of the threat of skepticism at all, but just
means to be giving a plausible description of the only possible basis for causal
inference, namely the mind’s experience of itself. The last possibility may
well seem to be the most plausible, leading to the “naturalist” reading of
Hume promoted by Norman Kemp Smith, Barry Stroud, and Don Garrett
rather than the “skeptical” reading of Hume accepted by Hume’s contem-
poraries such as James Beattie and Thomas Reid and defended recently and
more skillfully by Robert Fogelin.
There is a further issue with Hume’s treatment of causation that is largely
suppressed in the Enquiry but that was evident in the Treatise, namely, that
although, as we saw in the last passage quoted, Hume sometimes describes
necessary connection as being displaced from the object to the mind, on his
own strict interpretation of empiricism there is a problem in positing the
existence of either objects or minds distinct from perceptions. This is what
pushes Hume toward his own even if unacknowledged form of idealism.
That is, although we naturally speak of perceptions as being of objects and in
or by the mind, on the view that all knowledge is founded on perception and
that in perception we are immediately acquainted with nothing but percep-
tions, it becomes problematic how we could have knowledge either of the
mind itself or of any object of perceptions distinct from those perceptions.
Hume puts the former point succinctly by arguing that we have no percep-
tion of the self distinct from our perception of its perceptual states:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always
stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or
       45

shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time
without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.
(1739–40: I.IV.6.3)

He then argues that in fact the self is

nothing but a bundle of different perceptions, which succeed each other

with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement
(1739–40: I.IV.6.4)

and that the idea of a continuous self is but a fiction or illusion created by
relations of resemblance and continuity among perceptions in the bundle,
just as both the idea of and belief in causal connection were created by
repetition of pairs of impressions. Without saying that the objects of per-
ception are also nothing but bundles of related perceptions, Hume presents a
similar account of how the idea of objects distinct from our perceptions of
them is generated by our impression of continuity among perceptions:
although only philosophers reflect on this, in fact we know that perceptions
are fleeting and transitory; we mistake continuity among them for enduring
identity; and we then invent something other than perceptions, something
not fleeting and transitory, to which to ascribe that enduring identity
(1739–40: I.IV.2). In neither case, however, do we nor can we actually
have a clear idea of any object or substance distinct from our perceptions,
because all our basic ideas must be copied from impressions and we do not
have impressions of these things. Thus we do not have an idea of external
objects or their substance, but neither do we have a clear idea of the mind or
its substance. We may not reflect upon this fact in ordinary life (perhaps we
cannot keep it in mind in ordinary life), but in philosophy we cannot
avoid it.
Hume’s attack on the supposition that we have an idea of the mind as
distinct from its impressions thus constitutes a rejection of Berkeley’s
commitment to the existence of mental substances, but not of idealism
altogether. On Hume’s account, we are not entitled to assert the existence
of both ideas and the minds, human or divine, that have them, but only the
existence of the former. Hume does not admit that we are forced into
skepticism about either minds or external objects by his approach, that is,
into a position that there may really be minds and external objects but we
cannot know that fact or their real qualities, nor does he confront
Descartes’s argument that skepticism about the existence of one’s own
mind is impossible; yet he still has a lingering worry that although there
46    

are psychological mechanisms that lead us to form the fictions of minds and
bodies beyond perceptions, we do not really know what we are talking about
when we talk about such things, and thus cannot even coherently doubt
whether we have knowledge of them—our talk about them is explicable but
meaningless. Hume thus seems to end up with an uneasy compromise
between idealism and agnosticism.
 4
Kant

The first major philosopher actually to call himself an idealist was

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), although as soon as he did so he labored to
distinguish his position from Berkeley’s by calling his position empirical
realism combined with transcendental idealism, and renaming his
position “critical” rather than “material” or even “visionary” and “dreaming”
idealism (Prolegomena §13, Note 3, 4: 293). By this Kant means that space
and time are the ineliminable forms of our immediate experience or “intui-
tions” of things as they appear to us but are not real properties of things as
they are in themselves; however, since Kant neither denies the existence of
things independent from our representations of them nor asserts that these
things must be mental in nature, the transcendental idealist part of his
position cannot be straightforwardly identified with idealism as he under-
stood it or as we are understanding it here, namely, as the position that
reality is ultimately mental in nature. While Kant thinks that he has given a
sound argument for the transcendental ideality of space and time, he thinks
he has given no reason at all to question the existence of things independent
from our representations of them. Moreover, since he separates the basic
“categories” of our thought that are the forms of all our concepts of things
from our immediate intuitions of them, and finds the source of the cate-
gories in our capacity for judgment rather than in our sensibility or capacity
for intuitions, he does not have to face Hume’s worry that our concepts of
both our selves and our objects may be downright meaningless. Kant’s
position is that we can readily conceive of both our selves and external
objects as distinct from the appearances of either, and further that we can
use the Cartesian distinction between non-extended thinking things and
non-thinking extended things within the domain of our experience, further
that we have no reason to doubt the existence of either our selves or external
objects, but that we cannot know the real nature of either our selves or
external objects as they are “in themselves.” There are two apparent breaches
in this barrier, however. For one, Kant certainly holds that we cannot
conceive of God as an extended, material being; but then again, he holds
that we can have only rational “belief ” (Glaube) in the existence of God,

Idealism in Modern Philosophy. Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Oxford University Press.
© Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848574.003.0004
48    

based on moral grounds; indeed he holds ultimately that God is nothing but
our idea of our own capacity for morality (see Guyer 2000); so in this case we
still do not have genuine knowledge of the nature of something existing in
itself. The other case is that of our own freedom, which according to Kant
must be a “transcendental freedom” that is incompatible with the thorough-
going causal determinism of the world as we experience it because it must be
a freedom to choose to do the right thing no matter what our circumstances
and prior history might seem to determine us to do, and which must
therefore be a capacity of our “noumenal” selves or of our selves as they
really are rather than of our “phenomenal” selves or selves as they appear to
us. In this case Kant may be allowing genuine knowledge of our selves as
they are in themselves, and attributing to them a capacity that is incompat-
ible with the properties of bodies as we ordinarily experience them; but as he
does not hold that all things in themselves have this capacity, neither is he
insisting that all reality is essentially mental in nature. Thus his position
remains distinct from the thoroughgoing idealism of Berkeley or indeed of
Leibniz.
The sources as well as the form of Kant’s position are complex. Kant was
deeply impressed by what he knew of Leibniz (the qualification “what he
knew of” is necessary because many of the texts that are crucial to later
understandings of Leibniz, such as “Primary Truths” and the “Discourse on
Metaphysics” (1686) were entirely unknown during Kant’s lifetime, and
others, such as the New Essays on Human Understanding, were published
only when Kant was well into his career, in 1765, and may already have fixed
his view of Leibniz), in particular by Leibniz’s view that space and time are
phaenomena bene fundata, “well-founded phenomena” but not representa-
tive of the real nature of things; indeed, Leibniz is the obvious source for
Kant’s use of the term “phenomena” to designate how things appear to us,
although his use of the counterpart term “noumena” to designate how they
might be in themselves seems to be his addition to Leibniz’s terminology.
Kant was also influenced by what he knew of Hume and his view that
causation is a form of thinking that we impose upon our experience rather
than something we directly experience. He was more generally impressed by
the empiricist argument that our knowledge of objects depends upon expe-
rience of them: for Kant, our own minds never supply more than the general
forms of intuitions and concepts, of sensibility and understanding, while the
“matter” of experience and thus the content for all empirical concepts is
always supplied by experience—a fact from which Kant draws the far-
reaching consequence that the idea of a complete system of empirical
  49

knowledge is never more than a regulative ideal for us (CPuR, Appendix to

the Transcendental Dialectic; CPJ, Introduction, sections IV–V). However,
Kant thought that both the Leibnizian and the Humean approaches failed to
account for the possibility of what he called synthetic a priori knowledge,
that is, knowledge that goes beyond the mere analysis of concepts, that thus
does more than merely unpack explicit or tacit definitions, and therefore
must rest on something more than the mere principle of non-contradiction,
but yet legitimately claims universal and necessary validity. The core of
Kant’s constructive model of knowledge is devoted to explaining how we
can have synthetic a priori knowledge based on the pure forms of intuition,
the pure categories of the understanding, and their combination into the
general principles of empirical knowledge such as that every change that we
can experience must be an alteration in the state of an enduring substance
governed by causal laws. But, unlike Plato, the original apriorist avant la
lettre, he does not see synthetic a priori knowledge as leading to realism
about things having the features that we know a priori, nor, like
Malebranche, the theological Platonist, does he see such knowledge as
knowledge of the mind of God. Rather, Kant sees the possibility and
actuality of synthetic a priori knowledge as providing the conclusive argu-
ment for the idealist aspect of his position through the premise that we can
only know to be necessary and therefore universally valid the forms that we
ourselves impose upon our experience. Thus precisely because we have a
priori knowledge of space and time in his view they can be only features of
our own representations of things, not properties or relations of those things
as they are in themselves. At the same time, even though when he wrote his
main works he was not well informed on the aporia about subjects and
objects about which Hume had ultimately thrown up his arms in the
Treatise, which has here been characterized as the tension in Hume between
agnosticism and idealism, Kant recognized that we cannot talk about what
he called appearances without conceding the real existence of subjects to
which objects appear as well as the objects that appear to such subjects. Kant
was thus led to the characteristic feature of his own “transcendental” idealism,
namely his combination of idealism about the main forms of objects, that is,
the view that we ourselves impose spatiality, temporality, substantiality, cau-
sality, and other forms upon our experience and precisely because we know
these forms a priori cannot regard them as also the real forms of objects
independent of ourselves, with a kind of ontological realism, his unshaken
confidence that in some sense both what we refer to as our selves and our
objects really do exist independently of our representations of them.
50    

But although Kant insists that his own “transcendental idealism” includes
“empirical realism,” that is, recognition of the pervasive reality of space and
time, thus of enduring external objects, in our experience, he does not want
to call his own position “transcendental realism,” because for him that
would be the view that objects independent of our representations do exist
with the forms that we represent them as having. That is, in Kant’s terms,
transcendental realism would be the view that things really are spatial and
temporal independently of our representing them as such. Nor would he
even be happy to call this conception of things in themselves a kind of
idealism, because it is part of his position that, at least from what he calls a
theoretical point of view, we cannot suppose that even our own minds are
really as they appear to us, nor can we assert that the reality that ultimately
underlies the appearance of minds is essentially different from the reality
that ultimately underlies the appearance of bodies. Yet he remains confident
that we are entitled to assert the existence of some sort of reality underlying
the appearance of both minds and bodies. And to make matters even more
complicated, he is confident, as already noted, that we can rationally believe
God to be mental in nature from what he calls a “practical” point of view,
that is, as a necessary presupposition of rationally attempting to do what
morality commands, and even seems to think that our own freedom,
incompatible with the nature of matter, is genuinely known, a “fact of
reason” (CPrR 5:30). A complete characterization of Kant’s position would
thus be empirical realism about space, time, causation, and the other cate-
gories, transcendental idealism about space and time but combined with
realism about the existence of things in themselves, and now even “practical”
idealism about the nature of ourselves as things in themselves and the nature
of God, as in both cases essentially mental or spiritual—a positive assertion
of the special, non-material nature of God and self but not of all things in
themselves.
Kant had already published a number of substantial scientific as well as
philosophical works before the “great light” of transcendental idealism came
to him in 1769, leading to his first statement of it the following year in his
inaugural dissertation, On the Forms and Principles of the Sensible and
Intelligible Worlds (1770), defended on his accession to the chair of logic
and metaphysics at the “Albertina,” the university in Königsberg where he
spent his life. But it would then take him another decade of unrelenting
work, the so-called “silent decade,” to publish his full argument for tran-
scendental idealism in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, which
appeared in 1781. (On the development of the Critique during the “silent
  51

decade,” see Haering 1910; Carl 1987; and Guyer 1987: Part I). Even then the
relation between the empirical realism and transcendental idealism that he
developed in that work continued to vex him: the first substantial review of
the book in 1782, by the Breslau “private scholar” Christian Garve
(1742–98) but heavily revised by the editor, the Göttingen empiricist
J. G. H. Feder (1740–1821), charged him with Berkeleianism, in other
words, with idealism as ordinarily understood to allow only mental entities
and states (the “Göttingen” review as originally published as well as Garve’s
original version are both translated in Sassen 2000), and Kant then tried to
rebut that accusation in his attempted popularization of the Critique, the
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics of 1783, and to further defend that
rebuttal of ordinary idealism in the “Refutation of Idealism” that he added to
the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787. (On the develop-
ment of Kant’s position between 1781 and 1787, see Guyer 1987: Part II).
But Kant was still not done with the topic of idealism, as we know from a
dozen further drafts of the “Refutation” that he composed after that second
edition of the Critique (Guyer 1987: Part IV). Indeed, Kant continued to
struggle with the clarification of his own position to the end of his life,
attempting a restatement of transcendental idealism in the uncompleted
material for a final book that has come down to us under the name of the
Opus postumum (see Förster 2000; Emundts 2004; and Guyer 2005: ch. 11).
But since it was Kant’s presentations of his position in the two editions of the
Critique and the Prolegomena that were most influential in his own time and
have been since, we shall concentrate on those texts here. It was in these texts
that Kant attempted to perfect his combination of empirical realism about
space, time, and the categories, transcendental idealism with regard to space
and time, and yet realism about the actual existence of things distinct from
our representations of them combined with agnosticism about their real
nature although together with the outright denial of their spatiality and
temporality and assertion of the fact of freedom in our own case. It was then
primarily in his writings in moral philosophy, above all the Critique of
Practical Reason of 1788, that he developed what we have called his practical
idealism about the real freedom of the noumenal self and the idea and
“postulate” of an immaterial God. The second half of Kant’s third and
final critique, namely, the Critique of Teleological Judgment in the
Critique of the Power of Judgment, uses Kant’s complex position to justify
the revival of a teleological approach to nature that would seem to have
already been outmoded in Kant’s time, but was transformed into a regulative
key (Guyer 2020b) and which had an enormous influence on the formation
52    

of the philosophical projects of the post-Kantian German idealists although

perhaps without Kant’s careful qualification.
Kant’s arguments for his transcendental idealism are distributed across all
parts of his Critique of Pure Reason. He gives a direct argument for it in the
Transcendental Aesthetic, supplemented by the Transcendental Analytic,
and he gives an indirect argument for it in the Transcendental Dialectic by
arguing that only his transcendental idealism can allow us to avoid the
paradoxes or confusions of traditional metaphysics (Proops 2021: chs. 10
and 12). We will comment first on Kant’s direct argument for transcenden-
tal idealism and then on his indirect argument for it through the critique of
traditional metaphysics.
The direct argument is based on Kant’s claim, developed in the
Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason and renewed
in §§6–13 of the Prolegomena, that we necessarily represent space and
time and objects in them by means of our a priori representations of
space and time, which are thus pure forms for the intuition—immediate
presentation—of particular objects, and that we can construct proofs of
theorems about space and time in geometry and arithmetic by appeal to
our a priori representations or in “pure intuition.” But how does this lead to
any form of idealism? Kant’s chief argument is that space and time can
represent

no property at all of any things in themselves nor any relations of them to

each other, i.e., no determination of them that attaches to objects them-
selves and that would remain even if one were to abstract from all subjec-
tive conditions of intuition,

and that space and time themselves can instead be only our a priori
representations of them and the spatial and temporal features of objects in
space and time only features of our representations of them or of the
“appearances” of objects, because

neither absolute nor relative determinations can be intuited prior to the

existence of the things to which they pertain, thus be intuited a priori.
(CPuR A 26/B 42)

The decisive point of this argument is the following: although because of our
forms of intuition our particular representations necessarily have spatio-
temporal structure, any objects that had that structure independently of our
  53

so representing them would at best have such structure contingently, and

thus the supposedly synthetic a priori propositions about space, time, and
their mathematics would not be necessarily true throughout their domain
after all. This argument thus exploits the key epistemological premise for
idealism, namely that if there is an isomorphism between knowledge and the
known it must be necessary. Kant is arguing that since we have no ground to
assert a necessary isomorphism between the spatio-temporal structure of
our experience and the spatio-temporal structure in things as they are in
themselves, we must deny the latter altogether and instead identify the
objects of our spatio-temporal knowledge only with our own representations
and their forms. Kant makes this key move several times. In the Critique, he
poses the rhetorical question,

If there did not lie in you a faculty for intuiting a priori; if this subjective
condition were not at the same time the universal a priori condition under
which alone the object of . . . intuition is possible; if the object ([e.g.,] the
triangle) were something in itself without relation to your subject:
then how could you say that what necessarily lies in your subjective
conditions for constructing a triangle must also necessarily pertain to the
triangle in itself (A 48/B 65);

similarly, in the Prolegomena he writes that

Pure mathematics, and especially pure geometry, can have objective reality
only under the single condition that it refers merely to objects of the senses,
with regard to which objects, however, the principle remains fixed, that our
sensory representation is by no means a representation of things in them-
selves, but only of the way in which they appear to us,

for on the contrary supposition

it absolutely would not follow from the representation of [e.g.] space, a

representation that serves a priori, with all the various properties of space,
as foundation for the geometer, that all of this, together with what is
deduced from it, must be exactly so in nature. The space of the geometer
would [or could] be taken for mere fabrication and credited with no
objective validity, because it is simply not to be seen how things would
have to agree necessarily with the image that we form of them by ourselves
and in advance. (Prolegomena §13, Note I, 4: 287)
54    

So, Kant concludes, in order to be necessarily true throughout their domain,

the synthetic a priori propositions about space and time—and this includes
not just the specific propositions of geometry or mathematics more gener-
ally but also the general propositions derived in the metaphysical exposi-
tions, such as that space and time are infinite singular wholes with parts
rather than instances—must be true only of the representations on which we
impose our own forms of intuition, and cannot be true of things as they are
in themselves. This is Kant’s chief argument for transcendental idealism, the
view that the way things appear to us essentially reflects our cognitive
capacities rather anything intrinsic to them, combined with what we could
call theoretically indeterminate ontological realism, the view that there are
things independent of our representations of them but because our most
fundamental ways of representing things cannot be true of them we cannot
know anything about them other than the fact of their existence itself—until,
that is, Kant brings his practical argument for our own ultimately mental
nature and the mental nature of God on board. (This interpretation is
developed in Guyer 1987: Part V, and Guyer 2017. For a different argument
to the same conclusion, that Kant actually denies the spatiality and tempo-
rality of things as they are in themselves, see Allais 2015. For a different
approach, that Kant never denies the spatiality and temporality of things as
they are in themselves but only omits spatiality and temporality from the
concepts of things as they are in themselves, see Bird 1962; Prauss 1974; and
Allison 1983/2004.)
In a passage added to the second edition of the Critique, Kant also points
out that by arguing for the “transcendental ideality” of spatio-temporality—
that it is a necessary feature of our representations of things but not a feature
of things as they are in themselves at all—he does not mean to degrade space
to a “mere illusion,” as did “the good Berkeley” (B 71): his position is that it
is a subjective but necessary feature of our way of representing things,
similar to secondary qualities such as color or fragrance (B 70n.) in being
subjective but unlike them in being necessary (see also A 29/B 45), and he
thinks that by failing to see that the spatiality (in particular) of our repre-
sentations is necessary, Berkeley has unnecessarily “demoted” it to a mere
illusion. Kant’s larger objection to the charge that his position is not
different from Berkeley’s is, however, that while denying the spatiality and
temporality of things as they are in themselves, he has provided no reason to
deny that there are things distinct from our representations of them and our
own minds as representing them even if their nature is necessarily unknown
once they have been stripped of spatiality and temporality. But since this
  55

larger objection is most clearly expounded and defended in the Prolegomena

and the “Refutation of Idealism” added to the second edition of the Critique,
which is inserted into the Transcendental Analytic, discussion of it can be
deferred for now.
Kant does not need to mount a separate argument for transcendental
idealism in the Transcendental Analytic, for while that is aimed at showing
that the use of certain concepts (the categories of pure understanding) and
principles (the principles of pure understanding) are necessary conditions of
any cognition of objects at all, indeed of self-consciousness (apperception)
itself, but also yield cognition only when applied to intuitions, pure intui-
tions in the case of pure mathematical cognition and empirical intuitions in
the case of everything else (thus Kant’s famous statement “Without sensi-
bility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none
would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without
concepts are blind,” A 51/B 75), since empirical intuitions have already been
shown to yield appearances rather than things in themselves, it automati-
cally follows that the categories and principles of pure understanding will
also yield cognition only of appearances. Nevertheless, Kant reaffirms tran-
scendental idealism during the course of the Transcendental Analytic.
The Transcendental Dialectic, the second section of the Transcendental
Logic of the Critique of Pure Reason in which Kant provides the critique of
traditional metaphysics is explicitly intended to give an indirect proof of
transcendental idealism (B xx) (Guyer 1987: ch. 18 and again Proops 2021:
chs. 10 and 12). Specifically, the middle section of the Dialectic, entitled
“The Antinomy of Pure Reason,” is supposed to provide this indirect proof.
All three sections of the Dialectic, thus the preceding “Paralogisms of Pure
Reason” and the following “Ideal of Pure Reason,” are supposed to show that
the faculty of reason’s inevitable conception of the “unconditioned,” that
which is a condition for everything else but itself has no condition, can never
provide knowledge of any object because knowledge requires intuition as
well as concept, and intuition is always conditioned—the representation of
any region of space is conditioned by more surrounding it, and that of any
region of time is likewise conditioned by the representation of more time
before and after it. Reason can form “transcendental ideas,” more properly,
“transcendent concepts” (A 327/B 384), that is, the ideas of an uncondi-
tioned subject (the self as substance), an unconditioned whole of all things
and events (a completed world-whole), and an unconditioned ground of all
possibility (God) (A 334/B 393). These ideas, according to Kant, may be
useful as guidelines for scientific research and even necessary for the
56    

purposes of practical reason, but they outrun the limits of intuition and
therefore theoretical cognition. This general claim itself does not entail
transcendental idealism, that is, it does not identify space and time with
our own forms of intuition. However, Kant’s claim is that the paradoxes
diagnosed in the “Antinomy of Pure Reason” can only be resolved on the
basis of transcendental idealism. In the case of the first two antinomies he
argues that both sides essentially concern space and time or the things in
them (these are the arguments that as we saw were missing from Arthur
Collier’s anticipation of the first two antinomies), and that since space and
time as forms of intuition are indefinitely extendable and divisible, both sides
of the debates, the theses and the antitheses, are false: space and time and
thus the totality of things and events in them (the world) are neither
bounded and finite nor unbounded and infinite but indefinite (even though
particular things within space or periods within time may have determinate
boundaries). In the case of the third and fourth antinomies, however, Kant
argues that the distinction between appearances and things in themselves
that is at the heart of transcendental idealism makes it possible for both sides
to be considered true, since they concern different objects: in the empirical
world of experience, there are only ever indefinitely extending chains of
causes and effects, each moment of which is necessary relative to its causal
laws (the third antithesis) but contingent because no antecedent cause is
absolutely necessary or necessary considered in itself, but outside of the
empirical world there is nothing to prevent there being an absolutely
necessary thing in itself (God) nor acts of absolute spontaneity on the part
of that absolutely necessary being or even lesser beings, such as finite agents
like us. Thus, Kant argues that the antitheses of the third and fourth
antinomies are actually true of the world as it appears, while the theses of
these two antinomies are possibly true of things in themselves, namely of
God as the ground of the entire world of appearance and of ourselves as
spontaneous agents grounding our own appearances of action—and again,
Kant’s ultimate claim will be that while we have necessary and sufficient
practical grounds for rational belief although not theoretical cognition in the
existence of God (B xxx), the foundational “fact” of pure practical reason
seems to include the real fact of our own noumenal freedom (CPrR 5: 30).
Kant’s antinomies led to the dialectical methods of Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel, and were thus to prove immensely influential. But it was clearly
controversial whether the antinomies in fact required the distinction
between appearances and things in themselves; Hegel, for example, surely
thought not. For the argument that only transcendental idealism can resolve
  57

the antinomies seems to be circular: unless one assumes that our representa-
tions of space and time give us not only reliable but also complete informa-
tion about the nature of space and time and all things in them, there is no
reason to assume that the limits of our representations of space and time—
their indefiniteness and the contingency of any starting or stopping point in
them—are also in fact true of space and time and everything in them in
themselves. Kant’s indirect proof for transcendental idealism therefore is not
conclusive (see Guyer 1987: ch. 18).
Kant himself did not think so, of course. He was utterly committed to
transcendental idealism. When confronted with the challenge that transcen-
dental idealism was nothing but Berkeleianism, however, that is, the reduc-
tion of all reality to ideas and the minds that have them, he recoiled. This
objection was made in the first substantial review of the first edition of the
Critique, written from an empiricist point of view by Christian Garve and
then redacted by J. G. H. Feder in 1782 (Feder and Garve 1782; Garve 1783
in Sassen 2000: 53–8, 59–77). Kant defended himself by a more precise
formulation of his doctrine in the Prolegomena (1783) and further by the
insertion of a “Refutation of Idealism,” specifically “material idealism,” into
the Transcendental Analytic in the second edition of the Critique (1787).
Kant’s claim in the Prolegomena is that his position should be called
“formal” or “critical” idealism rather than “material” idealism because it
merely identifies space and time with our forms of intuition but does not
otherwise deny the reality of the objects in space and time. As he puts it:

There are things given to us as objects of our senses existing outside us, yet
we know nothing of them as they may be in themselves, but are acquainted
only with their appearances, i.e., with the representations that they produce
in us because they affect our senses. Accordingly, I by all means avow that
there are bodies outside us, i.e., things which, though completely unknown
to us as to what they may be in themselves, we know through the repre-
sentations which their influence on our sensibility provides for us, and to
which we give the name of a body—which word therefore merely signifies
the appearance of this object that is unknown to us but is nonetheless real.
Can this be called idealism? It is the very opposite of it.
(Prolegomena §13, Note II, 4: 288–9)

At this stage, Kant’s response to the identification of his position with

traditional ontological idealism is basically incredulity: he cannot under-
stand it because in his view he has only given reasons for removing space
58    

and time from things to our representations of them, just as earlier philo-
sophers had given (different) reasons for relocating properties like color
from object to subject, but has provided no arguments against the existence
of those things themselves, which he, like any other sane person, takes for
granted.
By the time of the second edition of the Critique, however, Kant must
have come to see the need for a positive defense of the assumption of
the existence of things in themselves that ground our spatio-temporal
representations of body (although, since those things in themselves are
not supposed to be spatio-temporal and causality is supposed to be a
spatio-temporal relation, they cannot precisely be said to cause our spatio-
temporal representations). Kant’s argument—which in the following years
he would attempt to improve a dozen times (see Guyer 1983; Guyer 1987:
Part IV; and Kant 2005: Reflexionen 5653–4 and 6311–19, 6323)—is that we
can only achieve “empirically determined consciousness” of our own exist-
ence, or a determinate temporal ordering of our own representations,
by correlating them with something enduring outside of and distinct
from them:

The perception of this persistent thing is possible only through a thing

outside me and not through the mere representation of a thing outside me.
(B 275)

Spatiality may be acknowledged to be only my way of representing things

outside me, but insofar as anything in space is used to determine the order of
my own representations it must be regarded as being ontologically distinct
from my representations of it even if its phenomenology is subjective, that is,
even if spatiality is only our way of representing ontological independence
(see A 22/B 37). In this way Kant proves, contra Berkeley who denies it and
Descartes who doubts it, that our phenomenologically spatial representa-
tions are “grounded” in something ontologically distinct from those repre-
sentations. Kant’s “Refutation” was intended precisely to demonstrate that
transcendental idealism, the argument that our most basic forms of knowl-
edge in fact reflect only our own forms of intuition and conceptualization,
could and must be combined with indeterminate ontological realism, that is,
assurance of the existence of objects independent of our representations of
them combined with ignorance of their nature, other than their non-spatio-
temporality. (For alternative approaches to the “Refutation of Idealism,” see
Vogel 1993 and Emundts 2010.)
  59

It may well be asked of Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism,” as it had already

been asked of his yet-to-be-named transcendental idealism in 1770 by such
distinguished contemporaries as Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–77),
Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–79), and Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86),
whether it is really compatible with the transcendental ideality of time,
that is, whether it does not presuppose the reality of the temporality of the
enduring object by means of which it proposes to determine the sequence of
our own representations as well as of the self that has that sequence of
representations. Isn’t the sequence of representations itself, they essentially
asked, really a sequence, and therefore undeniably real, even if spatiality may
be merely apparent? But we will not further pursue that question here,
because all of Kant’s successors were more concerned with the viability of
Kant’s general distinction between appearances and things in themselves
rather than with the specifics of Kant’s argument for transcendental idealism
from a priori knowledge or with the details of Kant’s proof that we can assert
the existence of things in themselves in spite of that distinction. This
concern began with the famous objection of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
(1743–1819), made in the appendix to his 1787 book on David Hume
(Jacobi 1787), that without the assumption of things in themselves he
could not enter into the critical system, but that with it he could not remain
within the system: that is, he felt that once the distinction between appear-
ances and things in themselves was made, any ground for the assumption of
the existence of things other than our own representations had been
removed even if Kant had made no explicit argument against that existence.
Our next steps will rather be to consider how Kant deployed his transcen-
dental idealism to develop his moral philosophy in his second and third
critiques, and to take a brief look at his attempt to reformulate the doctrine
in the final work that he attempted but failed to complete, which survived in
the sheaf of notes that came to be known as his Opus postumum. Neither
in his moral philosophy nor in the combination of aesthetics and teleology
in the guise of a theory of the “subjective” and “objective purposiveness” of
nature that comprises Kant’s third critique (its theory of fine art can be
considered as a sort of appendix to its main argument) does Kant offer any
new definition of or argument for his transcendental idealism. Rather, he
attempts to exploit transcendental idealism for the defense of positions that
he holds dear—the actuality of freedom of the will and rational belief in the
existence of a God who makes possible the realization of maximal happiness
through maximal virtue that Kant calls the highest good—in the face of the
thoroughgoing determinism that he has himself imposed on the world as
60    

we experience it. Many details of Kant’s reconciliation of his naturalistic

and deterministic conception of experience with his conception of the
necessarily “supersensible” grounds of the possibility of morality will be
rejected by the subsequent generation of German idealists, but the general
project of demonstrating, as Hegel will put it, that the real is also rational, is
the heir to Kant’s transcendental idealism. So understanding how Kant
attempted to reveal the moral significance of transcendental idealism is
necessary for our larger story.
Kant expounded his moral philosophy in three main works, the
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals of 1785, in which he attempted
to clearly formulate and ground (aufsuchen und feststellen) the “fundamen-
tal principle” of morality and then prove that we have the freedom of the will
necessary always to be able to act in accordance with this principle; the
Critique of Practical Reason of 1788, in which he tried again to prove
the reality of freedom of the will and guarantee the possibility of realizing
the highest good, the combination of virtue and happiness that is the
“complete object” of morality; and the late Metaphysics of Morals of 1797,
comprising two parts, the Metaphysical Foundations of the Doctrine of Right
and of the Doctrine of Virtue, in which Kant lays out a full system of human
duties, both those that can and should be coercively enforced by the public
institutions of the state (the duties of right) and those that can only be
enforced by each human being’s own respect for the moral law (ethical
duties). But Kant had previously argued for at least the possibility of freedom
of the will as well as for the rationality of belief in the existence of God and
human immortality in the “Canon of Pure Reason” in the Doctrine of
Method of the first Critique, and in the third Critique he continues the
attempt to “bridge” the “great gulf” between the laws of nature and the laws
of freedom by means of transcendental idealism that he had begun in the
second Critique, so we need to look at those works too. Finally, in the
unfinished Opus postumum Kant seems to have been attempting to recast
our ideas of both nature and God as projections of our own mind, an idealist
project if there ever were one. But since that material became accessible only
in the twentieth century, it played no role in the historical development of
idealism, and we will have to omit discussion of it here.
We begin with the link between Kant’s transcendental idealism and his
moral philosophy. In the third Antinomy of Pure Reason in the first Critique
Kant had argued that while in the domain of appearance as we experience it
every event must be seen as determined by an antecedent one ad infinitum
(or more properly ad indefinitum) and thus there is no room for freedom of
  61

the will as Kant understands it, the radical freedom to choose between any
action and its contrary no matter what one’s past history might seem to
determine, in the non-spatio-temporal domain of things as they actually are,
in themselves, there is at least room for genuine spontaneity, that is the
origination of a series of events from a first cause that is not itself caused and
thus determined by anything else. In the first instance, Kant argues that this
allows for the possible existence of God as an uncaused ground outside of
the entire series of events that comprise the world of experience, but he also
notes that the distinction between uncaused ground at the noumenal
level and always causally determined events at the phenomenal allows for
the possibility of multiple instances of noumenal spontaneity, thus for the
possibility of completely free choices by ourselves regarded as things in
ourselves rather than as mere appearances. As he puts it, once “the faculty
of beginning a series in time entirely on its own [has been] proved
(though no insight into it is achieved), now we are permitted also to allow
that in the course of the world different series may begin on their own
as far as their causality is concerned, and to ascribe to the substances
in those series”—namely, ourselves—“the faculty of acting from freedom”
(A 450/B 478).
Establishing the possibility of freedom of the human will is as far as the
Critique of Pure Reason is usually thought to have gone, and indeed seems to
be what Kant thought that it had established when he came to write his
moral philosophy: only there, he suggests in the second Critique, can the
reality of freedom as a property of the human but noumenal will be
established. But actually even in the first Critique Kant had at least suggested
a stronger result. In his extended commentary on the resolution of the third
Antinomy, Kant introduces a distinction between “empirical” and “intelli-
gible” character. The former is how we appear to ourselves in space and
time, and as far as this is concerned, “its actions, as appearances, would
stand through and through in connection with other appearances in accord-
ance with constant natural laws, from which, as their conditions, they could
be derived.” No room for freedom of the will here. But transcendental
idealism allows for the possibility of intelligible character at the noumenal
level, “through which it”—that is, the human will—“is indeed the cause of
those actions as appearances, but which does not stand under any conditions
of sensibility and is not itself appearance” (A 539/B 567). Plenty of room for
freedom here, although it would not seem that the distinction between
phenomenal and noumenal, transposed into the domain of character, the
subject of moral responsibility, as the distinction between empirical and
62    

intelligible, does anything more than leave room for the possibility of
freedom. However, a few pages later Kant writes:

Yet the human being, who is otherwise acquainted with the whole of nature
solely through sense, knows himself also through pure apperception, and
indeed in actions and inner determinations which cannot be counted at all
among impressions of sense; he obviously is in one part phenomenon, but
in another part, namely in regard to certain faculties, he is a merely
intelligible object, because the actions of this object cannot at all be
ascribed to the receptivity of sensibility. We call these faculties understand-
ing and reason . . . Now that this reason has causality, or that we can at least
represent something of the sort in it, is clear from the imperatives that we
propose as rules to our powers of execution in everything practical.
(A 546–7/B 574–5)

Here Kant seems to be going beyond the position that the distinction
between appearances and things in themselves makes freedom of the will
possible; he seems to be saying that in addition to our knowledge of ourselves
as sensibly affected and passive, we have, through “pure apperception,”
knowledge of ourselves as genuinely active, or spontaneous, and able to
act in accordance with imperatives, including those of morality, no matter
what the history of our empirical character might seem to predict or entail.
This is very much the position that Kant will adopt in the Groundwork and
Critique of Practical Reason, and which might be called transcendental
idealism proper, attributing to ourselves as we really are a property compat-
ible with our nature as mental even if not with our spatio-temporal, causally
determined appearance. Or we might call this position the transcendental
realism of idealism: it asserts that we really are mind-like free wills, not really
causally determined bodies at all.
Yet in the first Critique Kant again seems to shy away from this assertion,
going so far as to say that “we have not even tried to prove the possibility of
freedom, . . . because from mere concepts a priori we cannot cognize any-
thing about the possibility of any real ground or any causality. Freedom is
treated here only as a transcendental idea . . . that nature at least does not
conflict with causality through freedom—that was the one single thing we
could accomplish . . .” (A 558/B 586).
But whether or not Kant thought that he could show that we have genuine
knowledge through pure apperception of the real freedom of our will in the
Critique of Pure Reason, that is exactly the claim that he makes in the
  63

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Before we come to that, however,

we need a quick look at Kant’s argument for rational belief in God and our
own immortality, belief that can be part of idealism but not materialism, in
the “Canon of Pure Reason.” Here Kant claims that it is only in its pure
practical—that is, moral—use that reason allows a “canon,” a determinate
set of rules for its use—in the theoretical case, reason’s ideas of the “uncon-
ditioned” can yield regulative but not constitutive principles. Kant will
ultimately qualify this claim about pure practical reason, for his final posi-
tion is that while pure reason yields a fundamental principle of morality
valid for any and all rational beings, it must be applied to some specific facts
about human nature and human circumstances to yield the specific juridical
and ethical duties of human beings (MM Introduction, 6: 217). In the
“Canon” Kant also claims that under ideal circumstances, in an entirely
moral world, “a system of happiness proportionately combined with moral-
ity can also be thought as necessary, since freedom, partly moved and partly
restricted by moral laws, would itself be the cause of the general happiness”
(A 809/B 837). Kant does not explain this claim, and the reason for it
emerges only in the Groundwork: morality requires that each person be
treated as an end in herself, that means that the particular ends that each sets
for herself must be treated as ends for all insofar as they are compatible, and
since happiness is what results from the realization of agents’ ends, in a fully
moral world the greatest possible happiness would be achieved, although
that is not the direct object of morality. But, Kant continues in the “Canon,”
in the real world not everyone is fully moral, far from it, so those who are
virtuous must be able to hope that “God and a future life” will at least make
their own happiness possible (A 811/B 829) if their own resolve to be moral
is not to be undermined (A 813/B 841; cf. CPJ §87, 5: 452). God and the
possibility of a future life cannot be understood in materialistic terms, so
there is a basis for rational belief in if not theoretical cognition of a real
idealism in this argument.
Kant comes back to, and revises, the argument about the highest good in
the Critique of Practical Reason, but first a word about Kant’s argument for
the reality of freedom in the Groundwork. (Needless to say, the literature
on the Groundwork, one of the most widely read works in all of philosophy,
is vast; a few useful commentaries are Paton 1947; O’Neill 1975/2013; Rawls
2000; Guyer 2007; and Allison 2011). In the first two sections of that book,
Kant analyzes, first, what he takes to be common concepts of a “good will”
and duty and, second, the philosophical concept of a categorical imperative,
that is, a moral command that holds for any agent regardless of her
64    

particular desires. As he does in the opening moves of the second Critique

also, Kant takes it for granted that any moral theory will recognize that the
fundamental principle of morality must hold categorically, without excep-
tions. Kant formulates the categorical imperative in three main steps, cul-
minating in the formulation that every agent must act only on maxims that
would transform the realm of nature into an “empire of ends,” a “systematic
connection . . . both of rational beings as ends in themselves and of the ends
of his own that each may set for himself ” (Groundwork 4: 433, cf. 4: 436)—
the formulation of the categorical imperative that can explain the link
between morality and happiness that was assumed in the “Canon” of the
first Critique. Kant’s position is that all of this may be derived by analysis of
the concept of a rational being, but that it requires a further “synthetic” step
to show that the results of this analysis apply to and bind us, actual human
beings. He attempts this further step in the third section of the Groundwork
by appeal to his doctrine of transcendental idealism: we can distinguish
between appearance and thing in itself even in our own case, but, he
assumes, while our empirical knowledge of our selves is governed by the
structures of space, time, and the categories, and is thus subject to causal
determinism, we also have insight into the “self-activity” or spontaneity of
our own pure reason, and the only possible law of this activity is the moral
law, precisely because of its independence from particular, empirically given
desires (Groundwork 4: 451–2). As we saw Kant do at one moment in the
Critique of Pure Reason, he thus claims that we must regard ourselves “as
intelligence . . . as belonging not to the world of sense” but “as belonging to
the intelligible world“ (Groundwork 4: 452). This is an assertion of real
idealism, that is, of the intelligent and therefore mental nature of our being
at its most fundamental level. Kant makes this argument in a moral context,
but he does not appear to restrict its force by claiming that it is a mere
“rational belief ” or, in the term in which he will next introduce in the second
Critique, a “postulate of pure practical reason.” He just asserts it.
This brings us then to that second Critique. (The main commentary in
English remains Beck 1960.) This book makes two revisions to the positions
Kant has advanced in the first Critique and the Groundwork. After an initial
restatement of the argument for the categorical imperative that Kant had
made in the previous book, although here only in the form of what had there
been its first formulation, the requirement that we act only on maxims that
we could also will to be “practical universal laws” (CPrR 5: 27), Kant devotes
the bulk of the work to further development of his accounts of freedom of
the will and the highest good. While Kant’s metaphysical, idealist theory of
  65

free will remains the same, he reverses the order of argument for it (see
Ameriks 1982/2000: ch. 6): instead of arguing from our knowledge of our
real self-activity as intelligence to the binding validity of the moral law for us,
as he does in the Groundwork, Kant argues that we have immediate aware-
ness of the binding force of the moral law, as the fundamental “fact of
reason,” but that this brings along with it knowledge of our possession of a
“pure will”: the moral law directs us to set aside all “empirical conditions”—
that is, desires—for our actions, and our pure will makes it possible for us to
actually do so (CPrR 5: 30–1). Kant illustrates this with an example, a person
who knows that because he ought to refuse to bear false witness he can do so
(even if he does not know whether he will). This illustration relies on the
principle that “ought implies can,” but this principle becomes an essential
part of Kant’s argument only in the further book Religion within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason because there Kant has separated the pure will
into two parts, the pure Wille which gives the moral law and is thus identical
to pure practical reason, and the faculty of choice, or Willkür, by which the
agent decides whether or not to act in accordance with the moral law. These
two separate parts need to be linked by the principle that “ought implies
can,” while in the Critique of Pure Practical Reason the ability to give
ourselves a pure moral law and the ability to choose to act in accordance
with it were two sides of the one coin immediately given as the “fact of
reason.” But either way, the basic position remains the same as in the
Groundwork: while our empirical character is spatio-temporal and fully
subject to causal laws and thus to determinism, our real, intelligible charac-
ter is that of spontaneous rationality. This must be considered a full-
throated version of idealism.
When it comes to immortality and God, however, Kant’s position in the
second Critique is qualified as “rational belief ” or “postulate” rather than
straightforward “fact of reason.” Kant’s position also seems to be conflicted.
For he argues that we need to postulate personal immortality in order to
allow sufficient progress toward the full realization of virtue, which we
certainly do not observe in ordinary human nature as empirically known
(5: 122), but he also argues that we need to postulate God as the author or
“supreme cause” of a nature the laws of which are compatible with the moral
law, and thus allow for the realization of happiness as a consequence of
virtue in nature (5: 125–6). These two postulates seem contradictory because
they suppose that human virtue can be perfected only in a non-natural
eternal existence but that the happiness that should ensue from the perfec-
tion of virtue must be able to be realized within nature, thus apparently
66    

before the perfection of virtue. But even if the position is contradictory, it

does seem to be idealist rather than materialist: surely humans are supposed
to be immortal only as minds, not as bodies, and equally surely God is not
conceived of as a body, but as some sort of super-intelligence. The pious
Bishop Berkeley would not have been unhappy with this result.
Kant rarely admitted that he had changed his mind about anything, at
least after his turn to the “critical philosophy” in 1781. Nevertheless, his
1793 Religion can be seen as resolving the tension between the postulate of
immortality and that of God as the author of nature by reinterpreting free
will as allowing for the possibility of a “change of heart” or fundamental
maxim, from the “radical evil” inherent in the choice to subordinate moral-
ity to self-love to the radical goodness or virtue of subordinating self-love to
morality, at any time, or at least as what appears to us, in our phenomenal,
temporal self-presentation, as at any time (see especially Religion 6: 66–7).
This means that we do not need eternity to perfect our virtue, but that doing
so is always open to us within our natural lives, although on the basis of our
noumenal freedom; thus there is no contradiction between the condition for
the possibility of the perfection of virtue and that for the possibility of the
highest good, namely that (we can rationally believe that) God has so
designed nature as to make happiness possible if people are virtuous.
Kant does not explicitly return to this point in the Religion, but it is the
underlying theme of the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). This book
is divided into two halves, the first dealing with what Kant calls aesthetic
judgment, on beauty and sublimity in nature and on beauty in fine art (see
Guyer 1979/1997; Allison 2001; Guyer 2005a), the second with what he calls
teleological judgment, judgment on “purposiveness” within certain parts of
nature, namely organisms, but also within nature as a whole. His claim is
that beauty, sublimity, and purposiveness in nature are all “ideal” in the
sense of being located strictly speaking within the human mind rather than
within nature itself (CPJ §§58, 73, 75). In the case of aesthetic judgment,
Kant argues that such judgments, although based on a judge’s own feeling of
pleasure, claim “subjectively universal validity” or to speak with a “universal
voice” (§§7–8), that is, to be valid for any human being who approaches
their object in an optimal frame of mind, not distracted by any personal
interest, assuming that the judge who first makes the judgment has also been
in an optimal condition to do so (see §19). He first explains that this claim is
rational because our pleasure in a beautiful object is based in a “free play” of
our imagination and understanding (the explanation in the case of the
sublime and of artistic beauty is somewhat more complicated, because
  67

those involve the faculty of reason, or in the case of fine art, ideas of reason
as well), and imagination and understanding, as the conditions of the
possibility of knowledge in general, can be assumed to work the same way
in all human beings (§§21, 38). But then he sets up an “antinomy of taste”
which, like all of Kant’s antinomies, is supposed to be resolved only by
transcendental idealism, namely, by the supposition that there is a “super-
sensible substratum” that grounds both harmony among human cognitive
natures and between the human cognitive capacities and nature itself. This is
clearly a step toward a substantive idealism. Along the way, Kant argues that
although our pleasure in beauty must in the first instance be disinterested,
we take an interest in the fact of the existence of such pleasure, based in the
fact that natural beauty gives us a clue that nature is receptive to our
concerns, including foremost our moral concerns (§42)—of course we
have an interest, the interest of reason, in the possibility of the realization
of our moral goals, and therefore in the existence of any sort of evidence for
this realizability. Kant interprets our experience of natural beauty as some
sort of evidence of the harmony between nature and morality that is the
condition of the possibility of the highest good, grounded in the second
Critique in the postulate of or rational belief in the existence of God.
This line of thought becomes more explicit in the second half of the third
Critique, the “Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment.” (See
McLaughlin 1990; Guyer 2005b: Parts I and III; and Zuckert 2007.) Here
Kant argues that we humans are capable of understanding organic processes
such as growth, self-maintenance, and reproduction only by thinking of
organisms “as if” they had been designed by an intelligent designer, an
obvious step toward idealism. Although his approach is no doubt undercut
by the synthesis of Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian genetics
characteristic of twentieth-century biology, which has the general form of
a physical or mechanical explanation of such apparent purposiveness in
biology, Kant thought that the “antinomy” between the mechanical expla-
nation that we seek in all science and the teleological explanation, explana-
tion by antecedent design, that we are forced to in thinking about organisms,
and that we then generalize to nature as a whole, could be resolved only by
thinking of nature as a whole “as if ” it were the product of an intelligent
designer outside of nature, achieving its purposes—for it must have such—
through the laws of nature (§§73, 77). Kant maintains that this is not
“dogmatic,” thus not constitutive theoretical metaphysics; thus he does
not go so far toward real idealism here as he does in the case of our own
freedom. Nevertheless he links this line of argument to the fact of our
68    

own freedom by arguing that the “final end” of nature can only be some-
thing “unconditioned” and therefore outside of nature, and that this can be
nothing other than human freedom, fully developed in morality but also
requiring the realizability of the highest good in nature (§84; see especially
Guyer 2005b: ch. 12). Thus Kant’s entire philosophy culminates in a com-
plex form of idealism: transcendental ideality with regard to space and time,
which includes the assertion of the non-spatiality and -temporality of things
in themselves, including ourselves as we are in our selves, outright assertion
of the freedom of our own intelligible character, and therefore its essentially
mental rather than physical character, and the postulate or possibility of
rational belief in if not theoretical knowledge of an intelligent, therefore
mind-like, ground of nature itself.
It is in this context, further, that Kant discusses the idea of an intuitive
understanding, a concept that would become of utmost importance for the
post-Kantian German idealists, especially the early Fichte and Schelling, in
their attempts to give a new foundation to what they took to be the ultimate
aim of Kant’s philosophy. In §77 of the third Critique, Kant, somewhat
regretfully, dismisses the idea that human beings can rely in our explana-
tions of natural phenomena on an intuitive understanding because of the
ineliminable discursivity of our understanding, by which he means that we
always have to apply general concepts to particular intuitions, although
general concepts can never capture all of the richness of particular objects
(an idea that Kant gets from Leibniz and Baumgarten). According to Kant, it
is also because of this discursivity that we human beings are not allowed to
think of ends as real causes. Instead, we have to treat all explanations that
involve the concept of an end, that is, all teleological explanations and
especially those that concern organisms understood as natural ends
(Naturzwecke), as only subjectively valid and provisional. They are condi-
tioned by our inability “to represent the possibility of parts (with respect to
their constitution and their relation) as being dependent on the whole,” an
inability that is rooted in the discursive character of human thought. The
early German idealists not only did not share this Kantian humility about
the limitations of our human understanding; they vehemently resisted it in a
number of different ways, all designed to overcome Kant’s assessment.
Kant himself ended up with a complex position, combining the undeniable
insight that the most fundamental forms of knowledge ultimately depend on
fundamental operations of self-consciousness with more contentious claims,
such as that the possibility of morality requires a kind of freedom incompat-
ible with the most basic assumption of natural science, that causal explanation
  69

is always possible. He mapped these positions onto a complicated ontology

that reduces space and time to mere appearance and in different regards both
denies and assumes the possibility of knowledge of things as they are in
themselves. We will now see how Kant’s immediate successors tried to cope
with this complex inheritance.
 5
German Idealism

Kant’s view about how we must conceive of both the natural and the moral
world in all its different aspects had an enormous impact both within and
beyond the academic scene in late eighteenth-century Germany. His
uncompromising fight for reason and rationality as the sole arbiter of
right and wrong in all spheres of life provoked massive reactions in many
intellectual communities, especially those involved in theological, political,
and social debates. All these debates took place within the overall struggle
in the third part of the eighteenth-century between supporters of the
Enlightenment on the one hand and their anti-Enlightenment opponents
on the other. The main representatives of the later German Enlightenment
movement at that time were Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher and
biblical scholar, as well as businessman Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
(1729–81), the dramatist, art critic, and philosopher as well, and of course
Kant himself. They were vigorously opposed by notables including Friedrich
Heinrich Jacobi, a novelist, what we now call a public intellectual, and also a
philosopher (both his philosophical works and his novel Allwill are trans-
lated in Jacobi 1994); Thomas Wizenmann (1759–87), a young Protestant
theologian whom Kant mentions in a footnote of his second Critique,
although to straighten him out on the difference between a postulate of
pure practical reason and mere wish-fulfillment (CPrR 5: 143n.); Johann
Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), a former student of Kant’s who became one
of the leading Protestant theologians and cultural philosophers of his time,
considered now one of the founders of historicism and cultural relativism
(although those terms were not available at the time); and Johann Georg
Hamann (1730–88), another wayward friend of Kant who opposed his own
mystical Christianity to Kant’s religion of pure reason. (On the idea of an
anti-Enlightenment, or as he called it the “Counter-Enlightenment,” see
famously Berlin 2013a and 2013b; Guyer 2020a explores relations between
Kant and Mendelssohn as two figures within the German Enlightenment,
while Beiser 1987 and Guyer forthcoming discuss many of Kant’s most
immediate critics.) Whereas Kant and the other dominant figures of the
Enlightenment fought against superstition in religion and for human rights

Idealism in Modern Philosophy. Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Oxford University Press.
© Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848574.003.0005
   71

in politics and equality in social relations by relying on the validity of the

fundamental principles of rationality, the anti-Enlighteners were distrustful
of rationality as the guideline for all problems and questions concerning
both the natural world and the human world of morality, society, politics,
and culture. They pointed to limitations and paradoxes inherent in the very
concept of rationality as employed by the proponents of the Enlightenment
with the intention to re-establish what they took to be a basic truth that
more and different resources than enlightened rationality are needed to
account for what is going on in the natural and what should go on in the
moral, social, and cultural world. Of course, Kant had insisted that reason
could lead to paradoxes, but that those could be corrected by reason itself
through “critique.” For the anti-Enlighteners, however, such central ele-
ments of Kant’s philosophy as his insistence on the distinction between
appearances and things in themselves on epistemological grounds and on
the restriction of the reality of freedom to practical contexts were taken to be
paradigmatic of the unworldliness and remoteness from everyday life not
just of Kant’s philosophy but of the Enlightenment in general.
However, the conflict over the limits of rationality was not the only,
perhaps not even the main, issue. Of equal importance in the ongoing
dispute was the question as to the conception of the subject that interacts
as a knower and an actor with the world. Here Kant was seen, especially by
Jacobi, as favoring a model according to which the subject of knowledge and
action is the product of a spontaneous act that gives rise to rules of object-
formation both in a theoretical sense, on the basis of the categories of the
understanding on the one hand, and in a practical sense via the categorical
imperative of pure practical reason on the other. But Kant’s fundamental
idea that the subject of all conscious activity, the I, has to be conceived of as
consisting in an “act of spontaneity” (CpuR B 132) that lies at the basis of our
ability to become conscious of objects was met with incomprehension, if not
positively ridiculed by many of his contemporaries, again most explicitly by
Jacobi. The main reason for this incomprehension was that Kant connected
with his conception of self-consciousness or the I as an “act of spontaneity”
the further claim that although all consciousness of objects depends on this
spontaneous act the act itself can never become an object (even though, as
we saw in both the Critique of Pure Reason and the third section of the
Groundwork Kant sometimes did claim that we could cognize our own
spontaneity or “self-activity” through pure apperception). In any case,
Kant’s opponents objected to his distinction between the unknowable “tran-
scendental” I and the knowable “empirical” I, the former denoting the I as
72    

subject of all knowledge, the latter the I as an object of knowledge. The

questions that were asked by many, either confused or irritated or both,
were: does Kant really want to confront us with a double I, one of which is
categorically inaccessible to any knowledge whatsoever? If this is really his
intention, how do we have to conceive of the relation in which these
different I’s stand to each other? Does it make sense or is it even possible
to think of them as being identical, being the same? What would sameness
or identity amount to in this case? And above all: if there indeed is a rational
basis for this doubling of the I, of self-consciousness, does it not speak
against a conception of rationality that gives birth to such results? It is
easy to comprehend how questions like these could lead to the impression
that if such a conception of rationality lies at the root of the demands and
commands of the Enlightenment, then one should be skeptical of the entire
movement.
Among those who were profoundly influenced by the ongoing dispute on
how to assess the Enlightenment in general and its Kantian underpinnings
in particular were all the philosophers who were later labeled as the
“German idealists,” thus Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), Friedrich
Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), and Georg Friedrich Hegel
(1770–1831). All of them started as students of theology who for different
reasons moved on to philosophy. They had in common a vital interest in
and (in the case of Fichte and Hegel) a quite persistent enthusiasm for what
they took to be the major aim of the French revolution, namely to establish a
society of free, equal, and brotherly united citizens that is based on rational
principles. Their positive attitude toward the French revolution with its
emphasis on freedom and rationality led them to sympathize in their
youth with what they saw as the center of Kant’s project in philosophy as
documented in his three Critiques. Although from early on they differed
among themselves on how to understand Kant correctly, they by and large
agreed that for Kant (1) spontaneity is the fundamental source of all world-
and self-relations, (2) the reality of freedom is the basis of the primacy of
practical reason, and (3) rationality is the sole criterion of claims to validity
in all areas of discourse. In particular, they took the Introduction to Kant’s
Critique of the Power of Judgment to be the founding document of a
revolutionary approach to philosophy in its entirety, an approach that
would open up the dead ends in which traditional philosophical theories
were trapped and replace them with a system that did justice to reason in the
evaluation of all matters of concern to human beings, be it in knowledge,
morals, or aesthetics. Whether or not they were right in their assessment of
   73

Kant’s intentions in the three Critiques is by no means obvious and has been
controversial ever since. (The literature on German idealism and its relation
to Kant is far too great to list here; for a start, see Beiser 2002; Pinkard 2002;
Henrich 2003; Horstmann 2004; di Giovanni 2005; and Förster 2011 [2013].
For an exhaustive survey of the “systems of pure reason and their critique,
1785–1845,” see Jaeschke and Arndt 2012. For a multi-author collection, see
Ameriks ed. 2000b.)
Although all of the German idealists proclaimed their commitment to
what they called the “spirit” of Kant’s philosophy throughout their careers,
they were at the same time his harshest critics. They complained not about
what they took to be the intentions lying behind Kant’s so-called “critical”
project but about the execution of this task in the form of the three Critiques.
These complaints addressed many different aspects of Kant’s philosophy,
among them most prominently (1) what they called the insurmountable
“dualisms” (see Guyer 2000) that are supposed to play an essential role in
both Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy and in his resolution of the
supposed antinomy of teleological judgment as well. They also complained
about (2) the subjectivism characteristic of his teachings in all of their parts,
that is his view that the world of experience as the object of science but also
of aesthetic and teleological judgment is very much our own construction,
and they were very critical of (3) what for them was the most implausible
consequence of Kant’s transcendental idealism, namely that no knowledge
of things in themselves is possible (although, as we saw, Kant never doubted
the existence of things in themselves, and also seemed to breach the insu-
perable barrier to our knowledge of their nature at least in the case of
freedom of the will). As to (1) they objected (a) that in his theoretical
philosophy Kant insisted on the irreducible opposition between the faculties
of sensibility and understanding and hence between intuitions and concepts
in the fabric of knowledge, (b) that in his practical philosophy he advocated
the acceptance of two totally disjointed worlds, a sensible and an intelligible
world (mundus sensibilis atque intelligibilis), in both of which a rational
person has to be situated, and (c) that in order to account for the organic
world of living beings one has to accept two different modes of explanation,
the mechanical and the teleological, of which only the former has objective
validity while the latter is merely subjectively valid (a distinction that Kant
made within the empirical standpoint, since from the point of view of
transcendental idealism all of our representations of the world are informed
by our own cognitive structure, the forms of intuition on the one hand and
of conceptualization and judgment on the other). The charge (2) of
74    

subjectivism was directed against the claim purportedly endorsed by Kant in

his transcendental idealism that there is no subject-independent concept of
objectivity available on which to rely in evaluating knowledge-claims but
that what we ordinarily call “objectivity” is a construct grounded in subjec-
tive activities of our cognitive faculties.
However, it was most notably (3), the idea imputed to Kant that there are
things in themselves of which no knowledge is possible, that was the main
target of the criticism voiced by these early Kantians against Kant’s philo-
sophical edifice, because according to them this position opened the flood-
gates to skepticism in epistemology on the one hand and to nihilism in
morals and religion on the other. Thus it is no wonder that from early on the
German idealists were extremely unsympathetic toward and distrustful of
what they considered to be the underlying basis of the doctrine of things in
themselves, namely transcendental idealism, and that they tried to replace
this brand of idealism with other versions.
As we have seen, Kant made two major points with his transcendental
idealism. First, although he never doubted the existence of something
independent of our representations of objects, he claimed to have shown
that on theoretical grounds we can know nothing about the ultimate con-
stitution of this reality as it might be independently of the way it appears to
beings endowed with understanding, reason, and in particular human,
spatio-temporal sensibility; when it comes to the domain of practice, how-
ever, he sometimes maintains that we can rationally believe in our own, non-
deterministic freedom along with our own immortality and the existence of
God as the condition of the rationality of our efforts to be moral, although in
the first case he sometimes goes further and claims that we can know in pure
apperception that we really are free. In the theoretical case, indeed, Kant
went so far as to deny that the real objects “affecting” us with sensory
representations are substances and their attributes standing in spatio-
temporal and causal relations to each other and constituting a law-governed
whole of nature. But since, according to Kant, we can neither prove nor
disprove the existence of God on theoretical grounds, we cannot know that
what we experience as objects are in the end mental products of a divine
mind having creative powers totally different from those that we find in
nature. Thus Kant holds that from a theoretical point of view we cannot
assert classical idealism, that is, that everything that exists is either an idea or
a mind, whether finite or divine. From this point of view we are bound to be
agnostic with regard to any theoretical claims about the real constitution of
the world, and thus we cannot assert either idealism or materialism about
   75

things in themselves. However, whenever we think about objects of ordinary

cognition, we have to accept them as being conceptual constructions based
on our subjective forms of intuitions and on very specific conceptual rules
for bringing together or unifying data: an object of cognition is that “in
whose concept a manifold of that which is given through sensibility is
united” (CPuR B 137). This means, according to Kant, that the assumption
of the conceptual constitution of objects of cognition is unavoidable. This is
the part of his position that Kant calls empirical realism. Yet at the same
time, Kant does maintain that we can, indeed must rationally believe in the
existence of an immaterial God, and sometimes goes so far as to claim that
we know that we ourselves are free in a way that is incompatible with
deterministic materialism. In this context Kant does maintain something
much closer to traditional metaphysical idealism: God and our own true
selves are not material objects.
What turned out to be Kant’s highly complicated transcendental idealism
was not accepted by the main representatives of post-Kantian German
idealism. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, as already mentioned, immediately
criticized Kant’s allowance of things in themselves of unknown nature,
and replaced it with a straightforward realism about external existence
grounded in a fideism, or immediate belief, which he claimed, plausibly or
not, to find in Hume’s rejection of the psychological possibility of skepticism
(e.g., Jacobi 1994: 273–4; see Beiser 1987 and Horstmann 2004). However,
the general tendency of the post-Kantian idealists, beginning with Fichte,
was to reject Kant’s transcendental idealism by arguing that there is no real
opposition between a subject-independent world present to us in the mode
of “givenness” and “being” and a world conceived of as subject-dependent
in that it is formed by conceptual tools or other “thought-ingredients”
stemming from subjective activity. In other words, Kant’s successors
removed his restriction of a necessary isomorphism between knowledge
and the known to the case of appearances, and took it to be a general
relation between thought and being. This led to a new conception of
idealism whose distinguishing character consists in the endorsement of the
claim of the “inseparability of being and thinking,” although the term
“inseparability” sometimes connotes reciprocal dependence and sometimes
strict identity. This conception was established primarily by epistemological
considerations and introduced an entirely new way of thinking about what
ultimately constitutes reality, based on a dynamic conception of self-
consciousness that the German idealists took to be at the heart of Kant’s
theory of the transcendental unity of apperception, which itself had been
76    

introduced by Kant on the basis of epistemological, not ontological, con-

siderations. According to this new conception, reality has to be conceived as
a result of an activity paradigmatically manifested in the unique manner in
which consciousness of oneself arises. Reality is the objectified expression of
this activity, an activity whose nature is paradigmatically exhibited in acts of
spontaneous thinking. Thus, in order to discover the true nature of reality
one has to understand the operations of this activity.
This approach to fundamental metaphysical questions undercuts the
traditional ontology of substances and their accidents or properties. It
means that one has to characterize the difference between idealism and its
opposite, which can go under the various names of realism, naturalism,
materialism, sensualism, etc., not in terms of different kinds of “stuff ” either
material or mental, but in terms of the contrast between dynamic elements
like activities and forces as the primary constituents of reality and more
substantial items like material objects and (spiritual) persons. Idealism
understood in this fashion becomes the name of a “metaphysical” (in a
non-traditional sense) worldview that is opposed to what especially Fichte
and Schelling liked to call “dogmatism,” the latter being a view that encom-
passes traditional idealism and its opposites as well. This new idealism is
rooted in assumptions about dynamic processes that are operative in the
course of self- and object-constitution. There is thus a fundamental differ-
ence between the idealism of German idealism and the immaterialism of
Berkeley: where Berkeley’s idealism focused on ideas as the “stuff ” of
existence and assumed minds, whether human or divine, as their substra-
tum, the German idealists focused on the spontaneous activities paradig-
matically exemplified in thinking, understood as conceptualization as such,
and acting, understood as inducing change on the basis of concepts. The
German idealists did hold, in some form or other, that these activities,
although conventionally taken to be activities of the mind, were the foun-
dational elements out of which not just the physical, bodies and their forces,
but also everything mental, the mind as a substance, originated through self-
constituting “auto-poietic” processes. They largely tried to suppress the
traditional ontology of substances and their accidents within which
Berkeley still worked, which Hume questioned but for which he supplied
no alternative, and which Kant again defended by conceiving of substance
and accident as relational categories. Instead they favored conceptions of
idealism that are meant to ground traditional substance ontology in opera-
tions and acts of autonomous forces and activities that in their spontaneous
realization give rise to substances both physical and mental, that is, not only
   77

to substantial bodies but also to minds conceived of as substances. Thus, for

them Kant’s transcendental idealism, although rightly giving priority to the
spontaneous activity of self-consciousness in the attempt to account for the
possibility of epistemic access to the world albeit only of appearances,
nevertheless failed and remained a version of “dogmatism” by remaining
committed to the opposition between substantial appearances and substan-
tial things in themselves on the one hand and between minds and bodies on
the other without establishing a common ground either between appear-
ances and things in themselves, or between minds and bodies, or, most
generally, between thinking and being. This critical assessment led them to
the view that an idealism that is worth its name has to uncover what lies at
the basis or what makes these oppositions possible, that is, it has to go
beyond the opposition between thinking and being. Still, while refusing to
accept an insuperable distinction between thinking and being might have led
to some form of materialism if this purported unity were understood from
the side of being, the idealists conceived of it primarily in terms of thinking,
and thus remained, as their name implies, some form of idealists.
Although overcoming the distinction between thought and being by
relying on self-relating activities might be regarded as the common goal of
all the major German idealistic thinkers, they pursued this project in differ-
ent ways. The first post-Kantian philosopher who embarked explicitly on the
project of elaborating a dynamic idealistic conception of reality based on
what he took to be conditions of cognition and agency and built on a specific
conception of self-consciousness was Fichte while he was a professor at the
university of Saxe-Weimar in Jena from 1794 to 1799. In his Doctrine of
Science (1794/5) and in the First and Second Introductions to the Doctrine of
Science (1797) he famously set out to demonstrate that the primordial act
that he called “self-positing” lies at the basis of all reality as far as it is an
object of cognition and agency. His starting point is an epistemological
question: how come we cannot but experience objective reality the way
that we do, namely in terms of spatio-temporal objects standing in deter-
minate relations? Where do these representations of objects, of relations and
especially the belief that they exist, come from? And, most importantly, how
can we have knowledge of objective reality that is not subject to skeptical
doubts? In order to answer these questions Fichte pursued different strate-
gies at different times. But the best known and most influential of these
attempts remains that of the first published version of his Doctrine of
Science. In what follows we will focus primarily on the line of thought
presented in this text, although Fichte changed his arguments considerably
78    

in the First and Second Introduction into the Doctrine of Science. (For
commentaries on Fichte’s argument, see Henrich 2019; Neuhouser 1990;
Horstmann 2004; Zöller 1998; and Breazeale 2013.)
Following the early Doctrine of Science, we must, according to Fichte,
accept three fundamental principles (Grundsätze) of human knowledge
without which we could not even make sense of the idea that we can
know that there is something real at all. The first states that self-
consciousness or the I is a spontaneous, unconditioned act that creates or
“posits” the I as having existence or being (ein Akt, der im Vollzug sein
eigenes Sein schafft). The I understood as this self-positing act that gives
rise to its own being and reality Fichte characterizes as “deed-act”
(Tathandlung), also translated as “Act,” and it is through this deed-act
that what we take to be real or having being comes to the fore. Fichte arrives
at his first principle of human knowledge on the basis of two assumptions.
The first is the (actually quite traditional) assumption that we can be
properly said to know only assertions (judgments or propositions) that
exhibit the character of certainty (Gewissheit), or express what is actually
and certainly the case; the second assumption (which borrows a Kantian
term) maintains that a regress in the process of justification of such asser-
tions can be avoided only if we can furnish some principle or fundamental
proposition that is “utterly unconditioned” (schlechthin unbedingt) (as
Fichte puts it), one, that is, which cannot be derived from any other
principle, and which, for its part, is such that it alone guarantees the utter
certainty, and thus the indubitability, that is, the immunity to skeptical
objections, of any given proposition. This second assumption leads him to
the claim that the unquestionable certainty of a proposition can never be
demonstrated discursively (by appeal to purely conceptual considerations)
or intuitively (by appeal to any sensuous perception); on the contrary, the
ground of unconditional certainty can only be found in the constitution of
self-consciousness itself. Fichte identifies as an appropriate method for
deriving the principle in question a procedure that he calls “abstractive
reflection.” This kind of reflection, according to Fichte, takes its point of
departure from a proposition that everyone regards as unquestionably
certain, a so-called “fact of empirical consciousness.” From this fact, this
indubitable proposition, the process of reflection isolates or abstracts the
elements that belong to the content of such a proposition, that is, belong to
that about which the proposition asserts something. What is supposedly left,
after this abstraction, is simply the form of the proposition, which consists
precisely in affirming the ascription, or non-ascription, of a predicate to a
   79

subject. The proposition that Fichte selects as the point of departure for his
“abstractive reflection” is the logical law of identity in the form “A = A,” a
law that is rightly regarded as utterly certain, that is, certain without recourse
to any further grounds, and thus as intrinsically certain. This fact alone
already shows that we have the capacity (the faculty) to claim something as
certain without reference to any further grounds, or, in Fichte’s own termi-
nology, of “positing” something absolutely (etwas schlechthin zu setzen).
Reflection on this fact shows, according to Fichte, that the utter certainty of
the law of identity is grounded in a self-positing activity or an I-activity,
which in this case posits identity between A and A, an activity that consists
precisely in the act of positing being, in this case of identity. However, as the
result of an I-activity identity could not have being, could not be a real
relation that indeed binds together A and A, that is, binds together A with
itself, if the I-activity itself were not itself real. Because there is no other
positing activity available than the I-activity, in order to be real this activity
has to posit itself as real. Thus, in order to account for the utter certainty of
the law of identity the I-activity, best expressed in the formula “I am,” has to
be seen as positing its own being.
This result, however, is not yet sufficient to give us the first unconditioned
and fundamental principle of all knowledge in the form of the I-activity
“I am.” This is because we have arrived at the “I am” as the guarantor of the
absolute certainty of a proposition only on the basis of an empirical fact,
namely the proposition “A is A” that has been presupposed as utterly
certain. Fichte now rightly observes that the “I am,” as the condition of
the certainty of an empirical fact, itself merely possesses the status of an
empirical fact (Tatsache)—if the utterly certain proposition were not given,
one would never be able to affirm the utter certainty of the “I am.” Up to this
point the “I am” has “only been grounded on a fact, and possesses no other
validity than that attaching to a fact” (GA I, 2: 257). But in order to discover
the first utterly unconditioned principle of all knowledge, we must establish
not only the utter certainty of the law of identity, but also the unconditional
certainty of the “I am” in a way that does not depend upon the presence of a
fact at all. In other words: we must be able to answer the question, how the
utterly unconditioned certainty of the proposition “I am” is possible. Fichte’s
reflections on this question lead to his conception of the “I am” as a deed-act
(Tathandlung). He reasons along the following lines: We know from our
analysis of the conditions of certainty of the law of identity that the “I am”
has the capacity to posit something absolutely in the I, that is, in performing
the I-activity. But in order to be able to posit something absolutely in the I,
80    

the “I am” itself must be posited. We have also already seen that the absolute
positing of the I consists in the activity of positing being. If this is so, and if
the “I am” is to depend on nothing else as its condition, we must think of the
I as the product of its own positing activity, since it would otherwise be quite
impossible to explain its being. Now this, in turn, is supposed to imply that
we must think the I as an activity that posits its own existence insofar as it is
active: the I

is at the same time the actor and the product of the act; the actor, and that
which the activity brings forth; act and deed are one and the same; and the
“I am” is therefore the expression of an Act. (GA I, 2: 259)

For Fichte, a deed-act is not supposed to be a fact, that is, something that is
simply already discovered as given, since the deed-act is logically and
ontologically prior to any facts insofar as it ultimately constitutes (posits)
everything that can be a fact for an I. The I, understood as deed-act, is
supposed to be something absolutely posited precisely because it posits itself,
and this self-positing constitutes its essence and guarantees its being, its
reality. Again, as Fichte says: “That whose being (essence) merely consists in
positing itself as being, is the I, as absolute subject” (GA I, 2: 259). This
means, for Fichte, that the I, so understood, displays all the characteristics
that make it an appropriate candidate for the first utterly unconditioned
principle of all knowledge. Fichte tries out various formulations for expres-
sing this first principle in a really adequate fashion. His most adequate
formulation might be the one that he furnishes at the end of section 10 of
the first paragraph of the Doctrine of Science: “The I originally posits its own
being absolutely” (GA I, 2: 261). This insight that the I must be conceived as
self-positing activity, an activity whose performance consists in its self-
actualization, is meant to make any distinction between epistemological
and metaphysical grounds for idealism obsolete, thus to transcend all
traditional grounds for and forms of idealism.
The second principle postulates a necessary act of counter-positing
(Entgegensetzen) to the self-positing activity of the I, resulting in what
Fichte calls a Non-I, and the third focuses on an activity that gives rise to
the concept of divisibility. Fichte attempts to justify the introduction of these
two principles on systematic grounds, although these principles can only be
described as unconditional in a qualified respect, by exploiting his own
distinction between the form and the content of a proposition. According
to Fichte, every proposition or judgment can be treated as either conditioned
   81

or unconditioned in relation to its content, or to its form, or to both.

If a proposition is unconditioned in either or both of these respects, then
it can be described, in Fichte’s terminology, as a fundamental principle
(Grundsatz). While the second principle is meant to establish as a condition
of cognition (!) the possibility of the reality of “otherness,” of something that
is not the I, the third principle shows how to mediate between the self-
positing and the counter-positing acts of the I by reciprocal limitation,
thereby introducing a subject–object opposition within the I that has
been established by the I-activity. Both these principles are presented as
codifications of two further unconditional acts of positing on the part of
the I. According to Fichte, the I possesses, in addition to the capacity for self-
positing that is captured in the first principle, the further capacity of positing
a non-I freely and simply (without any further ground). That is to say, it has
the ability, through what Fichte calls an “absolute act” (absolute Handlung),
to posit something as non-I that is opposed to the I. Fichte’s second principle
codifies this act of “counter-positing.” Finally, the I is further characterized
by a third capacity, that of freely and simply positing the divisibility of the
I and the non-I. The third principle specifically captures this notion of
divisibility.
It is not difficult to grasp what Fichte is attempting to accomplish with the
introduction of his second principle. It is supposed to do justice to our
inexpungible everyday conviction that there is an external world independ-
ent of ourselves, the objects of which are outside of and distinguished from
us, and to which we can relate in terms of knowledge and action alike. But
for Fichte this conviction is justified not because an external world inde-
pendent of ourselves compels us to understand it as characterized in such
and such a way. On the contrary, it is justified because it belongs to the
distinctive structure of the I to organize its world dichotomously through the
subject–object distinction or the opposition of the I and the non-I. However,
it is more difficult to grasp the significance that Fichte ascribes to the third
principle of divisibility. The motivation for introducing it is obviously to
present the non-I not only as the negation of the reality that the I claims to
posit in positing its own being, but also to ascribe independent reality,
independent being, to the non-I. In attempting to accomplish this by
recourse to the concept of divisibility, Fichte appears to make the implicit
presupposition that being or reality should be regarded as a kind of quantity,
something given in degrees (intensively considered) or parts (extensively
considered). If we accept this presupposition, then we cannot avoid some-
thing like Fichte’s third principle. For the assumption that we have to
82    

conceive of reality as a distributable plurality, together with the notion that

there are real objects that possess an existence independent of the subject,
means that it is necessary, within the Fichtean model of positing, to identify
a factor sufficient to account for the distribution of reality between the I and
the non-I. This factor is taken by Fichte to be divisibility. However, Fichte
still maintains that the division of what is absolutely posited as real by the
unconditioned I-activity into I and non-I is executed by the I-activity itself, it
takes place “within the I.” Thus in the resulting I–non-I constellation the
opposition is not between the absolute self-positing I-activity and something
totally divorced from this activity, in other words Kant’s thing in itself. The
opposition achieved by divisibility is the result of the distribution of the
sum total of what is posited by the absolute I (and hence what encompasses
all of reality) onto two different domains brought about by its positing and
counter-positing acts, that is, the domain of the divisible I on the one hand
and that of the divisible non-I on the other. They are distinguished by what
could be called different attitudes toward each other. In the first realm the
I-activity posits that in self-positing it posits itself as determined by what it has
posited as a non-I. In the second it posits that in its non-I positing it posits
itself as determining that which it has posited as a non-I. As is to be expected,
Fichte will use the introduction of the divisible I and non-I distinction and the
construction of this distinction in terms of the determined–determining
relation to establish two different disciplines in philosophy. The first is
theoretical philosophy. Here the way is reconstructed in which the divisible
I is determined by the non-I and eventually arrives at representations
(Vorstellungen). This reconstruction contains most of his epistemological
teachings. The second discipline is practical philosophy, in which the concepts
of striving and counter-striving (Streben und Gegenstreben), of feeling
(Gefühl), and of drive (Trieb) play the main role. It is within this framework
of an interplay of activities characteristic and constitutive of the I that Fichte
tries to avoid the Kantian conception of the thing in itself. Objects in the shape
of substantial things and subjects in the shape of cognizers are both manifes-
tations of the I-activity or of the I am.
On the basis of these three principles and by reflecting on the
purported interplay between self-positing and counter-positing, Fichte
arrives at a portrait of reality in which all “ordinary” objects, like walls,
trees, and people, and their “normal” interactions and dependencies, like
physical, spatio-temporal, and causal relations of force, find a place. This
portrait is claimed to be idealistic because it is the outcome of an insight
into the dynamics of these fundamental and opposed positing acts that
   83

are essentially mental in nature and because in the end these activities,
according to Fichte, are, metaphysically speaking, all there is: “for the
philosopher there is acting, and nothing but acting; because, as a philoso-
pher, he thinks idealistically” (Second Introduction, section 7; Werke 1: 498).
Idealism thus starts to become what could be called from a traditional point
of view a “hybrid” position that intimately connects epistemological and
ontological elements in explaining “the determinations of consciousness,”
that is, our common sense conception of reality as an object of cognition and
agency, “out of the acting of the intellect [Intelligenz]” yet without thinking
of the intellect as some sort of existing subject:

For idealism the intellect is an acting and absolutely nothing else; one
should not even call it something active because by this expression one
points to something substantial which is the subject of this activity.
(First Introduction, section 7, Werke 1: 440)

A consequence that Fichte explicitly draws from this understanding of

idealism is that one can no longer think of realism as a position that is
opposed to idealism. Rather

realism, . . . i.e., the assumption that objects totally independently of us exist

outside of us, is contained in idealism itself and becomes explained and
deduced in it.
(Second Introduction, footnote at end of section 1, Werke 1: 455)

Because in Fichte’s philosophical world everything is based on the I as a pure

activity, it is not surprising that his idealism was often called “subjective
idealism,” even though he would resist any identification of his view with
Berkeley’s substance–accident form of immaterialism. He avoids that con-
ception by introducing what could be called an ontology of pure action.
Fichte’s dynamic conception of idealism was adopted almost immediately
by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, who in the first period of his
philosophical career became next to Fichte the most outspoken defender
of this hybrid variety of idealism. In doing so he transformed Fichte’s
I-centered approach to reality via an analysis of the conditions of cognition
and agency into an idealistic version of a monistic ontology. In this he was
followed by Hegel. Whereas Fichte had mainly struggled to find an adequate
expression for his activity-based conception of a self-positing I and had
referred to anything outside the I only as the non-I posited by the I itself, in
84    

his early writings on the philosophy of nature Schelling tries to supplement

Fichte’s approach by giving a much fuller account of nature, understood
as everything that appears to be independent of us, in terms of the
I-constituting activities. Because of Schelling’s elevation of nature to a
central topic in his presentation of an idealistic worldview his position
became characterized, although somewhat misleadingly, as “objective
idealism.” On his account, we have to think of reality as an original unity
(ursprüngliche Einheit) or a primordial totality (uranfängliche Ganzheit) of
opposites that is internally differentiated in such a way that every particular
item within reality can be seen as a partial, incomplete, or one-sided
expression, manifestation, or interpretation of the most basic dynamic
opposition characteristic of the whole of reality. This view of reality, which
in early Schelling is quite explicitly linked to Spinoza’s one-substance ontol-
ogy, obviously does not lead directly to idealism by itself: one could just as
well give it a naturalistic reading. As we suggested earlier, the assumption of
an underlying identity between knowledge and the known can lead either to
idealism or to some form of materialism, depending on which of its terms—
knowledge or the known—is used to characterize the other. In order to
connect a monistic ontology in general to idealism in particular, one has to
identify the activities at work in the constitution of the world-whole with
mental or spiritual elements that are supposed to give conceptual structure
to reality. This can be and was done by Schelling at different stages of his
philosophical career in different ways. In the first edition (1797) of his book
Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur), he
set out to prove idealism by trying to show that “the system of Nature is at
the same time the system of our mind” (IP 30; SW 1: 134). This claim is not
meant to state a reciprocal relation of dependence between nature and mind
and their characteristic features, that is, according to Schelling, matter and
concept, thereby presupposing that nature and mind, matter and concept
nevertheless have some reality independently of each other. He rather wants
us to think of nature and mind, matter and concept as being identical in the
sense of being the same: the one is the other and vice versa. The reason why
we as finite minds have to differentiate between them at all lies in a double
perspective that is forced on us by our natural predisposition when looking
at reality to distinguish the “outside us” from the “in us” (cf. IP 39; SW 1:
138)—thus Schelling sees dualism as a psychological tendency but not a
philosophically sustainable position. If this disposition and its conditions
were understood in the right way, we would comprehend that, as he
famously writes, “Nature should be made Mind visible, Mind the invisible
   85

Nature” (IP 42; SW 1: 151) thereby making room for an idealistic conception
of reality as World-Soul (On the World-Soul is also the title of a 1798
publication by Schelling).
As a systematic counterpart to the construction of the phenomena of
nature out of different dynamic factors (forces, activities), in 1800 Schelling
presented his System of Transcendental Idealism. Here he set out to demon-
strate the development of mental phenomena out of these factors which he
here calls the unconscious and the conscious activity starting with sensation
(Empfindung) and intuition (Anschauung) until he arrives via acts of
willing at the aesthetic activity manifested in works of art. He thinks of
these transcendental idealistic demonstrations as a necessary complement to
his philosophy of nature (cf. SW 3: 331f.) and describes their mutual
relation thus:

As the philosophy of nature brings idealism forth out of realism, in that it

spiritualizes the laws of nature into laws of intelligence, or adds the formal
to the material, so does transcendental philosophy bring realism out of
idealism, by materializing the laws of intelligence into laws of nature, or
adds the material to the form. (SW 3: 352)

On this conception both together, philosophy of nature and transcendental

idealism, exhaust the entire scope of philosophy, which reveals itself in the
end to be nothing but a “progressive history of self-consciousness [fortge-
hende Geschichte des Selbstbewusstseins]” (SW 3: 331).
This early approach to establishing an idealistic monism and thereby vindi-
cating a Fichte-inspired dynamic version of ontological idealism was unsta-
ble: first it describes mind as emerging from nature, in what seems like a
materialist program, but then nature as emerging from mind, in what seems
like a paradigmatic idealist program. Schelling gave it up a couple of years
later in the second edition of the Ideas and criticized his earlier view as
providing a basis only for what he now calls “relative idealism” (IP 52;
SW 1: 163). He replaced the earlier view with what he now named “absolute
idealism” (IP 50; SW 1: 162). Both his criticism of his earlier World-Soul
conception and his endorsement of absolute idealism are at least to a certain
degree due to Hegel’s discussion of Schelling’s philosophy in his Difference
between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (1801). Schelling’s new
conception, which underlies what came to be known as his “System of
Identity” (Identitätssystem), takes reality to be a dynamic whole which he
describes as the “undivorced” (ungeschieden) or undifferentiated unity of the
86    

absolute-ideal or subjectivity and the absolute-real or objectivity in an

“eternal act of cognition” (IP 47; SW 1: 157). This eternal act is all there is,
it is “the absolute.” It is disclosed in two fundamentally different forms, one
of which is characterized by the prevalence of subjectivity whereas in the
other form objectivity prevails. These two forms give rise to the distinction
between an “ideal world” and “Nature” (IP 49; SW 1: 161). However,
according to Schelling these forms have to be distinguished from the “eter-
nal cognitive act” or the absolute from which the ideal world and Nature
originate. This act is pure activity of knowing that creates its objects in the
very act of cognition by giving them a form. Because reality is conceived thus
as a dynamic self-organizing cognitive process that lies at the basis of even
the most fundamental opposition between subject and object, Schelling
now thinks of his ontological monism as an unequivocal version of idealism.
He writes:

If we therefore define philosophy as a whole according to that wherein it

surveys and presents everything, namely the absolute act of cognition, of
which even Nature is again only one side, the Idea of all ideas, then it is
Idealism. Idealism is and remains, therefore, the whole of philosophy, and
only under itself does the latter again comprehend idealism and realism,
save that the first absolute Idealism is not to be confused with this other,
which is of a merely relative kind. (IP 50; SW 1: 162)

In the end, then, after 1800 Schelling (arguably as well as Fichte in his post-
Jena period) seems pushed toward a “non-dogmatic” idealism that combines
ontological as well as epistemological idealism within a monistic framework.
(The preceding sketch of Fichte and Schelling is based on Horstmann 2008a
and 2017. For surveys of the development of Schelling’s philosophy, see
Bowie 1993 and Snow 1996, and the multi-author collections Norman and
Welchman eds. 2004 and Ostaric ed. 2014.)
Although Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel too embraces a dynamical
conception of idealism in the spirit of Fichte and Schelling, he departs
from both of them by not relying on the self-positing activity of an I (the
“of ” understood as indicating both a genetivus subjectivus and objectivus,
i.e., the I as that which does the positing and as that which is posited) or on
some primordial subjectless cognitive act that brings about subject and
object as the most basic features of reality. He thus tries to transcend any
traditional form of idealism that identifies the fundamental level of reality
exclusively with the subject or mind. Given his deep distrust of irreconcilable
   87

dichotomies, of anything unmediated and one-sided, one cannot expect

Hegel to be an advocate of any conception of idealism conceived of as an
alternative to or in opposition against realism or materialism or whatever
else. He thus shares with Fichte and Schelling the hostility against attempts
to privilege idealism over and against realism (or something else) or the
other way round, but avoids the suspicion of a reversion to traditional
idealism better than either of his predecessors; in other words, he tries to
avoid collapsing the underlying unity of thought and being into one of its
terms or the other. In the case of Hegel, this hostility toward privileging
idealism shows especially well in his criticism of reductive programs as well
as of “bifurcating” (entzweiend) or separating positions in metaphysics and
epistemology. A reductive program according to which either everything
physical is reducible to something mental or everything mental can be
reduced to something physical is in his eyes “ridiculous” (cf. GW 6:
290ff.). Hegel rejects a bifurcation or separation based on the claim that
one has to distinguish between a world “for us” and a world “in itself,” where
the former is a subject-dependent and in this sense idealistic world while the
latter is the “real” world, although it is essentially totally inaccessible by any
subjective cognitive means. Thus he is really objecting to Kant’s distinction
between appearance and things in themselves understood as putting “the
real” outside of our grasp; Hegel objects to this as a “subjective” idealism,
although Kant himself had objected to Berkeley’s getting rid of things in
themselves (not Berkeley’s term, of course) under a similar name (see
Hegel’s criticism of Kant in Faith and Knowledge, GW 4: 325ff.). Hegel’s
objections to and his contempt for both idealism and realism in their
mutually exclusive forms are well documented in almost all of his writings
throughout his philosophical career.
So what can Hegel mean when in the second edition of his Science of Logic
(1831) he nevertheless claims that in the end “[e]very philosophy is essen-
tially idealism or at least has it as its principle” (GW 21: 142)? He must now
mean by idealism something other than traditional idealism and certainly
something other than Kant’s indeterminate ontological realism (supplemen-
ted by the outright mental realism of Kant’s moral philosophy). Rather,
Hegel must mean by idealism a philosophical outlook that is immune to the
charge of grounding a philosophical system in a conception of reality that is
committed to the acceptance of any irreconcilable oppositions or dualisms.
Now, for Hegel the most fundamental opposition both from a systematic
and a historical perspective is the opposition between thinking and being,
or rather, in the preferred terms, between subject and object. Looked at from
88    

a systematic perspective, this opposition is fundamental because of its

apparent unavoidability at a descriptive level for an assessment of the
ultimate characteristics of reality: after all, we want to be able to hold fast
to the distinction between what is only (in) our (subjective) thought and
what is (objectively) the case. Considered from a historical point of view it
shows that—at least within the tradition of occidental philosophy—the
opposition between thinking and being lies at the bottom of the most
influential attempts to give a philosophical account of the essence of reality
and its multifarious ways of appearing to us, although some of the most
profound of all philosophers, such as Parmenides at the very beginning of
the Western tradition and Spinoza at the beginning of modern philosophy
instead emphasized the unity of thought and being. The more typical
conviction of the fundamental and irreconcilable opposition between think-
ing and being finds expression in many different ways. These ways include
the belief that there is being that is totally independent of or without any
relation to thinking, or the conviction that thinking is somehow external to
being in that being is just the self-standing provider of material on which a
by itself contentless (inhaltslos) thinking imposes a certain conceptual form,
or the assumption that even if there were no thinking there would be being
and vice versa. However, according to Hegel it can be demonstrated that to
think of thinking and being as fundamentally opposed in any of these ways
leads to inconsistencies resulting in contradictions, antinomies, and other
bewildering deficiencies. Hence a philosophical system, “idealistic” in
Hegel’s new sense, that is to overcome these deficiencies has to get rid of
the underlying fundamental opposition and to show that thinking and being
are not opposed but ultimately the same. This claim as to the sameness or
the identity of thinking and being (subject and object) is the cornerstone of
Hegel’s metaphysical credo and together with some other assumptions leads
relatively smoothly to a version of ontological monism as the only convinc-
ing shape of an idealistic system. If a justification of continuing to use the
term “idealism” is required, perhaps it could go back to the original meaning
of Plato’s “Ideas” as the ultimate realities, more fundamental than either the
physical objects paraded before the artificial lights in Plato’s cave or the
flickering shadows of them perceived by the captives in the cave, although
Plato’s underlying unity of thought and being must be unitary although in
some sense also self-diversifying. (The literature on Hegel, even just on
Hegel’s metaphysics, is far too extensive to survey here. For a brief survey
see Emundts and Horstmann 2002, for more detail, Fulda 2003 and Beiser
2005. For an exhaustive intellectual biography, see Pinkard 2000. For works
   89

on Hegel’s metaphysics and logic, see Henrich 1971; Pippin 1989 and Pippin
2019; Bristow 2007; Longuenesse 2007; and Emundts 2012. For a volume
that explores Hegel’s relations to British idealism and American pragma-
tism, see Stern 2009. On Hegel’s rejection of dualism, see Guyer 2017.)
However, a closer look at how Hegel tries to realize a monistic idealism
reveals that it proved difficult to establish a philosophical system based on
the identity of thinking and being or subject and object. At the outset this
project was to be realized within the boundaries of two conditions. The first
was to present an argument in favor of the superiority of idealism that would
not just make the endorsement of idealism a question of individual character
or what a person wants to be, a move that Hegel thought to be characteristic
of both Fichte’s and Schelling’s defenses of idealism. The second was to
abandon the view that was, according to Hegel, also sometimes to be found
in Fichte and Schelling, that one has to think of idealism as an alternative
and in opposition to materialism, which they also called “dogmatism” or
“realism.” Not to meet these two conditions were in Hegel’s eyes unaccept-
able shortcomings of any attempt to establish a convincing idealistic world-
view. He expressed his dissatisfaction with attempts of this kind to establish
idealism as the superior approach in philosophy quite early (Faith and
Knowledge, 1802) by referring to them under the title “philosophy of
reflection of subjectivity” (Reflexionsphilosophie der Subjektivität). This
kind of philosophy of reflection, although favoring subjectivity and hence
giving priority to the conceptual and in this sense ideal contributions of
the mind to what is called reality is, according to Hegel, still stuck in what
he later came to call the “opposition of consciousness” (Gegensatz des
Bewusstseins) (in both Phenomenology [1807] and the Science of Logic
[1812, 1813, and 1816]). This kind of philosophy is committed to a mode
of thinking that takes place within a framework in which the opposition of
thinking and being or subject and object is still basic, dissolved only super-
ficially by either abstracting from one of the opposed sides or by establishing
a relation of domination between the opposed elements, without transcend-
ing and transforming them into a whole, his renowned “Subject-Object,” a
whole that is both constituted by these elements, the subject and the object,
and that at the same time constitutes them as its own internal differentia-
tions. This way of overcoming oppositions by thinking of the elements
opposed as having significance only insofar as their mutual relation can be
conceived of as being constituted by the unity they together form led Hegel
to claim that in order to avoid the idea of self-standing or irreducible
oppositions and hence to escape the charge of one-sidedness in cases
90    

where the prioritization of opposites is at stake, one has to follow the

methodological maxim that for every opposition there has to be a unity in
place that consists of the elements opposed. Hegel took this principle to
imply that the “absolute,” the totality of what there is and can be, must be
conceived of as what he sometimes calls the “identity of identity and non-
identity” (this formulation is already found in The Difference Between the
Philosophies of Fichte and Schelling of 1801, at the beginning of its chapter
on Schelling) or as the “unity of unity and multiplicity” (from the essay on
Natural Law of 1802, section II) where the terms “identity” in each of these
formulations are meant to refer to both the whole that gives rise to what is
opposed and to one of the elements in opposition.
But does the acceptance of such a methodological formula as a means
by which to transcend oppositions actually suffice to establish a superior
conception of idealism that is not just a one-sided alternative to materialism
or realism or dogmatism? It appears that on the basis of this methodological
device two intelligible answers to this question are available, neither of
which, however, settles the question of superiority. The first answer leads
to a negative result not only as to the alleged superiority of an idealism that
surpasses one-sidedness but in particular as to the cogency of such an
idealism. The second answer opens up at least the chance of a positive
answer to the question of the persuasiveness of a non-oppositional idealism.
On the one hand, those favoring the negative option would start from the
claim that the very idea of a “Subject–Object,” that is, of a whole that is prior
to and constitutive of its elements, cannot be defended by any rational
means. They would end up recommending just giving up on idealism as
well as its opposites and to refrain from discussing them as positions whose
superiority over each other can be defended philosophically in a subject–
object framework, because there is no rational way to make sense of this
framework altogether and hence to decide which of them has to be favored
over the other. It is in fact a reaction Hegel himself sometimes advocates
when he states, for example in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy
(chapter on later skeptics), that both idealism and dogmatism have the
status of mere proclamations and thus turn out to be equipollent. This
might be seen as a recommendation to give up on fundamental metaphysics
altogether, which of course many subsequent philosophers might welcome.
Supporters of the positive option, on the other hand, would have to give
credit to the rationality of the strategy, sketched above, of how to overcome
oppositions in a philosophically acceptable way and thus would allow for a
“Subject–Object” as the common whole in which the opposed sides can be
   91

united. But even such an admission would not lead directly to an argument
for the superiority of idealism. It would only provide a reason for favoring a
position that could be described as real-idealism (Real-Idealismus), a syn-
thetic product that integrates idealism and its opposites into a unity whose
elements, though still distinguishable, are at the same time in some sense
identical or, in Hegel’s idiom, sublated (aufgehoben). It is easy to show that
most of the German idealists were strongly attracted by this positive solu-
tion. At some point in their philosophical careers both Fichte and Schelling
explicitly used the term “real-idealism” in order to characterize their views.
Even Hegel late in life, in a review of a treatise by Ohlert (GW 16: 287ff.),
made use of this term as a name for his metaphysical teachings.
The positive solution just outlined seems to have been in line with Hegel’s
way of conceiving of how to overcome oppositions in his early Jena writings,
such as the “Difference” text. Unsurprisingly, however, he became dissatis-
fied with such a tactic because of its inherent limitations. This dissatisfaction
shows up explicitly for the first time in the Preface to the Phenomenology of
Spirit (1807), Hegel’s first and perhaps still most widely read extended
philosophical book. From then on he tried in different ways to find a
justification of idealism in sensu stricto, that is, a justification of a view
that (1) attributes priority to non-sensible activities, especially to the activity
of thinking, that (2) makes the traditional alternatives of materialism,
realism, and/or dogmatism obsolete, and that (3) allows for subject–object
identity without thereby being committed to real-idealism. The reasons for
his dissatisfaction with attempts that lead to real-idealism, among them
most of his own pre-phenomenological systematic sketches, are quite sim-
ple. (Here “phenomenological” connotes Hegel’s 1807 view that the differ-
ent, inadequate conceptions of reality appear in successive form in human
history until an adequate conception is finally reached, not Edmund
Husserl’s early twentieth-century conception of a “bracketed” Wesenschau
or “inspection of essences” that reveals the timeless structure of objective
experience and thought.) In the first place, it is obvious that the attempt to
transcend oppositions by making the opposed elements parts of an integrat-
ing unity looks like a makeshift, a terminological stipulation that cannot do
justice to what it is meant to achieve, namely, to allow the opposed elements
to develop out of a unity that is prior to them. Instead of commencing with a
developing unity, this move, according to Hegel, remains damaged by
presupposing the opposed components as self-standing, thereby making
the unity dependent on the elements rather than the other way around.
Secondly, the unity presented as resulting from a process of integration of
92    

what is taken to be opposed cannot be conceived as representing a real

identity of opposites because of its status as a synthetic product. In order to
qualify as real unities to Hegel’s taste, unities could be pictured in analogy to
the “Kippfiguren” of Gestalt psychology, single figures such as the duck-
rabbit or the vase-or-two-facing-profiles that can be seen in either of two
ways without any physical change in them, and that even flip back and forth
between two appearances without our choice. Both these reasons (together
with a couple of more idiosyncratic ones) led Hegel to believe that the
method of overcoming oppositions by stipulating unities is not ultimately
feasible for the task at hand, hence not able to solve the problem of one-
sidedness and consequently of no use in the endeavor of justifying the
superiority of idealism as he was trying to redefine it.
The question, then, is how to proceed in order to establish a version of the
subject–object-identity idea that is neither subject to the charge of one-
sidedness nor to that of just postulating it without any argument as a
given fact? Although this might seem to be a purely technical task, that is,
the task of conceptualizing the subject–object identity in a different way
than had been done in the real-idealism approach, and although Hegel
recognized early the insufficiencies of Fichte’s, Schelling’s, and even his
own initial suggestions for overcoming oppositions, it took him quite a
while to come up with a proposal that both avoids the problem of one-
sidedness and the suspicion that it operates with unfounded assumptions
while at the same time supporting the superiority of idealism as a meta-
physical doctrine. This is so because he had to realize that there is not just an
ontological question about the nature of the subject–object identity, but that
there is an epistemological worry to be answered before the ontological
question can even be addressed. As became increasingly clear to him, the
task he had to face consists in demonstrating two things: (1) that it is
epistemologically warranted to claim that there are indeed unities of basic
oppositions (like subject–object, identity–nonidentity, unity–multiplicity,
thinking–being) that precede their constitutive elements in that they are at
the basis of their constitution while at the same time consisting of them, and
(2) that it is ontologically necessary to think of the most basic identity, which
is that of subject and object, in an idealistic fashion, that is, not in terms of a
substantial item but within the scope of a framework that relies on the
activity of thinking as a process that is manifested in concepts and their
(logical) relations. For Hegel it is the epistemological task that must be solved
first before the ontological task of giving an idealistic account of the subject–
object identity in terms of the activity of thinking can be tackled. At least in
   93

the Phenomenology his idealism is based on epistemology in order to ground

metaphysics; that is why Hegel thought that he had to precede his “science of
logic,” which is essentially his ontology, with his “phenomenology,” which is
essentially his epistemology (see Fulda 1965).
The first task mentioned amounts to establishing an epistemological
argument for metaphysical idealism. Hegel presents this argument under
the guise of an introduction to what he calls “science” in the shape of a
Phenomenology of Spirit. Science here is roughly identical in meaning with
metaphysics. The details of this epistemological introduction to metaphysics
have been extensively investigated by many different scholars in studies
specifically on the Phenomenology, including Pinkard 1994, Stern 2002,
and most recently Brandom 2019. Hegel starts his epistemological account
by addressing the question: how is it possible to convince what he calls in the
Phenomenology a “natural consciousness” (natürliches Bewusstsein), that is,
an ordinary human being who is committed to the common standards of
conceptualization and reasoning—how is it possible to convince such a
subject by discursive means, not just by appeal to some strange non-standard
procedures like intellectual intuition or revelation, of the epistemic legiti-
macy of the assumption of a subject–object identity that is prior to and
constitutive of its elements? Because the answer to this epistemological
question is meant to ground the ontological claim concerning the ultimate
constitution of reality, Hegel thought fit to address it in the form of an
introduction to what subsequently had to be elaborated in a systematic way
as a metaphysical doctrine about what there ultimately is (his “logic”). This
epistemological task turned out to be much more difficult than Hegel
initially thought. This is documented by the surprisingly many different
sketches of what he took to be an “introduction” to his system that he wrote
even before he published the best-known version of this introduction, the
Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807. But the Phenomenology is not just the best
known, it is the only version of an introduction that Hegel ever elaborated in
detail, at least in print, that explicitly addressed the task at hand as an
epistemological problem. In the second edition of the exposition proper of
his system, the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline pub-
lished much later in 1827 (first edition 1817) he chose a different introduc-
tory path to his metaphysical project under the title “Attitudes of
Thought towards Objectivity” (Stellungen des Gedankens zur Objektivität)
for reasons that might have to do with a modification in his assessment as to
the suitability of epistemological considerations for introductory purposes.
This will be pointed out later. However, the Phenomenology still remains the
94    

most straightforward attempt to settle the question as to the metaphysical

priority of the subject–object identity on epistemological grounds.
Although looking at Hegel’s different pre-phenomenological attempts to
find a suitable introduction to his central ontological doctrine is an inter-
esting enterprise in its own right, it cannot be dealt with here in detail. It
would lead to a discussion of why Hegel initially, from 1801 perhaps to 1806,
thought of what he in this early period called “logic” as a discipline that
could function as an introduction to his metaphysics. Of all the fragments
that have come down to us from this period, the most complete “logical”
version of an introduction is the so-called Jena Systemdraft II from 1804–5.
This system-draft contains a so-called Logic as a discipline that is meant to
present the process of “elevating” (erheben) an epistemic subject equipped
with traditionally accepted methodological and logical convictions to the
“standpoint of science” (Standpunkt der Wissenschaft), that is, to a stand-
point that is based on the metaphysical doctrine of subject–object identity.
This process is delineated by Hegel as an introductory logical process that
proceeds by means of a criticism of standard logical forms like judgments
and inferences as well as of object constituting concepts. This general
approach is of course inspired by Kant’s strategy of a “metaphysical deduc-
tion” of the categories of pure understanding, although Hegel’s eventual
execution of this strategy in the Science of Logic, by far his longest philo-
sophical book, will be far more ambitious than Kant’s few pages, offered as a
mere “clue” to the transcendental deduction of the categories.
In order to deal with the epistemological problem of demonstrating the
metaphysical priority of identities over and against their opposed elements,
in the Phenomenology Hegel begins with an analysis of the conditions of
knowledge where knowledge is understood as an achievement of a subject’s
activity of dealing conceptually with the objective world or the world of
objects. For Hegel, an inquiry into the conditions of knowledge is the right
starting point because knowledge understood as the activity of gaining
conceptual access to the world is the only discursive attitude available to a
subject toward determining what is objectively real, that is, toward the
world. The approach Hegel is pursuing in order to arrive at the desired
result, that is, the proof of the priority of unity or identity, can be outlined
thus: he first introduces the conception of knowledge (Erkennen) that is
leading his investigation. According to this conception knowledge is a
relation established between some claim of a subject and an object that
allows for some sort of correspondence (Entsprechung) between them. The
possibility of this correspondence depends on getting hold of structural
   95

features that are shared by the subject’s claim and the object on the basis of
which a knowledge relation can be established. Hegel maintains that the
relevant structural feature in the case of knowledge is conceptual presence of
both subject (claim) and object which implies that not only the claim but
also its object must be treated as conceptual items. This is the assumption of
isomorphism that underlies any epistemologically motivated move toward
idealism; the fundamental difference between Hegel’s strategy and Kant’s is
that for Kant this approach requires the reduction of objects of genuine
knowledge to appearances, or our own way of representing objects, while
Hegel is trying to avoid this reduction by conceiving of real objects that are
structured in the same way as our thoughts are without being reduced
to them.
Hegel’s concept of knowledge as a correspondence relation between
subject and object has to be distinguished from the process by which
knowledge is established. The exemplary scenario that Hegel has in mind
when talking about the acquisition of knowledge in the Phenomenology
might be described as follows: knowledge obtains if a (conscious) subject
affirms a claim about the characteristics (whether essential or not) of an
object, state of affairs, or event (henceforth just “object,” thus this should not
be understood just to mean that which endures through some state of affairs
or event) that corresponds to what the subject takes to be true of the object,
state of affairs, or event that is addressed. For example, if a subject claims
that such and such is the case then this claim amounts to knowledge if it
turns out that such and such really is the case. (Thus far, Hegel’s analysis
does not seem much different than Alfred Tarski’s famous correspondence
analysis of truth, “ ‘p’ is true only if p”; Tarski 1936 and 1944.) Knowledge is
thus understood as the positive result of a comparison between what a
subject takes to be true and what is true of the object. It is easy to decide
what a subject takes to be true. This is expressed by the claim. What is not
that easy to decide is whether this claim is true, that is, whether the object is
indeed adequately characterized by the claim. (This is why Tarski’s defini-
tion of truth is not an epistemology of truth.) It is here that according to
Hegel experience comes into play. In order to come to a decision as to the
adequacy of its claim to the object, a subject has to rely on experience. (Thus
far, of course, any empiricist, and Kant as well, would say the same.) If a
subject experiences that its way of conceiving and referring to what it takes
to be the case is deficient and is somehow refuted, undermined, or made
obsolete by the way the object presents itself in experience, it has to give up
the knowledge-claim and to replace it by a different claim. Experience
96    

understood as a means of settling knowledge-claims in this fashion plays a

double role, a negative and a positive one. Its negative role consists in its
destructive function with regard to the knowledge-claims of the subject:
according to Hegel it often happens that the subject, based on what it
experiences while referring to an object, has to give up on its claims because
they prove not to measure up to the intended object. (Thus far there is still
no difference with ordinary empiricism.) Yet for Hegel there is a much more
significant positive aspect connected with experience, and here is where
Hegel departs from ordinary empiricism: while experiencing the breakdown
of its claim, the subject does learn something genuinely valid about the
nature of the object addressed. This is so because the subject can only
experience the inadequacy of its claim against the background of what the
object referred to reveals as (belonging to) its true nature, a revelation—and
this is Hegel’s decisive point—that is manifested in its not corresponding to
what a subject claims about it. In other words, the object shows its real
character to a subject only by exhibiting what it is not conforming to, and
hence gives rise to a new claim by the subject that takes into account what
was learned about the object in the experiential process. It is in this manner
that the subject learns more and more about the real nature of the object
until it arrives at a subject–object constellation where it realizes that knowl-
edge can only be obtained if it understands itself as being—identical with or
indistinguishable from—the object. The details of this experiential process
are somewhat complicated and cannot be spelled out here. It must suffice to
indicate that for Hegel the main methodological feature at work in initiating
this process consists in what he calls “determinate negation,” an operation
that is designed to introduce new conceptual elements into the process and
to lead within the chain of experiences a subject makes of its object from one
subject–object constellation to the next.
The question now is, how does Hegel avoid lapsing into ordinary ideal-
ism, the reduction of the object to the subject? Two points might be
suggested. (1) Hegel’s analysis of the conditions of knowledge does not
just lead to a metaphysical claim about the “real” nature of objects. His
analysis is meant to pave the way at the same time to what could be called
an idealistic “metaphysics of the subject.” This is so because according to
Hegel the experiential process reveals besides the real nature of the object
the real nature of the subject as well, although that is often just taken for
granted in empiricism. In this process the subject is forced to realize through
experience that what ultimately can count as an object that meets the
standards for knowledge is a self-transparent, organized, conceptual whole that
   97

encompasses all of reality, which empiricism would never allow. However, it

also has to realize that this all-inclusive conceptual organism is identical
with itself, to which empiricism is also not committed. This leads to the
subject’s experience of its own reality via its insight into the true nature of
the object, thereby proving metaphysical subject–object identity, although it
achieves this insight/knowledge not in its initial shape as an individual
human cognizer (Erkennender/Wissender) but in its social, cultural, and
religious shape as Spirit.
(2) Hegel’s concept of knowledge is designed to establish a metaphysical
conclusion based on an epistemological argument. In this regard it can be
seen as having structural similarities to Kant’s epistemological argument in
favor of transcendental idealism. According to Kant the possibility of
knowledge depends on the ability of a subject to perform object-constituting
acts through conceptual operations on intuitions that are guided by catego-
rical rules. Kant’s argument, as he emphasizes over and over, entails that
what can count as an object of knowledge has the status of an appearance
and not of a thing in itself, that is, an object considered independently of the
sensible and conceptual activities of the knowing subject, because it is the
result of the sensible forms and conceptual procedures of the knowing
subject. This is the reason why Kant restricts knowledge to knowledge of
appearances and why he takes the metaphysical question as to the real
nature of objects, independent of space, time, and the categories, to be
unresolvable. Hegel in the Phenomenology initially proceeds in the same
transcendental spirit as Kant. He too thinks of objects of knowledge as
conceptually constituted by the subject and he too believes that human
knowers deal with appearances as the objects of knowledge. However, and
here is what he takes to be his fundamental difference with Kant, he refuses
to take appearances, which Kant understood as intuitional and conceptual
constructs created by the human mind, to be the ultimate reference point of
knowledge-claims, end products of our creative cognitive activities that give
no information whatsoever about the real nature of that of which they are
appearances. Instead, Hegel favors a model according to which appearances
are the ways in which something real appears, they are one-sided manifesta-
tions of something real, of something in which they are grounded. In his
eyes this model is not just superior to Kant’s conception because it can avoid
the subjectivism inherent in Kant’s approach to knowledge; it is better
because it does justice to the way in which knowledge is actually acquired
by experience—the phenomenology of knowledge. It is because there is
something “out there” as (part of) an objective reality, about which we
98    

believe ourselves to have a conception expressed by a knowledge-claim, that

we are able to experience the deficiencies of this conception and to replace it
by a different one. The object, the “out there,” has to be something inde-
pendent from the way it appears to us because otherwise there would be
nothing that could function as the source of resistance on the basis of which
we are driven to give up on an initial knowledge-claim and its underlying
conception of an object while at the same time being compelled to formulate
a different, more adequate claim on the other. Yet this source of resistance,
the object “out there,” is for Hegel also a thoroughly conceptual item. It
reveals its nature by disclosing those conceptual determinations that are
characteristic of each of the multiple ways in which it appears until the
subject arrives via what it experiences at an adequate concept of that which
is grounding all of its appearances, that is, at the object in itself. Kant is
sometimes credited with having established a “metaphysics of experience”
(Paton 1936). In a certain sense the same can be said about Hegel’s position
in the Phenomenology. However, whereas Kant thinks of experience as the
outcome of our epistemic dealings with and restricted to appearances, Hegel
conceives of experience as an epistemic process that leads to an insight into
the thing in itself. This is a radical reconception of Kant’s conception of the
thing in itself, which, we will later suggest, shows that what would subse-
quently be called “Neo-Kantianism” and heralded as a departure from Hegel
nevertheless preserved one of his essential innovations. Charles Sanders
Peirce’s “pragmatism” also shows the influence of Hegel in its conception
of truth as that which would be believed at the (ideal) completion of
scientific inquiry.
With the concept and the process of knowledge settled, Hegel starts his
epistemological argument for the metaphysical priority of identities over
and against their opposed elements with an analysis of the way in which the
most basic opposition, the opposition between a subject and an object of
knowledge, is initially presented. This leads to a configuration in which
knowledge figures as a relation between subject and object that proceeds on
the assumption that the relata of this relation, that is, the subject and the
object, stand in complete opposition to each other, each of them being self-
standing and a pure other to the other. This configuration is what Hegel calls
“sense certainty,” a configuration in which the knowledge relation is sup-
posed to obtain between two items, a subject-this and an object-this, that are
totally isolated from each other, with no conceptualizable internal connec-
tion whatsoever. According to Hegel, such a conception of the knowledge
relation proves to be unwarranted because the idea of a cognitive relation
   99

between totally independent items makes no sense. Instead, that the very
attempt to establish such an (unreasonable) conception already presupposes
that there indeed is a structural affinity between subject and object, an
affinity that enables an object to be an object for a subject and that enables
the subject to relate to the object. Hegel wants us to think of this mutual
affinity in terms of conceptual determinations necessary to come up with
both the concept of an object of knowledge and a tenable account of a
knowing subject. Thus in the case of, for example, “sense certainty” the
affinity claim is expressed in the result that in order to be an epistemic object
an object of cognition has to exhibit the conceptual characteristics of uni-
versality (Allgemeinheit) and singularity (Einzelnheit) provided by the sub-
ject and that the subject itself, in order to be thought of as an epistemic
subject, must have at its disposal the conceptual resources (in this case the
concepts of universality and singularity) necessary to determine the con-
ceptual features of its object. The entire process run through in the
Phenomenology is meant to enrich the features a subject and an object
have to share in order to arrive at a complete concept of what both a subject
and an object are. This is Hegel’s version of the age-old assumption that
knowledge and the known must be isomorphic.
Thus, in the Phenomenology the initial scenario of “sense certainty” that is
based on the absolute opposition between the knowing subject and the
object known sets the stage for a long series of configurations or models of
knowledge that is aimed at demonstrating that knowledge in a complete or
absolute sense can only take place in a setting where subject and object share
all their respective structural features, that is, where both, the subject and the
object, have the same conceptual determinations and thus are identical. This
amounts according to Hegel to the insight that if knowledge is analyzed in
terms of a subject–object relation then in the end there is for knowledge
(Erkennen) no difference between the subject and the object or, as he is fond
of saying, that there is a difference that is no difference (ein Unterschied, der
keiner ist). Among other things this means for Hegel that knowledge in the
strict sense is ultimately self-knowledge or a state of affairs where a subject
that stands in the relation of knowing (erkennen) to an object is “in truth”
related to itself. As he famously puts it, in the act of knowing (Erkenntnisakt)
the subject “is in the other (the object) with itself (exclusively related to
itself)” (im Anderen bei sich selbst sein).
However, the demonstration that the difference between subject and
object of knowledge is based on their original identity does not seem to
lead directly to the justification of a metaphysical claim about the real nature
100    

of things. This is so because of the impression that the identity arrived at in

the Phenomenology does not seem that much different in status from the
identity Hegel was so critical of in the case of Fichte and Schelling. Hegel’s
phenomenological conception of identity could well be seen to boil down to
a form of subjective idealism because in the end he too, like Fichte and
Schelling, conceives of identity as the result of the epistemic activities of a
subject, thereby making objectivity again subject-dependent or resolving it
into a Kantian subjective creation. In order to count as giving an epistemo-
logical argument in favor of a metaphysical claim about the real nature of
things, the Phenomenology needs to provide some reason why the epistemic
process that leads to subject–object identity is a process that implies the
metaphysical reality of the items involved and not just their epistemic reality
as subjective conceptual constructions. For Hegel this reason consists in the
experience of resistance. This is so because resistance can only be exerted by
something real and experienced by something that is susceptible to resist-
ance, hence also has to be real. Experience and resistance thus guarantee the
transition from epistemology to metaphysics: the object referred to has to be
real in a subject-independent, that is, metaphysical sense because the char-
acteristics it displays are discovered, and not created, by the subject in the
process of establishing a correspondence relation between the conception it
has of the object, expressed by a knowledge-claim, and the way it experi-
ences the object to be. The upshot is that the subject as well as the object of
this process are neither posits as in Fichte nor based in some unknowable
unity of opposites as in Schelling; they are experienced as metaphysically
real items within a knowable world in which their opposition turns out to be
just an appearance.
Thus the epistemological account presented in the Phenomenology of how
the very possibility of discursive, conceptual knowledge is based in an
original identity of opposites or a metaphysical subject–object identity can
be seen as an argument to an ontological conclusion because of the convic-
tion Hegel shares with the other post-Kantian idealists that knowledge is a
real relation. By this he and his idealist allies mean that knowledge somehow
presupposes the reality of what is known, that is, it is a relation between real
relata. This conviction puts constraints on how to conceive of this identity
when it comes to a metaphysical interpretation of its elements (analogous to
the way in which in propositional logic a semantics puts constraints on the
interpretation of its syntax). This identity established as the basis of knowl-
edge has to meet at least two conditions. First, it has to be such that the
subject–object split can be grounded in it, and second it must allow for an
   101

interpretation according to which it is metaphysically real or has being

(Sein). These conditions function as constraints on how to conceive of
subject–object identity because they specify what can count as an acceptable
interpretation (a semantics) of an otherwise purely structural item (a syn-
tactic feature). Without meeting these two conditions, all we would have at
the end of the Phenomenology would be a claim about the grounding
function of an identity of subject–object structure (a syntactic item)
that is still lacking an interpretation of the reality (the semantic
element) of all the terms involved in that structure. It is by providing an
interpretation of the identity structure along the lines delineated that in the
Phenomenology Hegel tries to give a defense of metaphysical idealism in a
non-oppositional sense, that is, not reducing being to thought, by using
epistemological means.
However, in later years, as was already mentioned, he gave up on an
epistemological introduction to his metaphysics and replaced it by what
could almost count as a reversal of his phenomenological strategy. He now
tries to establish a metaphysical argument for non-oppositional idealism
that has epistemological consequences. This change of attitude is documen-
ted most visibly in the second edition of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences in General (1827), although it might have been on Hegel’s mind
much earlier. Here the introductory function is taken over by a text entitled
“Preliminary Conception” (Vorbegriff) set in front of the three subdivisions
of (the encyclopedic version) of “The Science of Logic” (Wissenschaft der
Logik). This text contains what he now calls “[Three] Attitudes of Thought
towards Objectivity” ([Drei] Stellungen des Gedankens zur Objektivität).
In it Hegel puts forward his views of the shortcomings (and merits) of
traditional answers to questions about the real nature of things and points
to the limitations of the methods of traditional philosophy for tackling these
questions. The reasons for his shift away from assigning the Phenomenology
an introductory role remain somewhat in the dark and are nowhere made
explicit by him. It almost certainly had nothing to do with him having
reservations as to the philosophical soundness of what he had expounded
in the earlier book, for he continues to make his positive references to this
work throughout his later writings. A reasonable guess could be that Hegel
became increasingly worried that the phenomenological talk about subject
and object and their identity might have encouraged the temptation to think
of them as substantial items, as some sort of essentially stable things instead
of acknowledging them as thing-like appearances in the ever changing
configurations in which knowledge (Erkennen) or more generally thinking
102    

as an activity organizes itself. After all, what shows up as “absolute knowing”

(absolutes Wissen) at the end of the Phenomenology is meant to designate a
situation in which knowledge as the activity of thinking in its spiritual
appearance or as Spirit realizes that there is nothing but this activity and
that whatever there is, be it subject or object in any of their many guises, is
an outcome, a manifestation of this very activity, as is Spirit itself. Hegel’s
cryptic note written down late in life on the occasion of his abandoning the
plan to revise his Phenomenology for a second edition could be read as
pointing in this direction. The “abstract absolute” (abstracte Absolute), he
somewhat apologetically writes, did prevail in the era in which he wrote
down the Phenomenology. This could be read as a reminder of the risks
connected with talk about the absolute in terms of subject–object identity in
the dynamical, activity-based metaphysical framework of absolute knowing,
a framework that he finds paradigmatically conceived of already by Aristotle
in his conception of noesis noeseos (“thinking that thinks itself ”) as he
openly admits in many places, especially at the end of the Encyclopedia.
So now Hegel returns firmly to the camp of post-Kantian idealism,
grounding any conception of reality as mental substance in a more funda-
mental conception of activity. This activity may seem obviously mental, but
Hegel tries to avoid identifying it with the activity of any particular subject,
which would collapse his view back into traditional, “subjective” idealism.
Rather, beginning with the Science of Logic, the first part of which
was originally published in 1812, five years after the publication of the
Phenomenology, Hegel starts his philosophical project of establishing a
non-oppositional metaphysical idealism with an abstract metaphysical
claim to the sole reality of thinking, and declares that the sole condition
for making this claim convincing to a human subject consists in the will-
ingness of a person to make “the resolve . . . to consider thinking as such”
(Entschluss, das Denken als solches zu betrachten) (SoL, trans. Di Giovanni,
70, cf. Enc. §17, §78 A). Thinking here is understood as a conceptual activity
that manifests its reality in knowledge (Wissen, Erkennen), thus it is con-
ceived of by Hegel as an activity that in taking place gives rise to and displays
itself in all the conceptual determinations and operations necessary for
establishing concepts on the basis of which a knowledge relation between
a subject and its intended object can be established. In other words, the
Science of Logic is meant to provide an account of how the conceptual tools
and procedures necessary for knowledge are grounded in and develop out of
the very activity of thinking in general. It is a metaphysical account because
it refers to what is ultimately real: according to Hegel there is nothing else
   103

than the subject-independent activity of thinking that is real and whatever it

is that can count as real has to be grasped as a manifestation of this activity.
Because it is a conceptual activity the concepts it generates and the proce-
dural configurations (like judgments and inferences) in which it manifests
itself exhaust the domain of what can play a role in the establishment of an
environment containing all of the conceptual elements that can function as
necessary conditions for the possibility of a knowledge relation between
subject and object. This means that what can count as knowledge has to be
constituted in conformity with the conceptual and logical rules that express
the very nature of thinking. Anything that does not comply with these rules
forfeits any claim to the status of being real or has no claim to reality. This is
so because it falls outside of what can be thought by thinking.
At first glance, it seems strange that Hegel elaborates his metaphysical
views as to the reality of thinking understood as a conceptual activity that is
shaped by inherent logical rules in a discipline he calls Science of Logic. After
all, logic in the philosophical tradition since the ancient Greeks was sharply
distinguished from metaphysics. Although the subject matter of both logic
and metaphysics could be taken to be thinking (as Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and
many others do) these disciplines were meant to deal with thinking in
different ways. Logic was assigned the task of analyzing independently of
all content the forms in which thinking appears, for example, to use the
eighteenth-century textbook taxonomy, analyzing the forms of concepts,
judgments, and inferences. Metaphysics, in contrast, was supposed to
answer questions about the ultimate nature of reality as opposed to thought,
although on the basis of what can be coherently and validly thought (cf. Enc.
§26ff.). However, Hegel’s junction of logic and metaphysics is not surprising
if one takes into account that for him, contrary to the tradition, thinking
attains a metaphysical status based on the claim of the reality of thinking.
Thus, for him there is no difference between logic and metaphysics and
hence the title Science of Logic is appropriate. Hegel’s logic is not just a
successor or replacement of traditional logic, but is already metaphysics—if
you like, it elides Kant’s distinction between “general” and “transcendental
logic,” where the former concerned solely the valid forms of relationship
among concepts, judgments, and inferences but the latter concerns how
such relationships can gain a purchase on objects. Hegel is quite explicit
about this change of status in all the different versions that he published
under the title Science of Logic. In his metaphysical logic thinking comes to
realize its nature by entering a highly complex autopoietic or self-organizing
process. This process is outlined by Hegel in two successive stages each of
104    

which is tackled in a separate part of the Science of Logic. The first part he
calls “objective logic” containing a “logic of being” and a “logic of essence,”
the second is called “subjective logic” and contains a “logic of the Concept.”
The metaphysical process starts from the most basic objective manifesta-
tions of thinking that give rise to qualitative, quantitative, and relational
determinations in a variety of forms. They are followed by subjective
manifestations that show up in the shape of the logical and methodological
rules that govern inferences and scientific explanations until a stage is
reached in which thinking arrives at self-transparency, understanding itself
as the originator of both all the objective and subjective determinations so
far. This understanding confirms to thinking that it indeed is all of reality,
that is, all that there is, or that thinking and being are the same. According to
Hegel, it also confirms to thinking that the subject–object divide has no
metaphysical reality but is just a way in which thinking internally divides
itself in order to account for the possibility of knowledge which thus turns
out to be self-knowledge. It is precisely here that Hegel collapses Kant’s
distinction between general and transcendental logic. As is only to be
expected, Hegel’s logico-metaphysical identification has been and still is
debated by both sympathizers with and opponents of his philosophical
project, especially in the English-speaking world. This ambivalent attitude
toward his metaphysical teachings might have been a reason why people
attracted to Hegel’s work have often been more interested in the epistemo-
logical side of his enterprise, thus in the Phenomenology of Spirit, than in its
logico-metaphysical side. In recent years, however, a re-evaluation of his
metaphysics seems to have taken place, as is documented in an increasing
number of texts on logico-metaphysical topics (e.g., Stern 2009; Kreines
2015; Pippin 2019).
Putting the point without Hegel’s terminology but relying heavily on his
own preliminary remarks on the question “With What must the Beginning
of Science be made?” in the Science of Logic, the relation between his
metaphysical and his epistemological line of thought can be sketched
roughly thus: The Phenomenology has given an epistemological argument
that knowledge understood as the conceptual activity of a subject that relates
to an object can only be realized if it can be seen as having established a
relation of correspondence between real items. It also has demonstrated that
in order for these items to stand in such a relation they have to be structur-
ally identical. Thus, realized or “real” knowledge (wahres Wissen), that is,
knowledge where the items related to each other do correspond and are
indeed identical, has to be taken as a relation between conceptual items.
   105

However, relations between conceptual items can only be established by

thinking because thinking is the only conceptual activity. Hence if knowl-
edge is to be possible thinking must be real, must have being (Sein haben).
It is here where the metaphysical considerations begin. Thinking is an
objective, a real activity in the sense of being metaphysically independent of
any subject whatsoever. As is shown in the Science of Logic, it manifests itself
in conceptual determinations that are constitutive of the possibility of
knowledge. These determinations do not just include concepts that are
essential for establishing the very concept of an object (of knowledge).
They also include conceptual determinations without which there could be
no conception of a subject (of knowledge) and especially not a conception of
the identity of subject and object. Because thinking is a conceptual activity
its reality implies that in unfolding its determinations it thereby constitutes
the concepts of subject and object that have to be conceived of as conceptual
structures whose reality consists in nothing other than their being instantia-
tions of thought, that is, manifestations of thinking, ways in which thinking
is revealed. In short, objects and subjects just are what Hegel calls “objective
thoughts,” they are not objects of thought, not something that can be
distinguished from what they are manifestations of, that is, of thinking.
Conceived in this way, thinking not only fulfills the two conditions men-
tioned above (i.e., it grounds the subject–object divide and it is real, has
being), it is at the same time the only candidate to satisfy them (because
there is no other conceptual activity available). Therefore, in order to
account for a model of reality that is open to knowledge-claims, that is,
that conceives of reality as intrinsically cognizable, one has to start from the
identity of thinking and being or from the fact that only thinking is real.
From this argument for the sole reality of thinking, whether in its
epistemological or its metaphysical form, it is easy to derive a new concep-
tion of idealism that is not subject to the objections that Hegel raised against
what he saw as the one-sided attempts by his fellow post-Kantians, in
particular of Fichte and Schelling. After all, if thinking is all there is and if
thinking is taken to be not primarily and exclusively an activity of a (human)
subject or something that can be present to the senses, but is conceived of as
self-standing conceptual and in this respect ideal activity that opens up first
and foremost a space for opposition in the general shape of subject and
object of knowledge, then indeed, as he puts it, “every philosophy is essen-
tially idealism” (GW 21: 142) as long as it shares, whether explicitly or
implicitly, this basic conviction of the reality of thinking. This idealism is
non-oppositional, because for such an idealism “the opposition between
106    

idealistic and realistic philosophy is therefore without meaning” (GW 21:

142). One might thus doubt whether the term “idealism” is a fitting name for
the position that Hegel endorses. This term may be misleading, suggesting
that for Hegel the term “thinking” points in the direction of the mental, the
spiritual. Although Hegel wants these connotations to obtain in certain
contexts, they play no role in his metaphysical views. There the only relevant
fact is the reality of thinking and the consequences of this fact. Hegel himself
seems not to have been too happy with the term “idealism” as a character-
ization of his philosophy. This is shown by the fact that he very rarely uses it
for this purpose. However, setting aside questions of terminology, it is safe to
say that for Hegel’s general conception and defense of idealism three points
are the most important to acknowledge: (1) it is a metaphysical conception
of idealism, although it can be arrived at by epistemological means; (2) it is a
conception that establishes idealism by relying on the sole reality of think-
ing, which in turn is taken to be an immediate fact, a given (Vorhandenes, cf.
GW 21: 55f.) in an almost Cartesian fashion; (3) however, contrary to the
Cartesian “I think,” this real thinking is not conceived of as an activity of a
human or non-human subject but as a self-standing and self-organizing
activity that in the process of its own determination gives rise to conceptions
of both subject and object founded in the primordial identity of thinking and
being. Hegel certainly departs from Berkeley’s substance-based idealism, on
which all that exists is finite minds and their ideas and the infinite mind and
its manifestations. But it can certainly be asked what pure thinking not
grounded in thinkers is supposed to be.
Hegel’s basic claim as to the identity of thinking and being might be
thought to have some initial plausibility if one takes such a claim to be a
somewhat metaphorical expression of the view that in our human ways of
thinking about objects some conceptual elements are invariably involved.
Understood along these lines, Hegel’s claim could be considered, as it often
is, as nothing but a peculiar version of Kant’s empirical realism. Such an
interpretation might even be suggested by the impression that Hegel as well
as Kant takes thinking to be an activity that is characterized by operating on
and with concepts and that what Hegel calls “being” can easily be identified
with what within Kant’s epistemological framework is called “reality,” that
is, the empirical reality of intuited objects rather than their transcendent
grounds. Given the enormous influence Kant’s critical project had on all the
post-Kantian idealists this impression is by no means entirely groundless. It
might well be thought to capture Hegel’s position in the Phenomenology,
where the concept of “resistance” might be thought to have filled the role of
   107

Kant’s intuitions, with which we are “affected” by things in themselves.

However, this interpretation is still misleading, or at least it does not capture
Hegel’s position in The Science of Logic, because it does not do justice to the
ontological connotations that Hegel wants to connect with this identity
claim. For the final form of Hegel’s idealism it is indeed essential that the
world and everything contained in it ultimately has to be conceived of as a
manifestation of the activity of thought and thus as a conceptual item that
has objective existence. Put differently, Hegel wants to prove that the world
is but the unique way in which conceptual thinking has organized itself as
reality in a process that is, according to him, best described as a process of
self-realization, but of thinking itself, not of you or me as individual
thinkers—we too are only manifestations of this activity. Viewed from this
standpoint, the world as traditionally and common-sensically regarded as an
assemblage of more or less independent objects standing in physical and
sometimes social relations to each other seems to have become a strange
place indeed. Each individual object contained in the world, be it a physical
object (a tree, a lemon), a social one (a family, a society, a state), or a cultural
one (an artwork, a religion), has to be taken to be an element in this process
of self-realization, thus a partial manifestation of thinking the totality of
which Hegel calls “reason” (Vernunft)—but not an object that exists inde-
pendently of anyone’s ideas, like we might have thought a stone or a lemon
to do, or individual ideas, or individual thinkers of ideas. Obviously this
conception of what the world and the objects it consists of really are—if it is
not meant to be just another variation of either a dogmatic idealist claim in
the spirit of Berkeley or a transcendental idealism à la Kant—has to use the
term “reason” in a way that is different from the traditional or normal use in
the history of modern philosophy since Descartes (or perhaps all of philos-
ophy since Plotinus and Averroës or Ibn Rushd). And so it is. For Hegel
reason is not one of the many faculties attributed to the mind of a human
individual. Rather, Hegel thinks of reason as the process of thinking in
general that provides what could be called a structural plan for its own
realization in terms of the categories in which it manifests itself. Thus Hegel
wants us to understand reason in a teleological and not in a psychological or
representational sense (although for other philosophers, perhaps for
Aristotle, these need not be opposed). In this sense reason comes to com-
prehend itself in a process whose end point is reached as soon as complete
self-transparency of thinking is achieved and this means as soon as reason
has understood its own reality. The unconventional connotations that Hegel
wants us to connect with his concept of reason might sound confusing.
108    

However, they belong to the way in which he tries to conceptualize his

overall construction of reality as an organically self-realizing manifestation
of reason. We will see in the sequel that many subsequent philosophers have
tried to accept Hegel’s insights into the structure of thought without taking
on board his radical ontology, his complete equation of reality with such
thought.
The belief in the reality of reason can be regarded as the hallmark of
Hegel’s idealistic conception of reality. His famous statement in the preface
of his Philosophy of Right is a well-known document of this belief. It reads:
“What is reasonable is real; and what is real is reasonable” (Was vernünftig
ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig) (GW 14.1: 14).
As is obvious, the idealistic aspect of his view strictly speaking has to do with
his theory of what he calls reason, the realization of which is the world or
reality. This theory not only commits him to idealism because of its radical
conceptualism—after all, reason is a conceptual activity—but also to his
metaphysical monism, because of the singularity of reason which, for Hegel,
is reality. Within the framework of this theory, reason is certainly conceived
of as providing something like the conceptual master plan or the universal
conceptual structure that governs all domains of reality from physical, social,
and cultural phenomena down to the conceptual structure of the most basic
individual kinds of objects and the structure of individual objects as well.
This universal structure comes about by means of a process of conceptual
self-determination that results in a complete exposition of the conceptual
elements contained in reason, a process that is documented in Hegel’s
Science of Logic. But it leads to a situation in which reason has not only
become fully transparent to itself as capturing the structure of all of reality,
but as all of reality itself.
While Hegel definitely wanted to overcome what he took to be
the shortcomings both of Kant’s philosophy and of the positions of his
post-Kantian contemporaries Fichte and Schelling, at the same time he
did not want to give up on the post-Kantian project of transforming
Kant’s transcendental idealism, which restricts knowledge to the subject’s
own experience, into a robust new idealism based on dynamic principles of
world-constitution that are found in the activity of thinking itself. He
differed from Fichte and Schelling in that he does not ground thinking
either in some activity of a subject, as did Fichte, or in a cognitively
inaccessible primordial unity, as did Schelling (like Spinoza), but in the
idea of a thoroughly conceptual organization of reality because of a thor-
oughly conceptual reality itself. His elaboration of this idea gives rise to what
   109

he calls in the introduction to the second edition of the Science of Logic an

“intellectual view of the universe” (Intellektualansicht des Universums) (GW
21: 34). This view is meant to reconcile the need for conceptual elements
constitutive of traditional epistemologically motivated idealism with the
categorical commitments characteristic of traditional ontological idealism
yet in a way that no longer requires the opposition between epistemology
and ontology, or between thought and being—for all has become thought.
Hegel would ultimately find few followers willing to take this last step with
him—just think of Karl Marx “standing Hegel on his head,” that is, thinking
of structures of thought as manifestations of material reality, for example, of
tensions between capital and labor—but even those more committed to the
self-structuring character of thought would usually be less willing to identify
such thought with all that there is.
 6
The German Response to Idealism I
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) heaped a great deal of invective on

Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. For that reason, Schopenhauer is not always
included among the German idealists. And indeed, nothing could be further
from Hegel’s version of absolute idealism, in which pure reason is the
ultimate reality, than Schopenhauer’s theory on which behind the realm of
appearances constructed in accordance with our own conceptions of space,
time, and causality—his form of the empirical realism side of Kant’s tran-
scendental idealism—there is a unitary reality that is utterly irrational or at
least arational—his form of Kant’s ontological realism, but flipped from
practical to theoretical and from rational to arational. Nevertheless, since
Schopenhauer works within a Kantian framework, and identifies underlying
reality with pure activity, although of an arational rather than rational kind,
it is useful to think of him within the framework of idealism.
Schopenhauer puts forward his theory in his main work The World as
Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung), first published
in December, 1818 (with an 1819 date on its title page), and then in a much-
expanded second edition in 1844 and yet another expanded edition in 1857.
This book had been preceded by a doctoral dissertation On the Fourfold Root
of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813), which Schopenhauer subse-
quently regarded as the introduction to his magnum opus. The earlier
work includes Schopenhauer’s main modifications to the structure of
Kant’s epistemology, while the later work accepts Kant’s idealist interpreta-
tion of this epistemology (Book I) and then replaces Kant’s version of the
doctrine of things in themselves with Schopenhauer’s own version of the
unitary non-rational will underlying all appearance (Book II). (Valuable
works on Schopenhauer, including his relation to Kant, are Gardiner 1953;
Magee 1983; Young 1987 and 2005; Janaway 1989; Atwell 1995; and
Jacquette 2005. A thorough biography that details Schopenhauer’s relations
to the other German idealists is Cartwright 2010.)

Idealism in Modern Philosophy. Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Oxford University Press.
© Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848574.003.0006
       111

Schopenhauer’s acceptance of the empirical side of Kant’s transcendental

idealism combined with his non-rational version of Kant’s ontological
realism is on display throughout The World as Will and Representation.
Schopenhauer accepts without reservation Kant’s argument that space, time,
and causality are forms of our own representation that we know a priori and
impose upon the appearances of objects. He does precede this acceptance
with a Fichtean argument that “The world is my representation,” where the
sheer “mineness” of representation is supposed to be a “form . . . more
universal than any other form,” including space, time, and causality
(WWR §1, p. 23). Schopenhauer holds that

no truth is more certain, no truth is more independent of all others and no

truth is less in need of proof than this one: that everything there is for
cognition (i.e., the whole world) is only an object in relation to a subject, an
intuition of a beholder. (WWR §1, pp. 23–4)

This simple and perhaps inescapable thought may be regarded as the most
fundamental epistemological motivation for any form of idealism. On the
basis of this proposition, Schopenhauer then tries to distinguish his position
from what he takes to be the skepticism of Hume, that there is a real
question about whether there is either a subject or an object in addition to
representations, and from the dogmatism of Fichte, that both of these can be
proved; his own view as initially stated is rather that

the object as such always presupposes the subject as its necessary correlate:
so the subject always remains outside the jurisdiction of the principle of
sufficient reason. (WWR §5, p. 35)

But, speaking of dogmatism, he simply accepts from Kant that

space and time can not only be conceived abstractly, on their own and
independently of their content, but they can also be intuited immediately,

and that

This intuition is not some phantasm derived from repeated experience;

rather, it is something independent of experience, and to such an extent
that experience must in fact be conceived as dependent on it, since the
112    

properties of time and space, as they are known a priori in intuition, apply
to all experience as laws that it must always come out in accordance with.
(WWR §3, p. 27)

By this remark, Schopenhauer indicates his recognition that Kant derives his
epistemological idealism from his understanding of the implications of our a
priori cognition of space and time, but he does not attempt to explain Kant’s
inference or to add any argument of his own. Schopenhauer also does not
doubt that there is something other than the representing subject beyond
what it represents, an underlying reality beginning with its own body as it is
rather than as it merely appears. He accepts Kant’s insistence that there can
be no appearance without something that appears (CPuR B xxvi).
However, Schopenhauer’s fundamental departure from Kant is already
suggested in this passage:

We have immediate cognition of the thing in itself when it appears to us as

our own body; but our cognition is only indirect when the thing in itself is
objectified in other objects of intuition. (WWR §6, pp. 40–1)

What Schopenhauer means is that although we have an experience of our

own bodies, as it were from the outside, through the same forms of space,
time, and causality through which we experience all other bodies, including
other animate bodies, and in this regard we experience all bodies including
our own as mere appearance through the forms we impose on experience,
we also have another experience, each of us of his or her own body, as it were
from the inside, namely we have an experience of willing an action and of
our bodies as the instruments of our wills, with no separation between will
and action and thus no relevance of spatial separation, temporal succession,
or difference between cause and effect. However—and this is the argument
of Book II—our immediate experience of our own bodies as instruments of
our wills is an experience of our actions being immediately determined by
desire rather than by reason. “To the pure subject of cognition as such, [his]
body is a representation like any other among objects,” but

Will . . . this alone gives him the key to his own appearance, reveals to him
the meaning and shows him the inner workings of his essence, his deeds,
his movements; (WWR §18, p. 124)

and what we discover when we look closely at our wills is that they are
governed not by reason but by impulse, at its most fundamental level a
       113

“dark, dull driving” (WWR §27, p. 174), and even at its highest, most
clarified level, still desires or apparently “creative drives” that only “seem
to perform their tasks from abstract, rational motives” (WWR §27, p. 182). It
is not our planning and calculating drives that best express the real nature of
the will but our genitals (WWR §20, p. 133). Of course, it is well known that
following the lead of one’s genitals is a pretty good formula for disappoint-
ment, and for Schopenhauer this reveals the frustration to which a will
driven by desire ultimately leads: either one does not get what one wants,
the object of one’s desire, and is frustrated, or one does, but then one
wants more, and either does not get that, so is frustrated, or does, but
then wants more, and so on ad infinitum. Trying truly to satisfy desire is
the height of irrationality, but for Schopenhauer there is nothing else we can
will—we can at best try to escape from the clutches of will altogether,
whether through art, asceticism, or compassion.
But of course, if the underlying nature of reality, the thing in itself, is
nothing other than will, then escape from its clutches should not really be
possible but should at most be apparent. And not only does Schopenhauer
equate our experience of ourselves “from the inside” as desire-driven will
with our own ultimate reality, our character as things in themselves; he also
argues that we have no choice but to think of the underlying reality of all
appearance in this way, because this is our only form of insight into—or
acquaintance with—anything as a thing in itself. We can only “take the key
to the understanding of the essence in itself of things” to be the

key provided . . . by the immediate cognition of our own essence, and apply
it to [the] appearances in the inorganic [and organic] world as well,

even appearances that are more remote from us than any others. Ultimate
reality, because, Schopenhauer assumes,

it is everywhere one and the same, . . . must be called will here as well as
there, a name signifying the being in itself of every thing in the world and
the sole kernel of every appearance. (WWR §23, pp. 142–3)

Schopenhauer devotes many pages to empirical descriptions of the simila-

rities between the forces at work throughout the rest of nature and the
merely apparently rational but really non-rational character of our own
behavior, but of course the character of things in themselves cannot be
inferred directly from any amount of empirical data; Schopenhauer derives
his conclusion not from all this empirical illustration but rather from our
114    

allegedly immediate rather than empirical insight into the character of our
own wills and the very problematic premise that at bottom everything is
essentially one. His position thus begins from an epistemological premise,
namely that we can know ultimate reality through knowing ourselves, and
reaches an ontological conclusion, that ultimate reality must be like our-
selves, but in opposition to Kant and the other German idealists he assumes
that our own nature is essentially non-rational and therefore that the
ultimate character of reality, although it is in a certain sense like the mental,
is also fundamentally non-rational.
It may seem far-fetched to think of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) as an
idealist. After all, he presented himself as an almost fanatical anti-idealist
throughout his life. In many of his published and unpublished writings
as well as in his letters he expresses over and again his dislike and his
disdain for what he calls “idealism.” A telling summary of his position
concerning idealism is to be found in his letter to Malwida von
Meysenbug (October 20, 1888):

and I treat idealism as untruthfulness that has become an instinct, a not-

wanting-to-see reality at any price: every sentence of my writings contains
contempt for idealism. (Nietzsche, eKGWB BVN-1888, 1135)

This harsh assessment is not easy to understand given Nietzsche’s known

sympathies with a “perspectival” approach to objects of cognition, his
insistence that falsification or tampering (Verfälschung) is at the basis of
most of our cognitive judgments, and his claims as to the dependence
of knowledge on needs. Considerations like these suggest that in spite of
his protests, at least the epistemological motivation for idealism is not alien
to Nietzsche. At least some of his beliefs are compatible with what has
been called here epistemological arguments for idealism although
Nietzsche himself would have taken these beliefs to express a form of
realism. However, before searching for and elaborating on possible idealistic
tendencies in his own thoughts, we should find out what “idealism” meant
for Nietzsche and why he was so hostile to it. (On Nietzsche’s criticism of
Kant but also “Kantian foundations,” see Hill 2003. Among many treat-
ments of Nietzsche’s “perspectivism,” see Danto 1965: ch. 3; Nehamas 1985:
Part I; and Clark 1990. A thorough biography of Nietzsche and interpreta-
tion of his work is Young 2010.)
Idealism, for Nietzsche, seems to be a particularly unappealing form of
metaphysics, in other words of philosophy as it has been practiced
       115

throughout history from the era of the ancient Greeks up to his own time
(because of his contempt for Kant’s postulates of pure practical reason,
Nietzsche gave little credence to Kant’s theoretical critique of traditional
metaphysics). He took philosophy in this traditional shape to be a somewhat
enigmatic endeavor to pursue the mutually excluding tasks of (culture-
forming) art and religion on the one hand and of (cognition-focused)
science on the other (see Nachgelassene Fragmente: Notebook 19, [47],
[62], [218]; KSA 7: 434). It is doomed to failure because of two fundamental
shortcomings. The first is that it gives a privileged status to truth in declaring
truth to be the ultimate goal at which it aims. This preoccupation with truth
is based on the implicit assumption that truth has some overriding value.
This assumption has never been justified, not even addressed by any phi-
losopher. Nietzsche writes in the Genealogy of Morals (1887: section 24):

Turn to the most ancient and most modern philosophies: all of them lack a
consciousness of the extent to which the will to truth itself needs a
justification, here is a gap in every philosophy—where does it come
from? Because the ascetic ideal has so far been lord over all philosophy,
because truth was set as being, as god, as the highest authority itself,
because truth was not allowed to be a problem. Do you understand this
“allowed to be”?—From the very moment that faith in the God of the
ascetic ideal is denied, there is a new problem as well: that of the value of
truth.—The will to truth needs a critique—let us hereby define our own
task—the value of truth is tentatively to be called into question.”
(KSA 5: 401; Third Essay)

However, it is not the problem of the value of truth but the second short-
coming that, in Nietzsche’s eyes, leads directly to metaphysics. It is the
tendency of philosophers to deny the obvious, to neglect surfaces in favor
of what is allegedly behind them, out of habitual weakness and anxiety to
prefer the stable and immutable over and against change and becoming, so
exemplified at the very beginning of Western philosophy by Plato. Nietzsche
often expresses this critical sentiment in his published and unpublished
writings. The following note is a nice example:

On the psychology of metaphysics. This world is apparent—consequently

there is a true world. This world is conditioned—consequently there
is an unconditioned world. This world is full of contradiction—
consequently there is a world free from contradiction. This world is
116    

becoming—consequently there is an existing [seiende] world. All false

inferences (blind trust in reason: if A is, there must be its opposing concept
B). It is suffering that inspires these inferences: at bottom there are wishes
that such a world might be; similarly hatred of a world that causes suffering
expresses itself through the imagination of another world, one full of value:
the ressentiment of the metaphysicians against the actual world is here
creative. (Notebook 8 [2]; reprinted in KSA 12: 327)

This tendency to “falsify” (verfälschen) or to “re-evaluate” or “reframe”

(umdeuten) reality out of resentment is, according to Nietzsche, especially
well documented in the idealistic tradition in metaphysics, as is shown
paradigmatically in Plato’s idealism. (On Nietzsche and Plato, see Silk and
Stern 1981. On Nietzsche’s complex attitude toward Socrates, see Nehamas
1998: ch. 5. On Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, although chiefly in a
moral context, see Reginster 2021.) It was Plato who invented the idea of
another world that is much more real, much more true than the ever
changing, always unstable world in which we live; he invented the fiction
of the supreme reality of an imperishable and everlasting ideal world
inhabited by archetypal ideas and immutable forms, a “world in itself” in
comparison to which the “Lebenswel” of everyday experience is just a pale
shadow. Yet Nietzsche seems undecided how to evaluate the real motives
that led Plato to his idealism. Sometimes he wants to distinguish Plato from
other idealists by crediting him with some obscure positive reason for
endorsing idealism. In section 372 of The Gay Science, entitled precisely
“Why we are not idealists,” he writes:

In sum: all philosophical idealism until now was something like an illness,
except where, as in the case of Plato, it was the caution of an overabundant
and dangerous health, the fear of overpowerful senses, the shrewdness of a
shrewd Socratic”. (KSA 3: 623)

However, there are other passages where Nietzsche is not in such a chari-
table mood and where he presents the ultimate reasons for Plato’s strong
leanings toward idealism as rooted in weakness and resentment just as with
all the other idealists in the history of philosophy (e.g., Ecce Homo 3; KSA 6:
311). His ultimate verdict on metaphysics in all its ancient and modern
forms is nicely expressed in the following note:

On the psychology of metaphysics. The influence of fearfulness. What has

been most feared, the cause of the most powerful suffering (the lust for
       117

domination, sexual lust, etc.) has been treated by humans most hostile and
eliminated from the “true” world. Thus they have step by step wiped out
the affects—claimed God to be the opposite of the evil, i.e., reality to consist
in the negation of desires and affects (which is to say precisely in nothing-
ness). Likewise they hate the irrational, the arbitrary, the accidental (as the
cause of countless physical suffering). Consequently they negate this ele-
ment in that-which-is-in-itself, they conceive it as absolute “rationality”
and “purposiveness.” In the same way they fear change, transitoriness:
therein is expressed an oppressed soul, full of mistrust and bad experience.
(The case of Spinoza: an inverted sort of person would count this change as
charming). A playful being overladen with power would call precisely the
affects, unreason, and change good in an eudaimonistic sense, together
with their consequences, with danger, contrast, dissolution, etc.
(KSA 13: 536)

However, this thoroughly critical assessment of all forms of idealisms as

abominable expressions of intellectual weakness and vindictiveness seems to
be at odds with another of Nietzsche’s cherished beliefs, according to which
we have to take reality to be not only dependent on but ultimately con-
stituted by the respective perspectives on or the respective ways of inter-
preting what we encounter. This Nietzschean view can give rise to the
impression that in the end he might have been closer to endorsing some
form of epistemologically motivated idealism. This leads to the topics of
perspectivism and interpretation (Auslegung) in Nietzsche.
Although the details are far from clear, the general tendency of his
perspectivism is expressed quite well in aphorism 374 from The Gay Science:

How far the perspectival character of existence extends, indeed whether it

has any other character; whether an existence without interpretation,
without “sense,” does not become “non-sense”; whether, on the other
hand, all existence is not essentially an interpreting existence—that cannot
be decided, as would be fair, even by the most studious and scrupulous
analysis and self-examination of the intellect; for in the course of this
analysis, the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself under its perspec-
tival forms, and solely in these . . . . Rather, the world has once again become
infinite to us: insofar as we cannot reject the possibility that it includes
infinite interpretations. (KSA 3: 626)

This view, according to which, further, the world each of us is experiencing

is the product of an interpretation forced on us by some unconscious
118    

overriding drive (Trieb) that is the formative mark of the individual

character of each of us, might be seen as endorsing a version of idealism if
idealism is understood as the claim that what appears to be known as it is
independent of the mind is in the end inescapably marked by the creative,
formative, constructive activities of human mind, whether individual or
collective, but without a firm insistence that reality is nothing but mind.
However, it is far from clear whether Nietzsche wants us to think of this
process of interpretation which leads to a specific perspective even as a
mind-dependent activity. Sometimes it seems as if he is favoring a quasi-
Humean view according to which the intellect operates in the service of
some anonymous affective and emotional drives in such a way that it just
provides a set of necessary means to consciously realize what drives force us
to do. The first lines of the following note, for example, may point toward a
metaphysical conception of idealism, but the last lines point in the more
Humean direction:

Against positivism, which would stand by the position “There are only
facts,” I would say: no, there are precisely no facts, only interpretations.
We can establish no fact “in itself”: it is perhaps nonsense to want such
a thing. You say “Everything is subjective”: but that is already an
interpretation, the “subject” is not anything given, but something invented
and added, something stuck behind . . . To the extent that the word
“knowledge” [Erkenntnis] has any sense, the world is knowable: but it is
interpretable differently, it has no sense behind it, but innumerable senses,
“perspectivism.” It is our needs that interpret the world: our drives and
their to and fro. Every drive is a kind of domination, every one has its
perspective, which it would force on all other drives as a norm.
(Notebook 7 [60]; KSA 12: 315)

In other passages Nietzsche seems to be more in line with a by and large

Kantian view according to which the intellect provides some rules of trans-
formation of what is given by the senses as individual and discrete data into
more general representations—although he does not seem much to approve
of this process, perhaps under the lingering influence of his earliest philo-
sophical hero, Schopenhauer. Thus we find him claiming in section 354 of
The Gay Science:

This is what I understand to be true phenomenalism and perspectivism:

that due to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can
       119

become conscious is merely a surface- and sign-world, a world turned into

generalities and thereby debased to its lowest common denominator,—that
everything that enters consciousness thereby becomes superficial, thin,
relatively stupid, general, a sign, a mark of the herd, that all becoming-
conscious involves a vast and fundamental corruption, falsification, super-
ficialization, and generalization. (KSA 3: 593)

Be this as it may, it is by no means obvious that either his explicit criticism of

idealism or his remarks on the ways we make up epistemic worlds prevent
Nietzsche from coming close to an epistemologically motivated form of
idealism himself. This is so because in epistemology his main enemy does
not seem to be idealism but all forms of realism.
And although his epistemology does not explicitly imply any ontological
claims, one could be tempted to see Nietzsche as toying with some ontolog-
ical motivations for full-blown idealism. His speculations concerning the
will to power as the ultimate dynamic foundation of all reality fall into this
category. For example,

Perspectivism is only a complex form of specificity[.] My idea is, that every

specific body strives to become lord over all of space and to expand its force
(—its will to power) and to repel everything that resists its own expansion.
But it perpetually collides with the equal efforts of other bodies, and
ends by making an arrangement (“unifying”) with those that are closely
enough related to it:—thus they conspire together to power. And the
process goes on . . . (Notebook 14 [186]; KSA 13: 373f.)

This idea of conspiring forces as the supreme world-constituting entities can

look like an allusion to Kant’s physics of attraction and repulsion but also to
a version of the idealism like those of Fichte and Schelling, because it too
invites us to conceive of dynamic processes as ontologically prior to (phys-
ical or mental) objects and events. Thus, in the end there are no real
obstacles to thinking of Nietzsche as an idealist on ontological as well as
epistemological grounds, although the speculations that lead him in the
former direction may be separable from the latter.
Yet, perhaps this somewhat blunt assessment should not be taken at face
value, perhaps it should be read under a proviso that should apply to almost
every determinate view attributed to Nietzsche. This is Nietzsche’s general
skepticism about the influence that should be granted to knowledge
(Erkennen) when it comes to establishing an insight into the fundamental
120    

character of reality. His deeply rooted hostility against the idea that the
ultimate constitution of the reality is revealed to us by processes of cognition
runs like a leitmotiv (to borrow a term from another of Nietzsche’s heroes,
Richard Wagner) through all his writings both published and unpublished.
One of the most explicit expressions of this distrust in the power of knowl-
edge/cognition is already to be found in The Birth of Tragedy, which is both
his very first book, published in 1871 under the title The Birth of Tragedy
from the Spirit of Music, and one of his latest, published in a second edition
in 1886 under the title The Birth of Tragedy or Hellenism and Pessimism. In
this book, the 27-year-old Nietzsche expounds an aestheticism that relies
heavily with respect to both content and terminology on Schopenhauer’s
metaphysics of the irrational will. According to this aestheticism, the cog-
nitive access of human beings to the world is founded in and strongly
mediated by the interaction of two antagonistic drives, named after two
figures in Greek mythology the Dionysian and the Apollonian, that “con-
spire” (sich miteinander verschwören) to establish an illusionary worldview.
The resulting conception of reality is an aesthetic one in that it does not
claim to be “true” in the sense of giving an adequate account of the world
and its ultimate constitution, rather it confesses to its deceitfulness, to its
intention to deliberately falsify (verfälschen) essential aspects of reality in
order to allow the individual person to endure and to overcome the inevi-
table sufferings of life. Nietzsche maintains that the delicate balance between
the two drives is based on their mutually influencing each other, as is shown
especially vividly in the Attic Greek tragedy which he takes to be the most
felicitous artistic document of a worldview that is formed by these drives and
rests not on objective data provided by scientific experience but on the needs
of the individual human being to come to grips with the encounter of a
world that comes across as an utterly chaotic natural and socio-cultural
environment. This aesthetic worldview, according to Nietzsche, is under-
mined by what he calls “the theoretical man” (der theoretische Mensch) (BoT
section 15; KSA 1: 98). He identifies Socrates as the first and paradigmatic
representative of this species who is possessed by a “profound delusion . . . ,
namely the imperturbable belief that thought, as it follows the thread of
causality, reaches down into the deepest abysses of being, and that it is
capable, not simply of understanding existence, but even of correcting it.
This sublime metaphysical illusion is an instinct which belongs inseparably
to science” (tiefsinnige Wahnvorstellung, . . . jener unerschütterliche Glaube,
dass das Denken, an dem Leitfaden der Causalität, bis in die tiefsten
Abgründe des Seins reiche, und dass das Denken das Sein nicht nur zu
       121

erkennen, sondern sogar zu corrigieren im Stande ist. Dieser erhabene meta-

physische Wahn ist als Instinct der Wissenschaft beigegeben) (BoT section 15;
KSA 1: 99). For Nietzsche the theoretical man in general and Socrates in
particular are guided in their cognitive efforts by giving priority to the
“mechanism of concepts, judgments and conclusions” (BoT section 15;
KSA 1: 100) in the endeavor to cognize (erkennen) the world, thereby giving
precedence to reason, logic, discursive rationality as necessary means of
knowledge. This Socratic decision to privilege rationality, underlying virtu-
ally all philosophy until Schopenhauer’s, comes at the expense of acknowl-
edging those aspects of reality that are accessible only on the basis of setting
into motion our Dionysian drive, namely our acknowledgment of the
“dark,” painful, chaotic features of the world. The dominance of the theo-
retical over the tragic view of the world that Nietzsche takes to be charac-
teristic of modern times (BoT section 17; KSA 1: 111) implies that an
approach to reality based solely on rational tools with the explicit exclusion
of the irrational, that is, the disregard of what has to be reached by other
than logical and conceptual means, cannot but lead to a one-sided, incom-
plete, and in the end dogmatic understanding of the world.
Against the background of this “aesthetic” attitude toward reality that
goes together with an extremely critical assessment of occidental rationality
as the guiding principle of human knowledge, it is no wonder that Nietzsche
throughout his life kept aloof from all traditional Western forms of philos-
ophy, above all the ultra-rationalist idealism of Hegel, forms that in his eyes
were rooted in the Socratic-Platonic heritage of modern thinking. For him
idealism as discussed in philosophical circles definitely represents one of
these inherently problematic forms. Hence even if it looks as if his own
views come close to idealism, it would be deceptive and disingenuous to
bring any of his claims into a close or more distant affinity to any form
of either epistemologically or metaphysically motivated idealism other
than Schopenhauer’s combination of empirical realism and transcendental
irrationalism—but even then Nietzsche’s conception of perspectivism can
also be taken as a rejection of Schopenhauer’s still Kantian transcendental
idealism with its fixed categories of space, time, and causality. All that can be
found are points of coincidence, of similarity and maybe even of complicity
with ways of thinking that, he believes, are in the end not just misleading but
dangerous because they diminish the chances of human beings to lead an
authentic life.
At this point, the narrative of the development and fate of idealism
becomes complicated. After the heyday of German idealism that ended
122    

with Hegel’s death, empiricism and materialism became more influential in

German philosophy, even in philosophers such as Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche whose views, as we have just seen, also show traces of idealism
thinking in the German-speaking world. Although it goes beyond the scope
of this chapter, yet, as John Passmore put it, “traditional roles were curiously
reversed: philosophizing of the British type was at its most powerful in
Germany just at the time when philosophizing of the German type was
exerting its greatest influence in Britain” (Passmore 1966: 49). Passmore was
referring to the rise of British idealism, epitomized by such philosophers as
Thomas Hill Green, Francis Herbert Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, John
McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, and many others—or perhaps it would be better
to say anglophone idealism, since the American Josiah Royce was also a
powerful figure in this movement, which dominated anglophone philosophy
from the 1870s and 1880s until World War I. This corresponds closely to the
height of Neo-Kantianism in Germany, which was certainly not exactly
empiricism, but which began from the assumption of the facticity of the
natural sciences, or of the sciences (Wissenschaften) more broadly, aimed to
elucidate the structural contributions of the human mind to human knowl-
edge, thus combining Kantian inspiration with an empiricist openness to
fact, but disavowed metaphysical speculation about any ultimate reality
beyond human experience. One of the late and great representatives of
Neo-Kantianism, Ernst Cassirer, called his own position “critical idealism,”
but by that he meant only that all forms of human representation and
knowledge, whether natural science, mathematics, language, religion, art,
history, and more are structured by what he earlier called “functions” of
human thought and later “symbolic forms,” not any metaphysical equation
of reality with mind. Our narrative then becomes complicated for the
following reason. Analytic philosophy as it has been practiced for most of
the twentieth century and into the twenty-first is often thought to have
begun in the revolt of George Edward Moore and Bertrand Russell against
British idealism, above all against the work of Bradley, informed in turn, at
least in the case of Russell, by the work in logic and philosophy of language
of the German mathematician Gottlob Frege. Neo-Kantianism is not typi-
cally thought to have played much of a role at all in the development of
analytic philosophy; for example, the magnificent Oxford Handbook of the
History of Analytic Philosophy edited by Michael Beaney has no chapter on
Neo-Kantianism at all (Beaney 2013). But, as Michael Friedman and others
have shown (Friedman 2000), the work of Rudolf Carnap and Hans
Reichenbach emerged from the background of Neo-Kantianism, and their
       123

work influenced leaders of the next generations of analytic philosophy such

as Carl Hempel, W. V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam and many others. In many
ways, a version of Neo-Kantian epistemology, that we always know the
world through the particulars of human ways of perceiving and conceptua-
lizing reality, became the default position of analytic philosophy, although of
course with plenty of squabbles over the details: Quine rejected the idea that
we could say anything a priori about necessary features of human concep-
tualization, for example, even anything like the “relativized a priori” adopted
by Reichenbach and much later by Friedman, and Donald Davidson’s
rejection of any distinction between conceptual “scheme” and “content”
followed in the footsteps of Quine’s rejection of the analytic–synthetic
distinction. Nevertheless, the view that human knowledge is permeated by
and valid from the human point of view combined with the view that claims
about how things are apart from this point of view are pretty much mean-
ingless has been characteristic of most analytic philosophy, and its realism
has rarely been “naive realism,” the claim that it makes sense to say that we
know things exactly how they really are. So Passmore’s further statement
that “it was with weapons forged in Britain but sharpened in Germany that
twentieth-century British empiricism won its victories over Anglo-German
Idealism” (Passmore 1966: 49) is correct if we read it to say that it was with a
combination of the British reaction to British idealism and the Neo-Kantian
rejection of traditional German idealism that modern analytic philosophy
was forged. (Although in the more than 600 pages of his comprehensive and
insightful A Hundred Years of Philosophy, first published in 1957 and revised
in 1966, Passmore spared only three pages for the earliest stage of Neo-
Kantianism and then later a page and a half for Cassirer.)
What would be correct to say in this context is that the reaction of Russell
and Moore to British and especially to Bradley’s idealism was the first
stage in the formation of modern analytic philosophy, taking place in
the years from the late 1890s until World War I, a period perhaps to be
extended to include the publication of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
Logo-philosophicus in 1919 and its English translation in 1921, while the
influence of Neo-Kantianism made its way into the mainstream of analytic
philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s, even though Cassirer was the only one of
the German Neo-Kantians still publishing major works at that time. So in the
following chapters, we will first discuss British idealism, which is certainly
full-blown idealism as we have defined it, that is, a metaphysical view that
reality is essentially mental, then the response to it in Moore, Russell, and
Wittgenstein; after that we will step back in time to resume the discussion of
124    

German philosophy with Neo-Kantianism. Our conclusion will be that

although Neo-Kantianism shares characteristic features of idealist episte-
mology (the word “epistemology” or its German source, Erkenntnislehre, is
in fact a Neo-Kantian coinage, often credited to Richard Hönigswald, 1913),
it is not in fact idealism, and is a significant source for the somewhat idealist
epistemology but rejection of idealist metaphysics characteristic of most
analytic philosophy. (In the end, we will mention a few exceptions to this
rule, that is, efforts to revise idealist metaphysics within analytic philosophy
broadly enough construed.)
 7
British and American Idealism

In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English-speaking world

idealism became an important approach across a wide spectrum of philo-
sophical discussions ranging from metaphysics via aesthetics to moral and
social theories. In England, Scotland, and Wales an idealism that was
ultimately both epistemological and ontological in motivation became the
dominant approach to philosophy from the 1870s (ironically, perhaps, 1872
marked the birth of Bertrand Russell and 1873 the death of John Stuart Mill,
of course the foremost spokesman for empiricism in nineteenth-century
Britain). Idealism was especially prominent at Oxford and in the Scottish
universities, although there were pockets of resistance, such as at Cambridge
and the University of London. Especially at Oxford, the primary training
ground for the British political elite, idealism became the driving force of
social and political thought through the influence of T. H. Green, Benjamin
Jowett, and Edward Caird as successive Masters of Balliol College, and
others (see Mander 2011: ch. 7; Mander 2016). In the United States, idealism
could not monopolize philosophy to the same degree, having to share the
stage with and ultimately reach an accommodation with the home-grown
pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey
(who himself underwent a transition over his long career from Hegelianism
to pragmatism), but it nevertheless also flourished for several decades. There
were too many participants in this transatlantic idealist movement for us to
mention let alone discuss all of them here, but among the best-known and
most outspoken spokesmen in favor of idealistic conceptions in metaphysics
and elsewhere in Britain in these years were Thomas Hill Green and Francis
Herbert Bradley at Oxford and John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart at
Cambridge, while in the United States the most prominent idealist was
Josiah Royce at Harvard, where idealism’s having to share the stage with
pragmatism was personified in Royce’s friendly rivalry with James and in
Royce’s ultimate attempt to synthesize his view with that of Peirce. Although
all of these figures are frequently characterized as being indebted to Hegel’s
writings and advocating a Hegelian view of reality, their various positions
are at best in a somewhat indirect, almost only metaphorical, sense informed

Idealism in Modern Philosophy. Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Oxford University Press.
© Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848574.003.0007
126    

by Hegel’s philosophy. In fact, these philosophers were more willing to call

themselves idealists than had been the earlier German idealists who suppos-
edly inspired them, but who as has been argued were just as interested in
escaping as in accepting the label. Rather, in many ways the Anglo-
American defense of idealism goes back to a state of the discussion charac-
teristic of the period prior to Hegel and German idealism in general, instead
employing an understanding of idealism influenced by eighteenth-century
disputes in the wake of Berkeley. None of these figures except perhaps Royce
continued to explore a dynamic conception of idealism distinctive of Hegel
and the other German idealists—Royce in fact wrote more extensively and
insightfully on Hegel and his immediate predecessors than any of the others
with the possible exception of McTaggart (who was eleven years younger
than Royce and began publishing a decade later, although not obviously
influenced by the American). In general, the late nineteenth-century ideal-
ists were more inclined to think of idealism again as a genuine, metaphysical
alternative to materialism and to embark again on the controversy whether
matter on the one hand or mind or spirit on the other is the ultimate “stuff”
of reality. These philosophers were thus more willing to identify themselves
as idealists than had been their predecessors. However, these philosophers
were not all equally complete monists, that is, insistent on reducing all
reality to mind. Both Bradley and McTaggart, for whom a defense of
idealism consists mainly in establishing the ontological point that reality is
exclusively spirit, were, and thus their idealism could also be called mental or
spiritual monism. But both Green at the beginning of the movement and
Royce toward its end strove for more nuanced positions, not excluding the
existence of matter from their idealisms, and thus resisted monism, while
still insisting that some form of mind or spirit was the most important and
dominant feature of reality. But all their efforts to establish a convincing
form of idealism, whether in the form of spiritualism or in a form that
allowed some role for matter as well, became rapidly unfashionable even
during the lifetimes of all these philosophers (except for Green, who died
young) due to what was called “the revolt against idealism” staged at the turn
of the twentieth century in Britain by Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore and
a decade later in the United States by a group of “New Realists.” However, as
we will suggest, at least Russell was himself pushed back in the direction of
some form of idealism, perhaps only on epistemological grounds, by the
time his own thought reached the stage of his “logical atomism.” For the
most part, however, after the attacks on Bradley and Royce, explicit avowal
of metaphysical idealism became rare, with a few exceptions such as the
     127

prominent defense of idealism by Brand Blanshard in the 1930s and several

spirited but less prominent defenses by a small number of subsequent
philosophers, such as Timothy Sprigge and John Foster in the 1980s.
Thomas Hill Green (1836–82) was the first of the great Oxford idealists.
He is best remembered for a lengthy polemic with Hume that he published
in the form of an introduction to a collected edition of Hume that he co-
edited (Hume 1874) and for his posthumously published Prolegomena to
Ethics, which is a polemic against utilitarianism from the point of view of a
perfectionism inspired by Kant as well as by Hegel. But the first of the four
books of the Prolegomena is a “Metaphysics of Knowledge,” beginning with
a statement of “The Spiritual Principle in Knowledge and in Nature” (1893:
13), which argues for a form of idealism on both epistemological and
ontological grounds, and Green’s posthumous works included a set of
lectures on Kant in which he engaged quite directly with Kant’s form of
idealism. Green also left behind a set of Lectures on the Principles of Political
Obligation that form one of the crucial documents of the political and social
philosophy of British idealism.
Green’s motivation in arguing for idealism in the Prolegomena is to
prepare the way for a conception of the will as free and creative as the
foundation of his ethics—in this regard Green’s view is as much in the spirit
of Kant’s practical idealism as it is Hegelian. Green’s idealism is expounded
in three main steps. First, and here also much influenced by Kant, he argues
that knowledge never consists in the mere apprehension of discrete items,
but in the recognition of order or relation, and that such order or relation is
not given but is constituted by and in consciousness. Thus,

The terms “real” and “objective” . . . have no meaning except for a con-
sciousness which presents its experiences to itself as determined by rela-
tions, and at the same time conceives a single and unalterable order of
relations determining them, with which its temporary presentation, as each
experience occurs, of the relations determining it may be contrasted.
(1893: 17)

From this he infers that

experience, in the sense of a consciousness of events as a related series—

and in no other sense can it help to account for the knowledge of an order
of nature—cannot be explained by any natural history, properly so called
(1893: 21–2)
128    

but must instead be constituted by mind itself, or,

the understanding which presents an order of nature to us is in principle

one with an understanding which constitutes that order itself. (1893: 23)

Thus far, Green’s position could be considered an epistemological argument

for idealism. However, he quickly moves beyond a merely epistemological
argument, because his next move is to argue that since the order of which
any individual human being is in various ways and to various degrees aware
obviously extends beyond what could plausibly be thought to be constituted
just by that individual, the order of which we are each aware must be
constituted by a mind or intelligence greater than that of any of us, thus
there must be “an eternal intelligence realized in the related facts of the
world,” and the world must be “a system of related facts rendered possible by
such an intelligence,” which intelligence “partially and gradually reproduces
itself in us, communicating piece-meal but in inseparable correlation”
aspects of that order to each of us if not complete knowledge of it to any
of us (1893: 38). Green’s insistence on a supra-individual intelligence as the
source of cosmic order in which individual intelligences in some way
participate is a decided move beyond epistemology, and in his own view it
is also a significant departure from Kant, whose agnosticism about the real
nature of things in themselves, at least in the theoretical mood, “would at
once withhold us” from such an inference to the “spirituality of the real
world” (1893: 43). However, and here is the third main thesis of Green’s
form of idealism, the participation of individual human beings in the supra-
individual intelligence which constitutes the comprehensive system of rela-
tions can be seen as an apprehension of some portion of that order by
animal organisms:

in the growth of our experience, in the process of our learning to know the
world, an animal organism, which has its history in time, gradually
becomes the vehicle of an eternally complete consciousness. (1893: 72)

It is the eternal consciousness,

as so far realized in or communicated to us through modification of the

animal organism, that constitutes our knowledge, with the relations, char-
acteristic of knowledge, into which time does not enter, which are not in
becoming but are once for all what they are. (1893: 73)
     129

Green’s form of spiritualism is thus not intended to be incompatible with

ontological dualism: the object of all knowledge is the complete and eternal
order of things, which must be constituted by an intelligence greater than
that of any individual human being, but individual human beings are in fact
organisms, thus matter, to which some aspect of that intelligence is com-
municated. The epistemological aspect of Green’s idealism is complete,
because knowledge on the part of an individual is understood as consisting
in a grasp of an order that is itself mental, but his ontology is not exclusively
mentalistic, for while it includes the necessary existence of a supra-
individual intelligence or spirit it also allows the existence of animal organ-
isms (and thus presumably of other forms of matter as well). As Passmore
put it, Green thinks that “the distinction and connexion between individual
and eternal consciousness allows the Idealist to admit what is true in
materialism without departing from his major principles” (Passmore
1966: 59).
Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924), however, argued for a more exclu-
sively idealist ontology; he also rejects Green’s view that reality ultimately
consists in relations; instead, that mental reality is an “absolute,” although
we can only conceive it imperfectly in relational terms: “a relational way of
thought must give appearance and not truth . . . it is a makeshift, a mere
practical compromise, most necessary, but in the end most indefensible”
(1893: 28). Bradley was a student at University College, Oxford, and a
lifelong fellow of Merton College. He published three main works: his
Ethical Studies (1876), Principles of Logic (1883), and the book that pre-
sented his metaphysical views on the constitution and the main character-
istics of reality most explicitly, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical
Essay, which was first published in 1893 and reprinted many times during
his lifetime (and later). His reputation as a metaphysician was largely
destroyed by the attack of Moore and Russell that we will discuss, but
his Logic, even though it was not mathematical logic, may have helped
Russell to some of his philosophical results, such as his famous theory of
definite descriptions. Perhaps his Ethical Studies has best sustained its
reputation. (On Bradley and Russell, see Horstmann 1984 and Hylton
1990; more generally, see Taylor 1903; Wollheim 1959; Passmore 1966:
60–9; Manser 1983; Mander 1994; Mander 2011: chs. 4.2, 5.5, and 6.1; and
Mander 2020, ch.12).
Bradley famously proceeds from the claim that the traditional and received
“ideas by which we try to understand the universe” are contradictory
(1893: 11 [1897: 9]). But surely reality cannot be self-contradictory—nobody
130    

can deny that and still make sense—so these traditional ideas of reality must
be false. Thus Bradley rejects any identity between ultimate reality and our
ordinary modes of perception and conception (“thought”). He substantiates
this claim by examining a range of central concepts from metaphysics and
epistemology, among them the concepts of primary and secondary qualities,
of substance and attribute, of quality and relation, space and time, of
causality as well as the concept of a thing and that of the self. The best
known of his destructive arguments against these conceptions is that against
qualities and relations because it played a role in the discussion that arose at
the turn of the twentieth century between Bradley, Russell, and Moore
(among others) about the logical and ontological status of relations, that
is, whether they are “internal” or “external” to their terms. As to qualities
and relations Bradley claims:

The arrangement of given facts into relations and qualities may be neces-
sary in practice, but it is theoretically unintelligible. The reality, so char-
acterized, is not true reality, but is appearance. (1893: 25 [1897: 21])

He starts with pointing out that “[q]ualities are nothing without relations”
(ibid.). This is so because in order to be qualities they have to differ from
other qualities and hence have to be distinct. However, without relations
they could not be distinct. But distinctiveness presupposes plurality and
plurality relations.

Their plurality depends on relation, and, without that relation, they are not
distinct. But, if not distinct, then not different, and therefore not qualities.
(1893: 28 [1897: 24])

Not only without relations are qualities nothing, “[u]nfortunately, taken

together with them, they are equally unintelligible” (1893: 30 [1897: 25]).
The reason is that one cannot account for their distinctiveness if their
distinctiveness is based only on their being different: “In short, qualities in
a relation have turned out as unintelligible as were qualities without one”
(1893: 31–2 [1897: 27]). The same holds, according to Bradley, from the side
of relations. “They are nothing intelligible, either with or without their
qualities” (1893: 32 [1897: 27]). They are nothing intelligible without qua-
lities because “a relation without terms seems mere verbiage” (ibid.). They
are nothing intelligible with qualities either for in order for a relation to
relate it must stand in a relation to what it relates which makes it into a
     131

quality that requires “a new connecting relation” (ibid.) if it is to relate to

that quality. Bradley summarizes as the result:

The conclusion to which I am brought is that a relational way of thought—

any one that moves by the machinery of terms and relations—must give
appearance, and not truth. (1893: 33 [1897: 28])

The result of his examination not just of the concepts of quality and relation
but of all the other concepts he deals with consists in the verdict that all
attempts to capture the true nature of reality in terms of these categories are
futile because all these concepts are unintelligible, inconsistent, and in the
end self-contradictory. He even applies this critique to two concepts
accepted without demure by many other idealists, those of the self and of
God (Passmore 1966: 65). This means that what is designated by means of
these concepts cannot be real, but can only reflect the way the world appears
to us, not the way it really is. This diagnosis is based on Bradley’s funda-
mental conviction that “ultimate reality is such that it does not contradict
itself” (1893: 136 [1897: 120]). He takes this to be “an absolute criterion”
(ibid.). However, to be just appearance is not to be unreal in the sense of an
illusion. On the contrary, although appearance is “inconsistent with itself,”
one cannot deny its existence or “divorce it from reality” because “reality, set
on one side and apart from all appearance, would assuredly be nothing”
(1893: 132 [1897: 114]).
But does this ontological argument for idealism exclude epistemology
altogether? That is, since appearance always proves to be an inadequate way
in which reality is present to us, is it beyond our means ever to become
acquainted with the true essence of ultimate reality or can we avoid skepti-
cism and claim that it is indeed possible for us to have access to the
constitutive nature of reality? Bradley emphatically endorses the latter
possibility. According to him, the self-contradictoriness of what is appear-
ance already implies that there is positive knowledge of reality: reality has to
be One in the sense that it does not allow discord and it must be such that it
can include diversity (cf. 1893: 140 [1897: 123]), that is, “the Absolute is . . .
an individual and a system” (1893: 144 [1897: 127]). This character of reality
as an internally diversified individual system is revealed to us in sentient
experience. “Sentient experience . . . is reality, and what is not this is not real”
(ibid.). According to Bradley it is this sentient experience that “is commonly
called psychical existence” (ibid.). The material basis of sentient experience
is exhausted in feeling, thought, and volition. Thus reality consists in what
132    

has to be taken as the undifferentiated unity of these modes of sentient

experience before these modes make their appearance as different aspects of
experience. This leads Bradley to assume that what is ultimately real is just
what gives rise to appearances where appearances have to be understood as
specific forms under which the underlying undifferentiated unity appears in
each of these different aspects of experience. In his words:

. . . there is no way of qualifying the Real except by appearances, and outside

the Real there remains no space in which appearances could live.
(1893: 551 [1897: 489])

Although he concedes “our complete inability to understand this concrete

unity in detail” he insists that this inability “is no good ground for our
declining to entertain it” (1894: 160 [1897: 141]). In a way, although not
usually noticed, and certainly not suggested by Bradley himself, this brings
his philosophy closer to that of Schopenhauer than to that of Hegel, which
he rejected: just as Schopenhauer thought that we could do no other than to
infer from our own experience of the will that ultimately reality must be
something like that, so Bradley infers from our own, undifferentiated and
not yet abstracted experience that reality must be something like that.
Experience and reality, if not abstract thought and reality, do come back
together for Bradley. And although he claims at the end of his metaphysical
essay that he does not know whether his “conclusions” are to be called
Realism or Idealism (1893: 547 [1897: 485]), at the very end he nevertheless
abruptly states: “We may fairly close this work then by insisting that Reality
is spiritual” (1893: 552 [1897: 489]). This might lead us to assume that, “in
the end” (a favorite phrase of Bradley’s), it was primarily his search for a
basis for spiritualism that motivated him to explore the true nature of reality;
in other words, he was ultimately driven by an impulse toward idealism by
ontological premises even though he had developed powerful epistemolog-
ical arguments for a holistic version of metaphysical idealism. As one author
has written, “There is no getting around the fact that Bradley’s final position
as to our knowledge of ultimate reality is complex and nuanced” (Mander
2020, 298). After all, both appearance and reality can be characterized
as mind.
The identification of idealism with spiritualism, thus again an ontological
interpretation of idealism, is most explicit in the works of John McTaggart
Ellis McTaggart (1866–1925). McTaggart was the dominant idealist at
Cambridge, where he was first a student, then a Prize Fellow and lecturer
     133

in Moral Science at Trinity College, and there the tutor of both Moore and
Russell. (On McTaggart, see Passmore 1966: 76–82; Broad 1933–8; Geach
1979; Mander 2011: ch. 10.1.3). His earliest work, “The Further Determination
of the Absolute” (first published as a pamphlet in 1893, then as chapter IX of
Studies in Hegelian Cosmology [1901a] and in Philosophical Studies [1934]),
starts with the following proclamation:

The progress of an idealistic philosophy may, from some points of view, be

divided into three stages. The problem of the first is to prove that reality is
not exclusively matter. The problem of the second is to prove that
reality is exclusively spirit. The problem of the third is to determine what
is the fundamental nature of spirit. (1901a [1934: 210f.])

And the last of his writings published in his lifetime (“An Ontological
Idealism”) starts with the confession, explicitly employing the same termi-
nology that we have used here: “Ontologically I am an Idealist, since I believe
that all that exists is spiritual” (1924 [1934: 273]). He takes spirit to be the
sum total of individual spirits or selves connected by the relation of love, and
bases this conviction on the claim that only this conception of what ultimate
reality consists in allows us to overcome unavoidable contradictions con-
nected with all other attempts to reconcile unity and diversity as the
distinguishing marks of reality. Harmony between unity and diversity can
be established only on the basis of an all-encompassing relation of love
between all the characteristic elements of reality, which in turn presupposes
thinking of ultimate reality as a community of spirits or as Spirit. These—as
McTaggart himself admits (1924 [1934: 271f.])—rather mystical-sounding
assertions, which he adhered to all his life, he tries to back up by a number of
different considerations. In his earliest writing he relies heavily on views held
by Bradley to the effect that we have to accept that contradictions are a
criterion for non-reality. However, he does not employ this criterion as a
logical maxim with an implication for the nature of reality but transforms it
into a more active ontological principle according to which nothing that
prevents harmony can be real—so the active principle of reality must rather
be something positive, namely love. In his last work, his attempt to present
an argument for his ontological idealism is based mainly on (1) mereological
considerations concerning the structure of substances which aim to show
that only spirits can claim the status of a substance, and on (2) his theory of
time, the unreality of which he famously had proven in his magnum opus
The Nature of Existence (1921–7). In the first volume of this work he
134    

attempts to prove by what he calls an a priori method (in contrast to

inductive reasoning based on observation) (NE §43) that all that really exists
are substances. Substances according to McTaggart are infinitely divisible
and therefore cannot have simple parts. Between substances and their
individual features there obtains a relation of “determining correspondence”
such that each feature determines and is determined by all the others. Given
these a priori characteristics of what can exist the task McTaggart tackles in
the second volume is to

consider various characteristics as to which our experience gives us . . . a

prima facie suggestion that they are possessed either by all that exists, or by
some existent things (NE §295)

and to ask

a. “which of these characteristics can really be possessed by what is

existent” and
b. “of those which are found to be possible characteristics of the existent,
whether any of them can be known to be actual characteristics of it”
(NE §295).

This double task cannot be settled by a priori means but has to be

approached by starting from empirical assumptions based on experience.
If one has to acknowledge that the ways we are bound to conceive of all these
experiential or phenomenal characteristics lead to contradictions then these
characteristics cannot be true of reality. McTaggart’s strategy here is strongly
reminiscent of Bradley’s procedure to downgrade many phenomena to
appearances and to deny them the status of constitutive elements of reality.
The empirically given characteristics McTaggart discusses primarily are
(a) time, (b) matter, (c) sensa, (d) spirit, and (e) cogitation. As to (a) time
he denies that “anything existent [can] possess the characteristic of being in
time” (NE §303) where time is understood as an ordering relation between
events. He distinguishes between two ways of ordering in time. The first
gives rise to what he calls the “A-series” according to which every state of
affairs (event, thing) is either past or present or future. The second, the so-
called “B-series,” relates transitively and asymmetrically states of affairs in
terms of earlier and later (cf. NE §306). He claims that the A-series is more
fundamental than the B-series because only the A-series can account for
change (NE §317) and goes on to demonstrate that (a) without an A-series
     135

there is no B-series in a temporal sense (cf. NE §333) yet that (b) the (more
fundamental) A-series leads to time determinations of a state of affairs that
are contradictory. The result:

We conclude that the distinctions of past, present and future are essential
to time, and that, if the distinctions are never true of reality, then no reality
is in time. (NE §324)

Though never true of reality these distinctions are not empty, because
according to McTaggart they have to be taken as appearances of a third
series, the C-series, “a series which is not a time series, but under certain
conditions appears to us to be one.” This C-series “does actually exist in
every case in which there is the appearance of a time-series” (NE §347).
McTaggart thinks of the C-series (at least in The Nature of Existence) as an
“Inclusion Series” (NE §575)

whose members are connected by the relations “inclusive of” and “inclu-
sive in”, so that of any two terms one will be inclusive of the other, and the
other will be included in it. (NE §575)

Concerning (b) matter, which he characterizes as “something which pos-

sesses the primary qualities” (NE §355), he also wants to prove that it does
not exist (NE §364). This is so because all that exists are substances that have
to be infinitely divisible. Matter, however,

cannot be divided into parts of parts to infinity either in respect of its

spatial dimensions, or of that dimension which appears as temporal. And
matter, as usually defined, and as we have defined it, has no other
dimensions . . . . And therefore it cannot exist.” (NE §362)

The existence of matter can also not be inferred on the basis of the prima
facie existence of what we perceive “by means of the sense organs of our
bodies”, that is, of what he calls “sensa” (NE §373), because it is erroneous to
believe that matter as the presumed outside cause of a sensum has the same
qualities as a sensum and thus has to exist (cf. NE §365). He conjectures that
if there are outside causes of sensa they must be substances which are “of a
spiritual nature” (NE §371).
When it comes to (c) sensa, McTaggart holds that one has to distinguish
between two classes of percepta, those perceived by introspection (mental
136    

states, spiritual data) and those that are given by means of sense organs
(sensa). The latter do not really exist, they just lead to the illusion that they
exist. This is so because of a confusion between a perception that is part of
the percipient and therefore spiritual or mental in character and what is
perceived, that is, the object of a perception or the perceptum (cf. NE §373).
However, a perceptum as a sensum cannot, according to McTaggart, have
parts within parts to infinity and thus cannot really exist because what exists
has no simple parts (cf. 355). Having disposed of matter and sensa this way,
he then discusses the ontological status of (d) spirit or spirituality. He
declares that “the quality of spirituality . . . is the quality of having content,
all of which is the content of one or more selves” (NE §381) and states that
“nothing can have this quality except substances, and so nothing but sub-
stances are spiritual” and exist or are real (ibid.). A self or an I he takes to be
a simple quality of a substance which is known to me to be myself by direct
perception, that is, is known by acquaintance, not by description. The
distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by descrip-
tion he explicitly takes up from Russell (NE §382, cf. also §44). He then
surmises that it is very likely that the I, that is, the substance that possesses
the quality of being a self, persists through time because “I perceive myself as
persisting through time, or the real series which appears as a time-series”
(NE §395). He also holds that selves are conscious without having to be self-
conscious (NE §397) and that no experience is possible “which is not part of
a self ” (NE §400) though it cannot belong to more than one self (NE §401).
He concludes:

As all the content of spirit falls within some self, and none of it falls within
more than one self, it follows that all existent selves form a set of parts of
that whole which consists of all existent spirits. (NE §404)

Although written more than twenty years after G. E. Moore’s “The

Refutation of Idealism” (see below) and without mentioning him at all,
McTaggart thus arrives at the exact opposite to the conclusion that Moore
defended.
Regarding (e) cogitations which comprise perceptions, awarenesses of
characteristics, judgments, assumptions, imaginings, only perceptions can
form an infinite series required for existence (NE §406). Perception he
characterizes as awareness of a substance as having such and such qualities
(NE §407). The outcome he wants to have reached so far is this:
     137

. . . spirit, unlike matter and sense, can really exist. But it can do so only if it
contains no parts except perceptions and groups of perceptions. (NE §426)

All these considerations as to the character or the nature of time, matter,

sensa, spirit, and cogitations are meant to establish two results. The first is
“that nothing which is spiritual is also ‘material or sensal’ (sic) [although this
result] leaves it possible that what is really spiritual may appear as being
material or sensal” (NE §431). The second is McTaggart’s version of
idealism:

No substance has material or sensal qualities, and all reality is spirit. This
conclusion I propose . . . to call by the name of Idealism” (NE §432),

in an ontological sense, though, as he remarks, the terms “Spiritualism” or

“Psychism” might be “intrinsically better” to characterize his point of view
(NE §432).
It is interesting to note that McTaggart does not believe that his meta-
physical (ontological) spiritual idealism excludes a realistic stance in episte-
mology. This is so because he characterizes epistemological realism as a
position that is based on a correspondence theory of truth according to
which a belief is true if it corresponds to a fact. Because everything that is
real is a fact and (according to McTaggart) nothing is unreal (although it
may not exist), all beliefs about something are beliefs about facts and
consequently about something that is epistemologically real. Although this
concept of epistemological realism is vague, it suggests that McTaggart
thought of idealism not primarily in opposition to realism but much more
in terms of a doctrine that is opposed to materialism, that is, as an ontolog-
ical rather than epistemological doctrine. However, since McTaggart makes
clear that since matter and mind are the only candidates for genuine
substantiality of which we know, and thus that while only mind or spirit
satisfies the ontological conditions for substantiality, for all we know there
might be some other alternative, so his argument for idealism is not con-
clusive. His argument is predominantly ontological, but does presuppose
one crucial epistemological premise.
In sum: Unlike other British idealists who may have affirmed some form
of dualist idealism, or unlike F. H. Bradley, who affirmed the existence of the
“Absolute” without quite equating it with mind, although he seemed to
conclude that it must be more like mind than like anything else,
McTaggart positively affirmed idealism in its monistic form throughout
138    

his career in that he claims that only minds exist because of their substan-
tiality. His main argument for this position proceeds, like Leibniz’s, by
positing criteria for genuine substancehood that only minds can satisfy.
Contrary to Leibniz, however, McTaggart supposes that genuine substance
must be infinitely divisible, but then, closer to Leibniz, that their infinite
parts must be related by “determining correspondence,” each part deter-
mining every other. He then concludes that mind or spirit, which can
represent infinite divisibility and determining correspondence as well, is
the only candidate for genuine substancehood, and hence the only thing
that really exists. In further similarity to Leibniz, he supposes that there is a
multiplicity of minds, harmoniously related, although by their own love for
one another rather than by an external act of God (NE ch. XLI). McTaggart
admits that there is something provisional about his argument, for it is only
our “experience” and our “imagination” that suggest that the only candi-
dates for reality are matter, sensa, and mind. Thus there is no a priori proof
that his enumeration is complete, so “we are entitled to hold all substance to
be spiritual, not as a proposition which has been rigorously demonstrated,
but as one which it is reasonable to believe and unreasonable to disbelieve”
(NE §428). Here then he seeks to back off his dogmatic idealism, coming
back to something closer to Bradley’s position. But he does employ what
might be considered an epistemological rule of inference in his metaphysical
argument—crudely put, don’t worry about possibilities you can’t even
imagine—and he is not troubled by any doubt about this principle.
Idealism was also a major mode of philosophy in the United States during
the late nineteenth century. It had to compete with pragmatism—a compe-
tition personalized at Harvard from the 1880s until the death of William
James (b. 1842) in 1910 by his friendly rivalry with Josiah Royce
(1855–1916)—but while pragmatism remained prominent throughout the
twentieth century, whether under that name or not, the reputation of
idealism was permanently damaged by a movement toward “realism” early
in the century (which also attacked pragmatism, although without the same
effect). Earlier in the nineteenth century, the popular essayist Ralph Waldo
Emerson, the most philosophical of the New England “Transcendentalists,”
had struck many idealist themes, and after the Civil War a school of
“St. Louis Hegelians” emerged, whose efforts were primarily exegetical. But
the leading American idealist was Josiah Royce. Deeply influenced by the
lectures Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) gave in Cambridge in 1898
(Royce was one of the first to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy at the new Johns
Hopkins University in 1878, but that was one year before Peirce began
     139

teaching logic there in 1879), Royce incorporated aspects of Peirce’s prag-

matism into his version of idealism, giving an idealist spin to Peirce’s
conception of truth as what would be known at the end of inquiry were
that ever to be reached. But Royce’s argument always remained that episte-
mology must ultimately lead to what he himself called metaphysical ideal-
ism. (See Flower and Murphey 1977; Kuklick 1977 and 1985; Clendenning
1999; Oppenheim 2005.)
A prolific author who published fifteen books before his early death at 60,
Royce launched his defense of idealism in his first book, The Religious Aspect
of Philosophy (1885). In this work he introduced his first novel argument, for
idealism, what he called the argument from error. Royce’s claim is that
skepticism begins with insistence upon the possibility of error, but that
recognition of that possibility presupposes not just that there is “absolute
truth” (1885: 385) but that in some sense we have to know that absolute
truth, or at least some aspect of it, in order to have an object even for our
erroneous claims: how could we ever know that we are wrong if we don’t in
some sense know what it is we are wrong about, or at least if someone or
something does not know what it is we are wrong about? Thus we must have
some access to a “higher inclusive thought” even to make an erroneous
knowledge claim. In his words,

Either then there is no error, or else judgments are true and false only in
reference to a higher inclusive thought, which they presuppose, and which
must, in the last analysis, be assumed as Infinite and all-inclusive.
(1885: 393)

Royce holds that we must have some sort of apprehension of the “higher
inclusive thought” in order to be able even to make our errors, and then that
the growth of human knowledge over time consists in increasing apprehen-
sion of this all-inclusive truth without any limit being prescribed by our
subordinate status. This is the epistemological optimism that pervades all
Royce’s work, including his subsequent debate with Bradley, to which we
will return.
This account does not yet make clear why Royce thought that epistemol-
ogy must lead to ontological idealism; that becomes clearer in his subsequent
works. Royce’s next major statement of his idealism came in The Spirit of
Modern Philosophy (1892). The second part of the book more fully develops
Royce’s own arguments for idealism. Here Royce gives a clear definition of
his conception of idealism and adds to the previous argument from error a
140    

second argument, from meaning. The core of this argument is that the
intended object of an expression or thought must itself be conceived or
understood in some way, so that we always mean what are in some sense our
own ideas, although of course at any particular moment we hardly know or
understand everything about the object to which we refer; that is why the
idea that is the ultimate object of reference may be much greater than the
idea that refers. In Royce’s words,

The self that is doubting or asserting, or that is even feeling its private
ignorance about an object, and that still, even in consequence of all this, is
meaning, is aiming at such an object, is in essence identical with the self for
which this object exists in its complete and consciously known truth.
(1892: 370–1)

By means of this argument, any restriction of Royce’s position to a purely

epistemological one is eliminated: the possibility of meaning requires an
identity between what means and what is meant, and since anything might
be meant, anything at all must in some way be identical with what means,
subjects and their ideas and expressions, even though that identity can
hardly be absolute, and the ordinary conscious subject may seem very
different and more limited than the “one Self” (1892: 373) that underlies
the appearances of both ordinary subjects and ordinary objects. This is the
form that the characteristic idealist identification of being with thought takes
in Royce.
Royce develops an even more systematic argument for an idealism that is
both epistemological and ontological in his magnum opus, the two volumes
of his 1899–1900 Gifford lectures published (1899 and 1901) as The World
and the Individual. As the title suggests, a major theme of this work is
explicating in detail the relationship between underlying reality and ordi-
nary individual, conscious human selves. In this book, Royce expounds his
idealism as the last of the four possible “conceptions of being.” The first is
the “realistic conception of Being,” which is defined by the conception of
being as completely independent of thought, so that whatever is true of it is
true quite independently of what may be thought about it. This is the
everyday conception of reality. The second conception of being is the
mystical conception. As the defining notion of the realist conception was
independence, the defining notion of mysticism is the opposite, namely
immediacy, the idea that thought and its object must be one. This is idealism
in its simplest form. The third conception of being, which Royce sometimes
     141

calls the theory of “validity,” is that “To be real now means, primarily, to be
valid, to be true, to be in essence the standard for ideas” (1: 202). This
conception of being tries to retain realism’s recognition of independence
through the thought that “some of my ideas are already, and apart from my
private experience, valid, true, well-grounded” (1: 204) and mysticism’s
identification of subject and object through the thought that reality is itself
possible experience, but adds structure to the now unified realms of thought
and being instead of eliminating structure. It brings out the epistemology
characteristic of much idealism.
The fourth conception of being, however, is a fuller development of the
conception of meaning that Royce had introduced in The Spirit of Modern
Philosophy (1892). He now links meaning to purpose, and his thought is that
the meaning of a term is an intended purpose, a problem to be solved, for
example a mathematical problem to be solved or object to be constructed,
and that in using a term the user already has some approach to solving the
problem in mind but the full solution remains to be developed, may never be
fully developed in the life of a particular individual, but is in some sense
already included in the larger thought that constitutes reality. Reaching back
to both Hegel and Kant—an idealist conception of purpose (Zweck) was
after all the central and unifying concept of Kant’s third Critique—Royce
conceives of the progress of knowledge as making the meaning of our ideas
more determinate. This development also displays the influence of Peirce
and Royce’s attempt to assimilate pragmatism into his version of idealism:
his notion of meaning is clearly a version of Peirce’s approach to truth, on
which a proposition is true if it would be affirmed at the final stage of human
inquiry, with the difference that while for Peirce the final stage of
human inquiry is essentially a regulative ideal without ontological commit-
ment, for Royce, the comprehensive meaning in which all ideas would be
fully determinate is actually thought, although by a sort of super-self, not by
any particular finite human self or even by all the selves thinking at any one
time. Royce makes the transition from thought to being by stating that

In its wholeness the world of Being is the world of individually expressed

meanings, an individual life, consisting of the individual embodiments of
the wills represented by all finite ideas. (1899–1901: 1: 341–2)

Royce’s arguments for idealism, which in many ways return to the basic
form of modern idealism pioneered by Green, whose Prolegomena had been
published just a couple of years before Royce’s own career began, collectively
142    

illustrate the pressure that often forced a move from epistemology to an

idealist ontology. The epistemological argument begins with the insight that
our knowledge in some way or another always reflects the structure of our
own consciousness and thought. But the difference between what any
particular individual believes or even knows at any particular time and
what may be true and be known as a whole, at a time or over time, is too
great to ignore, and must be resolved. But once it has been assumed that
thought or mind itself is the proper object of knowledge, the only way to do
this is to make a contrast between individual thought and some sort of
supra-individual thought.
Royce enjoyed polemics, for example with his pragmatist colleague and
good friend James. He also gave a spirited defense of the definitely mental
nature of the absolute in a polemic with his fellow idealist Bradley in a
lengthy Supplementary Essay to the first volume of The World and the
Individual, entitled “The One, the Many, and the Infinite” (Royce
1899–1901: 1: 473–588). The argument is long and intricate, and turns on
Royce’s recent and intensive studies of new developments in logic and the
foundations of mathematics. But the gist of it (well summarized in Kuklick
1985a: 138–46), is that while in Bradley’s view every relation of an object to a
world (“R”) generates a vicious infinite regress, for R itself must be related to
the world by R*, and R* related to the world by R**, and so on, for Royce,
drawing on Richard Dedekind’s explication of how the infinite series of all
natural numbers can represent other infinite number series (of primes, of
the powers of 3, etc.), or vice versa, mind, at least mind capacious enough,
can represent these relations without contradiction or vicious regress.
As Kuklick puts it, “while Bradley holds [the ‘actual infinite’] to be self-
contradictory,” for Royce the essence of mind is to be “Self-Representative”
(Kuklick 1985a: 140), to be able to represent itself, that is, its representations,
through its own representations—just as long as this mind is capacious and
complex enough. That is why the mind must be absolute, and the absolute
must be mind—not just this mind or that, often enough not able to quite
grasp Dedekind’s treatment of infinites, let alone Royce’s metaphysical
application of it, but absolute mind.
At the outset of modern idealism, in Berkeley, the mind in question takes
the form of the infinite mind, God, contrasted to individual, human minds;
in later forms, such as those of Green and Royce, the supra-individual mind
is not always identified with God, but plays the same role. In the cases of
both Green and Royce, the union of epistemology and ontology also pro-
vided the basis for a moral idealism based on an insistence upon the
     143

underlying commonality of individual human selves in the larger self that

Royce called the Absolute. But we will not be able to trace that line of
thought here, and will instead conclude with the suggestion that many
subsequent philosophers drew back from the full-blooded idealism offered
by Green, Bradley, McTaggart, and Royce in favor of what was supposed to
be an ontological realism, but which nevertheless continued to harbor at
least epistemological traces of idealism. This might seem a surprising claim,
since the immediate response both to the British idealists and to Royce in the
US came from philosophers who identified themselves as realists. A case in
point would be Bertrand Russell. Before we turn to Russell, however, we will
pause for a look at Charles Sanders Peirce, who, as already suggested, had a
considerable influence on the later work of Royce.
Whereas Royce was convinced that epistemology must ultimately lead to
metaphysical idealism, Peirce was led in his philosophical development from
metaphysical realism to metaphysical idealism while supporting all the way
what has here been characterized as an epistemological ground for idealism.
Peirce, the most original American philosopher of his era, perhaps of any,
was the son of the Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce, who essentially
founded the Harvard mathematics department and did found the US Coast
and Geodetic Survey, which would be the son’s primary employment from
1859 to 1891. Charles Sanders Peirce also taught logic in the mathematics
department of the newly founded Johns Hopkins University from 1879 to
1884, but was fired from that post because he had the temerity to begin
residence with the woman who would become his second wife before his
divorce from his first wife had been finalized, and was never able to get
another academic position. He thus had to remain an employee of Coast and
Geodetic Survey, and then lived his final years in independent but dire
circumstances, supported in part by subscription lecture series that
William James arranged for him to give in Cambridge. Although he was
highly recognized and even supported by many of his academically much
more successful philosophical contemporaries, among them Royce and
James, and although he produced an impressive amount of writing (the
Peirce Edition Project that is in charge of publishing his writings will, if ever
finished, contain more than twenty volumes), he never succeeded in elabor-
ating his ideas in book form. Instead he published most of his work in
intellectual and learned journals (Proceedings of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The Nation, Popular
Science, The Monist, The Open Court) and encyclopedias (Baldwin’s The
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia). There are also quite a number of
144    

manuscripts he wrote for different lecture series but never published. They
comprise the early Harvard lectures on The Logic of Science (1865) and the
early Lowell Lectures on the same topic (1866) as well as the Cambridge
Lectures on Reasoning and the Logic of Things (1898) and the later Harvard
lectures on Pragmatism (1903). (On Peirce, see Murphey 1961; Passmore
1966: 136–44; Flower and Murphey 1977; Kuklick 1977.)
Peirce’s metaphysical views are intimately connected with his claim
“that logic is the science of representations in general, whether mental or
material” (CE 1: 169) and with his stipulations concerning the structure
and status of what he calls “representation.” In his early writings, while
trying to answer the question as to the grounds of the objective validity of
synthetic inferences (a question which he takes to be at the center of
Kant’s theoretical philosophy), he develops a notion of representation
according to which

[A] representation is anything which is supposed to stand for another and

which might express that other to a mind which truly could understand it.
(CE 1: 257)

This characterization of a representation is supposed to make the represen-

tation “mind-independent,” so to speak:

instead of being restricted to something within the mind, [the representation]

is extended to things which do not even address the mind. (CE 1: 323)

Peirce might have come to this conception of a representation by relying on

a phenomenological analysis of what he takes to be constitutive of every
experience. For him

experience has three determinations—three different references to a sub-

stratum or substrata, lying behind it and determining it. (CE 1: 168)

This is so because every experience is determined (1) by an external object,

(2) by our soul, and (3) by “the idea of a universal mind” (an “archetypal
idea”). Within representations he distinguishes in the early writings between
a copy (“a representation whose agreement with its object depends merely
upon sameness of predicates,” CE 1: 257), a sign (“a representation whose
reference to its object is fixed by convention,” CE 1: 257), and a symbol
(“a representation whose correspondence with its object is of the same
     145

immaterial kind as a sign but is founded nevertheless in its very nature,” CE

1: 323). Later he changed the terminology and used instead of “copy” and
“sign” the terms “Icon” and “Index,” which led to his better-known
distinction between Icon, Index, and Symbol as different kinds of repre-
sentations. Each of these different kinds is determined by a difference in its
way of denoting and/or connoting its object while all of them share the
characteristics of having to have (1) a relation to an object (2) under a
specific form (e.g., similarity, by convention) and (3) a relation to an
interpretant, that is, to a “consciousness” (cf. CE 1: 272f.). From his
analysis of the nature of a representation Peirce draws the metaphysical
conclusion that “[w]hatever is is a representation” (CE 1: 324) or “all is
representation” (CE 1: 326). He arrives at this conclusion in a somewhat
obscure way that seems to be based on the conviction that everything there
is represents itself or is a representation of itself under an interpretation.
Peirce does not immediately recognize his position as a form of idealism.
Rather, because representations are neutral with respect to their status of
being material or mental he can think of material objects as representa-
tions whose interpretant is either the representation itself or some (non-
human) consciousness for which the representation can function as a
symbol, and he can think of mental items like general terms or concepts
as universals that exist “out there” in a world that comprises in addition to
copies and conventional signs what he calls ideas (cf. CE 1: 168). However,
it is obvious that this view commits Peirce to a position that implies the
(metaphysical) reality of universals, a position that he explicitly and
happily endorses (cf. CE 1: 358ff.). And the very fact that every represen-
tation has both a denotative and a connotative function makes the basic
epistemological premise for idealism, namely the necessary isomorphism
between knowledge and the known, an element of his view.
Whereas in his earlier writings Peirce is very explicit about the metaphys-
ical implications of his representational position, he is reluctant to go into
metaphysical discussions in his later writings, where he is primarily con-
cerned with formulating and defending his conception of Pragmatism.
Instead he urges that his Pragmatism is not a metaphysical doctrine and is
in fact metaphysically neutral. In a draft of a popular article on Pragmatism
(1907), never published in his lifetime, he writes

that pragmatism is, in itself, no doctrine of metaphysics, no attempt to

determine any truth of things. It is merely a method of ascertaining the
meanings of hard words and of abstract concepts. (EP 2: 400)
146    

As we will see, the effort to accept much of the epistemology of idealism but
to reject its metaphysics would also be characteristic of the nearly contem-
poraneous Neo-Kantian movement in Germany, and through the influence
of that along with the influence of pragmatism of much subsequent analytic
philosophy.
He proclaims, most unambiguously in his Harvard lectures on
Pragmatism (1903), that one can establish Pragmatism as a methodological
maxim on the basis of epistemological (in later years: semiotic) considera-
tions that have to start from a phenomenological analysis of experience. To
provide this analysis is the task of what he calls Phenomenology (with
Peirce’s capital “P,” used explicitly in allusion to Hegel, cf. EP 2: 143f.)
which is in Peirce’s taxonomy the first of the main branches of philosophy
because on it rest what he takes to be the other branches of philosophy, that
is, normative science and metaphysics (cf. EP 2: 146f.). Phenomenology is
the discipline

whose task is to make out what are the elements of appearance that present
themselves to us every hour and every minute whether we are pursuing
earnest investigations, or are undergoing the strangest vicissitudes of
experience, or are dreamily listening to the tales of Scheherazade.
(EP 2: 147)

According to Peirce, phenomenological considerations, that is, considera-

tions spelled out in the Phenomenology, show that in whatever can be
experienced there are at least two distinct series of categories involved that
make this experience possible. Some of them are universal, that is, are
constitutive of every phenomenon, others particular, that is, they belong to
a phenomenon if looked at under a specific aspect (cf. EP 2: 148) like its
quantitative, qualitative, relational, etc. determinations. As universal cate-
gories he identifies three which he names Firstness/Category the First/First,
Secondness/Category the Second/Second, and Thirdness/Category the
Third/Third respectively. He defines them thus:

Category the First is the Idea of that which is such as it is regardless of

anything else. That is to say, it is a Quality of Feeling. Category the Second
is the Idea of that which is such as it is as being Second to some First,
regardless of anything else and in particular regardless of any law, although
it may conform to a law. That is to say, it is Reaction as an element of the
Phenomenon. Category the Third is the Idea of that which is such as it is as
     147

being a Third, or Medium, between a Second and its First. That is to say, it
is Representation as an element of the Phenomenon. (EP 2: 160)

These definitions are meant to capture what is essential to every phenom-

enon. They are interpreted in more familiar terms by Peirce as attributing to
every phenomenon the characteristics of presentness or immediacy
(Firstness), struggle or resistance (Secondness), and what may be described
as general openness to conceptual interpretation (Thirdness) as fundamen-
tal and irreducible features. Peirce is ready to credit Hegel with a similar
view (“I consider Hegel’s three stages as being, roughly speaking, the correct
list of Universal Categories,” EP 2:148). However, he criticizes Hegel for
mistakenly not allowing these categories to be independent of each other. He
believes that the reason for this failure on Hegel’s part lies in his being

possessed with the idea that the Absolute is One . . . . Consequently, he

wishes to make out that the three categories have not their several inde-
pendent and irrefutable standings in thought. Firstness and Secondness
must somehow be aufgehoben. (EP 2: 177)

Although this criticism might be justified from a Peircean phenomenolog-

ical point of view it poses at the same time a problem for him because he
now has to give an account of how the professed independence of his
universal categories can be integrated into his general representational
picture of reality, a picture according to which everything that is real has
to have the character of Thirdness and therefore is somehow related to
everything else in virtue of its interpretative or representational character,
that is, in virtue of its status as an interpretant.
It looks here as if Peirce needs something like Royce’s ideas that ultimate
reality is self-interpreting mind, and indeed in his later years (after c.1905)
he tried to solve this problem by giving his phenomenological claims a
metaphysical underpinning. For him metaphysics is that part of philosophy
that gives an account of the results of what philosophy in the form of
Phenomenology and as a normative science has accomplished. Here Peirce
exploits the fundamental idealist premise that there is a necessary isomor-
phism between thought and being: according to him,

[m]etaphysics consists in the results of the absolute acceptance of logical

principles not merely as regulatively valid, but as truths of being.
Accordingly, it is to be assumed that the universe has an explanation, the
148    

function of which, like that of every logical explanation, is to unify its

observed variety. It follows that the root of all being is One; and so far as
different subjects have a common character they partake of an identical
being. This, or something like this, is the monadic clause of the law.
Second, drawing a general induction from all observed facts, we find all
realization of existence lies in opposition, such as attractions, repulsions,
visibilities, and centres of potentiality generally . . . This is, or is a part of, a
dyadic clause of the law. Under the third clause, we have, as a deduction
from the principle that thought is the mirror of being, the law that the end
of being and highest reality is the living impersonation of the idea that
evolution generates. (CP 1: 487)

The term “law” in this characterization is equivalent to what he terms

“regularity” “in the universe of representations” (cf. CP 1: 480). The specific
version of metaphysics he is advocating shows up in his writings in the shape
of what he calls his doctrine of Synechism. He defines Synechism as

that tendency of philosophical thought which insists upon the idea of

continuity as of prime importance in philosophy and, in particular, upon
the necessity of hypotheses involving true continuity. (CP 6: 169)

This synechistic doctrine, he declares,

gives room for explanations of many facts which without it are absolutely
and hopelessly inexplicable; and further that it carries along with it the
following doctrines: first, a logical realism of the most pronounced type;
second, objective idealism; third, tychism, with its consequent thorough-
going evolutionism. We also notice that the doctrine presents no hin-
drances to spiritual influences, such as some philosophies are felt to do.
(CP 6: 163)

Tychism “or the doctrine that absolute chance is a factor of the universe”
(CP 6: 201) he takes to be an essential element of synechistic philosophy
because it

must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities

of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a
Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized
and partially deadened mind. (CP 5: 102)
     149

Peirce’s “tychism” introduces an element of chance into the ultimate reality

of the universe which neither Bradley nor Royce recognized, and that might
well seem a healthy idea. Nevertheless, like them he is committed to
objective idealism as well as to logical realism because of his view that (to
use a phrase favored very much by Bradley) “in the end” everything there is
is a representation. It is within this synechistic framework based on tychism
that, according to Peirce, the independence of Firstness and Secondness can
be shown to be a necessary condition for Thirdness. This is so because
continuity (which he identifies with Thirdness) and chance (as the organiz-
ing principle of evolution) could not be accounted for if there were no
independence of the three universal categories. He is very explicit about
this connection between his metaphysical and his representational views
when he writes:

Permit me further to say that I object to having my metaphysical system as

a whole called Tychism. For although tychism does enter into it, it only
enters as subsidiary to that which is really, as I regard it, the characteristic
of my doctrine, namely, that I chiefly insist upon continuity, or Thirdness,
and, in order to secure to Thirdness its really commanding function, I find
it indispensable fully [to] recognize that it is a third, and that Firstness, or
chance, and Secondness, or Brute reaction, are other elements, without the
independence of which Thirdness would not have anything upon which to
operate. Accordingly, I like to call my theory Synechism, because it rests on
the study of continuity. (CP 6: 202)

In virtue of the robust idealistic elements contained in his synechism it is

safe to say that Peirce’s final philosophy exhibits most of the traits that are
characteristic of metaphysical idealism prevalent in Anglo-American phi-
losophy at the turn of the twentieth century. So while Royce tried to
assimilate Peirce’s pragmatism into his own idealism, Peirce himself was
turning his pragmatism into a form of idealism (in which William James, for
example, would not follow him, perhaps one reason why Peirce ultimately
adopted the barbarism “Pragmaticism” in the hope of distinguishing his
position from what had become popular as James’s “Pragmatism”).
 8
The Rejection of British Idealism

Idealism and all the arguments for it came under massive attack in Britain at
the turn of the twentieth century by George Edward Moore (1873–1958) and
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), while in the United States Royce’s position
was attacked by a school of younger “New Realists,” to some extent inspired
by his lifelong interlocutor William James, who included E. B. Holt and his
younger Harvard colleague Ralph Barton Perry, and later Roy Wood Sellars
(the father of Wilfrid Sellars, who later moved back to a form of
Kantianism), and Arthur Lovejoy. Both Moore and Russell had more of an
enduring influence on the course of analytic philosophy than did the
American New Realists. But they also reveal the continuing impulse to
idealism in spite of their own efforts, so we will focus on them. Both of
them take idealism to be spiritualism in the vein of Berkeley and Bradley
(neither of them mentions their own Cambridge tutor McTaggart, perhaps
because his main work was not published until several decades after their
attack on Bradley), that is, they think of idealism as a position characterized
by the claim that the universe (Moore) or whatever exists or whatever can be
known to exist (Russell) is spiritual (Moore) or in some sense mental
(Russell). Although their attack was so influential that even more than a
hundred years later, any acknowledgment of idealistic tendencies is viewed
in the English-speaking world with reservation, it is by no means obvious
that they actually thought they had disproved idealism. On the contrary,
neither Moore nor Russell claimed to have demonstrated that the universe
or what exists or can be known to exist is not spiritual or mental. All that
they take themselves to have shown is that there are no good philosophical
(in contradistinction to, e.g., theological or psychological) arguments avail-
able to support such a claim. Moore especially is very explicit about this
point. He devotes the first five pages of his famous piece The Refutation of
Idealism from 1903 to assuring the reader over and over that

I do not suppose that anything I shall say has the smallest tendency to
prove that reality is not spiritual . . . . Reality may be spiritual, for all I know;
and I devoutly hope it is . . . . It is, therefore, only with idealistic arguments

Idealism in Modern Philosophy. Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Oxford University Press.
© Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848574.003.0008
      151

that I am concerned; . . . I shall have proved that Idealists have no reason

whatever for their conclusion. (Philosophical Studies 2f.)

And Russell in his The Problems of Philosophy (1912), in a similar vein,

warns the reader, after emphasizing the strangeness of an idealistic position
from a common-sense point of view:

[I]f there were good reasons to regard them [viz. physical objects] as
mental, we could not legitimately reject this opinion merely because it
strikes us as strange. (1912 [1974: 38])

Moore and Russell found two main arguments for idealism to be falla-
cious. The first depends on Berkeley’s idealistic principle that being con-
sists in being perceived, the second on the converse claim, attributed to
Bradley, that thought entails being. Their criticism of the first as well as
their rebuttal of the second argument both stem from certain convictions
about the nature of knowledge that they share. The assault on Berkeley is
staged by Moore most extensively in The Refutation of Idealism (1903).
Here he holds that if there is an argument to prove the idealistic claim that
the universe is spiritual (1903: 433) then this reasoning must rely either at
the beginning or at some point later in the argument on the premise esse
est percipi:

I believe that every argument ever used to show that reality is spiritual has
inferred this (validly or invalidly) from “esse is percipere” as one of its
premisses; and that this again has never been pretended to be proved
except by use of the premiss that esse is percipi. (1903: 437)

According to Moore the proposition esse est percipi “does at least assert that
whatever is, is experienced” (1903: 437) which is meant in turn to assert

that wherever you have x [esse] you also have percipi; that whatever has the
property x also has the property that it is experienced. (1903: 440)

After a lengthy analysis of this proposition he points out that the conception
of the connection between an experience and what is experienced that the
idealist is entertaining has tenuous consequences that give rise to the
question:
152    

if we never experience anything but what is not an inseparable aspect of

that experience, how can we infer that anything whatever, let alone every-
thing is an inseparable aspect of any experience? (1903: 451)

An inference to such a conclusion cannot be justified. He concludes that in

order to avoid an idealistic position one is better off endorsing a view
according to which

I am as directly aware of the existence of material things in space as of my

own sensations, and what I am aware of with regard to each is exactly the
same—namely that in one case the material thing, and in the other case my
sensation does really exist. (1903: 453)

This line of reasoning, remarkably similar to what Kant had argued in the
Fourth Antinomy in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason but
rejected as an inadequate refutation of idealism in the second edition, was
picked up in an abbreviated form by Russell ten years later in the chapter on
idealism in his The Problems of Philosophy, while the attack on Bradley,
although foreshadowed in Russell’s Problems, is spelled out rather lengthily
(and a bit nastily) by Moore in “The Conception of Reality” from 1917–18.
Their main objection against the two idealistic arguments seems to be that
they rely on unjustly presupposing that the mental act of relating to an
object (perceiving, thinking, knowing, experiencing) is a necessary condition
for the existence of this object. The fallacy involved here consists in failing to
make “the distinction between act and object in our apprehending of
things,” as Russell (1912 [1974: 42]) puts it, or, in Moore’s terminology of
“The Refutation”, in wrongfully identifying the content of “consciousness”
with its object (1912 [1974: 19ff.]). As soon as this identification is given up
and that distinction is made it is at least an open question whether things
exist independently of the mind, and idealism insofar as it neglects this
distinction and holds fast to that identification is refuted because it is based
on an invalid argument.
Whether this line of criticism of idealistic positions is indeed successful
might be controversial, and even if it strikes home against Berkeley the
charge that they simply conflate knowledge and object hardly seems to do
justice to the elaborate arguments of the late nineteenth-century idealists.
However, if one is convinced of the correctness of this criticism (as no doubt
Moore and Russell were) then it makes way for interesting new perspectives
in epistemology and metaphysics. This is so because if this criticism is taken
      153

to be successful it permits us to explore the possibility of a theory of

knowledge that starts from the assumptions (a) that objects exist independ-
ently of us and (b) that to know an object means to be immediately related to
the object as it is in itself (i.e., as it is undistorted by and independent of any
mental activity). Both Moore and Russell can be understood to have embarked
on this exploration in the course of which they came to conceive a position
which is aptly called by Peter Hylton “Platonic Atomism” (2013: 329).
The basic idea of this Platonic atomism seems to be the following:
Knowledge consists in standing in an immediate relation to an independent
individual object (assumption b). This immediate relation to individual
objects is best known under Russell’s term “acquaintance.” If, by stipulation,
knowledge is ultimately knowledge “by acquaintance,” then knowledge is
restricted to knowledge of individual objects. Knowledge basically is knowl-
edge of something or non-propositional knowledge. However, although this
rather frugal conception of knowledge might be sufficient to give an account
of the possibility of non-propositional knowledge, it is not that easy to see
how such a conception can give a sensible explanation of propositional
knowledge, that is, of knowledge that something is so-and-so. Moore and
Russell seem to have been acutely aware of this difficulty as is documented in
their very explicit efforts to avoid it. It might have been their different
reactions to this difficulty which in the years to come led them to proceed
on diverging routes in philosophy. As is easy to imagine, there are two
obvious reactions to the problem of propositional knowledge provided that
assumption (b) is agreed upon. The first is to claim that propositions (Moore
prefers the term “judgment” in this context) are individual objects with
which the subject is acquainted (if he or she claims to know that something
is so-and-so). The second is to broaden the concept of knowledge by not
restricting knowledge to knowledge by acquaintance but to allow for other
forms of knowledge as well. The first reaction apparently was the reaction of
Moore and is formulated most prominently in his early piece “The Nature of
Judgment” (1899), while the second can be attributed to Russell and is
documented most vividly in his The Problems of Philosophy.
According to Moore a proposition is composed out of concepts. If we are
to be acquainted with propositions we have to take their elements, that is,
concepts, to have independent existence (because of assumption a). Moore
points out:

. . . we have approached the nature of a proposition or judgment.

A proposition is composed not of words, nor yet of thoughts, but of
154    

concepts. Concepts are possible objects of thought; but that is no definition

of them. It merely states that they may come into relation with a thinker;
and in order that they may do anything, they must already be something. It
is indifferent to their nature whether anyone thinks them or not. They are
incapable of change; and the relation into which they enter with the
knowing subject implies no action or reaction. It is a unique relation
which can begin to cease with a change in the subject; but the concept is
neither cause nor effect of such a change. The occurrence of the relation
has, no doubt, its causes and effects, but these are to be found only in the
subject. (1899: para. 9)

Moore is well aware that this analysis of the nature of a proposition leads to
some version of what could be called “conceptual realism,” according to
which that what is “really” real are concepts because they are the ultimate
objects of acquaintance. He explicitly states:

It would seem, in fact, . . . that a proposition is nothing other than a

complex concept. The difference between a concept and a proposition, in
virtue of which the latter alone can be called true or false, would seem to lie
merely in the simplicity of the former. A proposition is a synthesis of
concepts; and, just as concepts are themselves immutably what they are, so
they stand in infinite relations to one another equally immutable.
A proposition is constituted by any number of concepts, together with a
specific relation between them; and according to the nature of this relation
the proposition may be either true or false. What kind of relation makes a
proposition true, what false, cannot be further defined, but must be
immediately recognized. (1899: para. 12)

Moore also is very well aware that his view of the nature of concepts
commits him to the claim that the world insofar as it is an object of
propositional knowledge consists of concepts because these are the only
things one can be acquainted with if acquaintance is a condition of knowl-
edge. Thus he writes:

It seems necessary, then, to regard the world as formed of concepts. These

are the only objects of knowledge. They cannot be regarded fundamentally
as abstractions either from things or from ideas; since both alike can be, if
anything is to be true of them, composed of nothing but concepts. A thing
becomes intelligible first when it is analyzed into its constituent concepts.
      155

The material diversity of things, which is generally taken as starting-point,

is only derived; and the identity of the concept, in several different things,
which appears on that assumption as the problem of philosophy, will now,
if it instead be taken as the starting-point, render the derivation easy. Two
things are then seen to be differentiated by the different relations in which
their common concepts stand to other concepts. The opposition of con-
cepts to existents disappears, since an existent is seen to be nothing but a
concept or complex of concepts standing in a unique relation to the
concept of existence.” (1899: para. 16).

Moore confesses that “I am fully aware of how paradoxical this theory must
appear, and even how contemptible” (1899: para. 14). And indeed one
wonders whether such an account does not raise more problems than it
answers. Fortunately we do not have to be concerned with this question
here. However, if we ask whether Moore’s theory really manages to avoid
idealism, it is hard not to conclude that its metaphysical commitments are
precisely a form of idealism, even if he has been led to his theory by an
attempt to maintain epistemological realism! After all, to claim that only
concepts are real, that they have a mode of being outside of space and time,
that they are non-physical and completely unaffected by any activity of a
thinking subject, does not sound very different from statements that can
rightly be attributed to, for example, Hegel, or even ultimately Plato, and
that are meant to assert idealism. The main difference in this case is that
Moore’s conception of what a concept is has virtually nothing to do with
what Hegel means by “concept,” but this does not suffice to establish
ontological anti-idealism. Although Moore might avoid identifying concepts
with the mental states of particular, finite subjects by his insistence upon the
metaphysical independence of concepts, many avowed idealists had also
done that. Moore comes dangerously close to the point where the difference
between ontological idealism and ontological realism vanishes and this
distinction becomes a question of terminology.
Russell chooses a different path in the attempt to somehow reconcile the
idea that knowledge has to be understood as a relation of acquaintance with
objects with the phenomenon of propositional knowledge. He is more flexible
both with respect to kinds of knowledge and with respect to kinds of objects
with which we can be acquainted than Moore is. First of all, he distinguishes
between knowledge of things and knowledge of truths. He recognizes two
kinds of knowledge of things: knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by
description. Knowledge by acquaintance obtains whenever
156    

we have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware,

without the intermediary of any process of inference or any knowledge
of truths. (1912 [1974: 46])

Knowledge by (definite) description obtains

when we know that it [i.e., the object] is “the so-and-so”, i.e., when
we know that there is one object, and no more, having a certain
property. (1912 [1974: 53])

The relation between these two kinds of knowledge is the following:

[K]nowledge concerning what is known by description is ultimately reduc-

ible to knowledge concerning what is known by acquaintance.
(1912 [1974: 58])

Knowledge of truths is distinguished from these two kinds of knowledge of

things. Knowledge of truths consists in pieces of knowledge that although
they cannot be proven by experience are such that we nevertheless “see”
their truth (1912 [1974: 74]). Examples of truths that can be known this way
are logical principles, the principle of induction, and everything we know a
priori. This taxonomy of kinds of knowledge, Russell believes, can account
both for the possibility of non-propositional and propositional knowledge
and at the same time retain the claim as to the primacy of the acquaintance-
relation for knowledge.
The obvious question now is: If all knowledge is ultimately based on
acquaintance, what is it that we can be acquainted with, that is, what are the
legitimate objects of acquaintance? Because, according to Russell, the
acquaintance relation is a relation to individual things, this question trans-
lates into “what are the individual things we can be acquainted with?”
Russell’s answer to this question is that there are exactly two kinds of things
we can be acquainted with, namely particulars, that is, things that exist, and
universals, that is, things that subsist (cf. 1912 [1974: 100]). Particulars
comprise sense-data, thoughts, feelings, desires and memories of “things
which have been data either of the outer senses or of the inner sense” (1912
[1974: 51]). Universals are

opposed to the particular things that are given in sensation. We speak of

whatever is given in sensation, or is of the same nature as things given in
      157

sensation, as a particular; by opposition to this, a universal will be anything

which may be shared by many particulars. (1912 [1974: 93])

Universals are conceptual entities: “These entities are such as can be named
by parts of speech which are not substantives; they are such entities as
qualities or relations” (1912 [1974: 90]). Because universals and particulars
alike are possible objects of acquaintance both have to be real. However,
according to Russell they are real in a different sense. Particulars have
existence in time whereas universals have timeless being. The first ones
exist, the others subsist. They form two different worlds in that the world
of particulars consists of items that are “fleeting, vague, without sharp
boundaries” whereas the world of universals “is unchangeable, rigid,
exact” (1912 [1974: 100]). The echo of Plato is unmistakable.
This rough outline of Russell’s epistemic universe is meant to emphasize
only those aspects of his position that are of relevance for an assessment of
idealistic tendencies in his approach to knowledge. As in the case of Moore,
it is tempting to interpret Russell’s commitment to a timeless world of
universals as if not an endorsement then at least tolerance of a position
that is difficult to distinguish from some version of an ontologically
grounded idealism. Perhaps such a verdict is not very significant because
one could as well describe this position as a version of ontological realism. It
just depends on what the distinctive feature of idealism is supposed to be. If
idealism is a position that takes for granted the reality of conceptual entities
even if it does not hold them to be mind dependent, at least not dependent
on particular, ordinary minds, then both Moore and Russell endorse it. If
idealism is meant to be a position that takes conceptual items to be mind
dependent, that is, dependent on particular minds, then both are realists
rather than idealists with respect to concepts. Either way, it is hard to see
how Russell can avoid the epistemological path to idealism given his views
about physical objects. This is so because of his sense-datum theory, accord-
ing to which what is immediately present to us, that is, what we are
acquainted with when we are acquainted with particulars, are just sense-
data and not objects in the sense of individual things with qualities standing
in relations to each other. For him “among the objects with which we are
acquainted are not included physical objects (as opposed to sense-data)”
(1912 [1974: 52]). Physical objects are constructions that we form out of
sense-data together with some descriptive devices, and only with respect to
these constructions can we have knowledge by description, that is, proposi-
tional knowledge. If idealism is understood (as has been done here) as
158    

involving the claim that what we take to be objects of knowledge are heavily
dependent on some activity of the knowing subject, then the very idea of an
object as a construction guarantees the endorsement of idealism. Thus, in
contrast to their self-proclaimed revolt against the idealism of Berkeley and
Bradley, the positions of both Moore and Russell are by no means free of
traits that connect them rather closely to well-known currents in modern
idealism; and these features, above all the supposition that knowers may be
immediately presented with some sorts of informational atoms, whether
properties, sense-data, or whatever, but that all further knowledge, or all
knowledge beyond immediate acquaintance, involves constructive activities
of the mind, are common throughout a great deal of recent philosophy.
 9
The German Response to Idealism II
Neo-Kantianism without Idealism

Insofar as it began with Moore and Russell’s supposed revolt against

Bradley, mainstream analytical British philosophy has been taken to be
opposed to idealism. But we have just seen that their own views were in
some ways difficult to distinguish from the idealism they allegedly rejected.
Ironically, the dominant movement in German philosophy from the 1870s
to World War I, the period that saw both the flowering of British idealism
and the supposed revolt against it, although it began with the cry “Back to
Kant!” (Liebmann 1865) and has always been known as Neo-Kantianism,
abjured metaphysical speculation altogether, and more thoroughly elimi-
nated metaphysical grounds for idealism than did the British philosophers.
It did this even while it fully accepted and amplified the Kantian premise
that our experience of reality is always structured by the distinctive features
of human mentality. In many ways this line of thought, the epistemological
grounds for idealism, would be more influential on the subsequent course of
analytical philosophy than the particular views of its presumed founders
Moore and Russell would be. With the exception of those of the last great
Neo-Kantian, Ernst Cassirer, most of the main works of the German Neo-
Kantians, whether the leaders of the “Heidelberg” or “Southwest School,”
Wilhelm Windelband, or the “Marburg” school, Herman Cohen and Paul
Natorp, both teachers of Cassirer, have not been translated into English at all
or were translated only long after their original publication; the influence of
Neo-Kantianism on analytic philosophy was rather through the work of
such émigré figures as Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach (see Friedman
2000). These philosophers were received in the US as ambassadors of the so-
called Vienna Circle and did not identify themselves as Neo-Kantians once
in the US, so analytic philosophy in the US became largely ignorant of its
own roots in Neo-Kantianism. We will not have space in the present work to
rectify this ignorance to any large degree, but will focus on a few of the
German Neo-Kantians and their effort to free Kantianism from metaphysics
and therefore from idealism proper.

Idealism in Modern Philosophy. Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Oxford University Press.
© Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848574.003.0009
160    

The decline of interest in idealist metaphysics during late nineteenth- and

early twentieth-century Germany had to do primarily with a certain aver-
sion against what was taken to have been an excessive and extravagant
usurpation of all fields of intellectual discourse by the classical German
philosophers under the pretext of idealism. This line of criticism was initially
voiced most forcefully by influential natural scientists such as Hermann von
Helmholtz (1821–94; see Hatfield 1991; Hyder 2009; Schiemann 2009;
Beiser 2011). But the marginalization of idealism in these years was an
avowed goal of Neo-Kantianism in both its Marburg and Southwest
forms, which are not always so easy to tell apart as this common distinction
might suggest. Although it was a reaction mainly to absolute idealism,
Neo-Kantianism accepted the epistemological outlook of the kind that had
traditionally led to idealism—that is why it was called Neo-Kantianism, after
all. This did not fail to be noticed, and Martin Heidegger’s later version of
realism, in which we are supposed to simply open ourselves up to truth
(aletheia in Heidegger’s preferred Greek terminology) can be interpreted as
a response to the survival of idealism as epistemology in Neo-Kantianism.
This will also lie beyond the bounds of the present narrative (but see
Gordon 2010).
In the immediate aftermath of Hegel, idealist conclusions based on
metaphysical and/or epistemological arguments could still be found in the
works of some of the then better-known philosophers. In particular, the
writings of Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802–72) and Rudolf Hermann
Lotze (1817–81) are documents of a lasting influence of idealistic figures
and practices of thought, as was highlighted in detail by Beiser (2014b).
Trendelenburg’s interpretation of his central concept of motion (Bewegung)
and Lotze’s vindication of his theory of value (Wert) reveal quite tellingly
their efforts to preserve essential idealistic features of both Hegel’s meta-
physics (Trendelenburg) and Kant’s epistemology (Lotze). During this
period there were still active right (old) and left (new) Hegelians who were
either critically or apologetically committed to a broadly Hegelian or ideal-
istic framework in philosophy, as well as others who sympathized with
certain aspects of Hegel’s philosophy but did not identify as either left or
right Hegelians. All these voices had some impact on philosophical discus-
sions mainly about religion, for example, Immanuel Hermann Fichte (the
son of Johann) and Christian Hermann Weisse, and politics, for example,
Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and David Friedrich Strauss. Karl Marx
and his eventual followers were outspoken opponents of an idealism in
Hegel’s sense, but their anti-idealism did not stop them from entertaining
       161

idealist notions of the development of history or the unavoidability of social

progress, with eventually profound consequences for twentieth-century
history.
But the main thrust of Neo-Kantianism at its height was a combination of
the fundamental epistemological motivation for idealism with a rejection of
idealist metaphysics; in accepting material reality and rejecting the reduction
of all reality to anything mental or spiritual, the Neo-Kantians were attempt-
ing to do justice to the extraordinary development of modern science in
Germany (and of course in contemporary Britain as well), while making
room for the irreducibly mental nature of the human experience of the
world. This dualism made itself felt in various ways: in the contrast between
Erklären and Verstehen, or “explanation” and “understanding” in the work
of the Berlin philosopher (and initiator of the Academy edition of the works
of Kant) Wilhelm Dilthey; in the distinction between Geltung and Wert, or
“validity” and “value” in the work of the Southwest Neo-Kantians; and in the
various forms of the distinction between the “natural” and “human”
sciences, distinguished as the “nomothetic” and “idiographic” sciences, or
sciences of lawlike generalization and sciences of individualized description,
of Windelband and Rickert, or as the “natural” and “cultural sciences”
(language, myth, religion, history, art, law, etc.) by Cassirer. The fundamen-
tal distinction beneath all these terms is that of the description of nature,
including the nature of human beings and their behavior, as objects onto-
logically distinct from our representations of them, and the description of
ourselves and our cultural products in terms of our experience of them—but
always with the recognition that in both cases the fundamental forms,
structures, or “logic” of the description, whether nomothetic or idiographic,
for example, is in fact furnished by the human mind. We can turn our
descriptive powers on the world, or on ourselves, but the categories are
always our own. This is of course the fundamental lesson of Kant, thus of
Neo-Kantianism, although the Neo-Kantians rejected the idea that beyond
our description of nature and ourselves within the framework of the cate-
gories it also makes sense to refer to things in themselves as having their own
nature even if we cannot know anything more about them than that they
exist. The concept of the thing in itself would be repurposed by the Neo-
Kantians to mean something more like what we would know if only we ever
had a complete picture of reality, thus something that differs from our
knowledge in completeness and degree but not in kind—something indeed
closer in spirit to Peirce’s conception of what would be known at the end of
inquiry if there were ever such an end, but less close to Royce’s conception of
162    

what is already known not by our minds but by absolute mind. We can also
suggest that the distinction between the use of our own categories to frame
our comprehensive science of nature and our various sciences of our own
experience is also heir to Kant’s distinction between the theoretical and
practical standpoints, although without Kant’s commitment to a radical or
libertarian conception of free will—another metaphysical commitment that
the Neo-Kantians stayed away from, along with any speculation about the
nature of an ontologically independent thing in itself. This is particularly
clear in the Southwest version of Neo-Kantianism, where the subjective or
internal point of view is characterized in terms not only of consciousness but
also of values (Werte), although typically multiple values rather than the
single value of morality or virtue. This connection is hinted at in the title of
Heinrich Rickert’s 1924 book Kant als Philosoph der modernen Kultur
(“Kant as Philosopher of Modern Culture”). One last hint we might throw
out here is that the Neo-Kantian view of the logic of natural science has been
more influential in the history of analytic philosophy than their recognition
of the human or cultural sciences, although some positions in analytical
philosophy, such as non-reductive materialism, the view that all that exists is
ultimately material but that the nature of consciousness and thought cannot
be described in physicalistic terms (e.g., the “anomalous monism” of Donald
Davidson), echo the Neo-Kantian distinction between the natural and the
human sciences.
We can only give some illustrations of these general points here. We can
start with some ideas from Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1914), the elder
statesman of the Southwest school—he was born in Potsdam, studied in
Göttingen with Lotze, and taught briefly at Zürich, none of which were of
course in southwestern Germany, but his main positions were at Freiburg in
Breisgau (1877–82), Strassburg (1882–1903), and then Heidelberg, all of which
were at that time (Strassburg became French again after World War I),
thus the name of the school. At Freiburg he would teach and be succeeded
by Heinrich Rickert, and Edmund Husserl and then Martin Heidegger
would follow there—that would be the end of Southwest Neo-Kantianism.
Windelband perhaps remains best known as a historian of philosophy—his
problem-oriented textbook remained in print for decades—but he published
numerous theoretical and programmatic papers as well, many collected in
Präludien, a volume originally published in 1884 and expanded in further
editions throughout the rest of Windelband’s life. One of Windelband’s
earlier philosophical articles, “Critical or Genetic Method?” from 1883,
starts from a premise that he basically shares with Herman Cohen and the
       163

following Marburg school, and that differentiates Neo-Kantianism from the

first wave of response to Kant that led to idealism, namely the idea of
deducing everything in philosophy from a single principle or concept,
such as the idea of consciousness in Fichte or of being itself in Hegel’s
dialectical logic. This is the view that philosophy must begin from some
norms of thought, perhaps multiple norms for multiple regions of thought,
that cannot themselves be deduced—or what the Marburg school would call
“facts.” Thus Windelband states that “philosophy can use neither of the
deductive nor of the inductive method, as is customary in the other sciences.
The validity of axioms can neither be inferred from anything else nor proven
from the mass of individual cases in which their validity is shown.”
(Windelband 1883, in Luft 2015: 275). Or as Heinrich Rickert would put
it, “without such value-presuppositions it remains impossible to have mod-
ern culture in its totality completely in view and then to understand [it]
scientifically from all sides” (Rickert 1924: 143). Whether in the natural or
the human sciences, you cannot think without some norms for thought
already in place. Second, while norms for thought can be construed teleo-
logically, that is, as guiding the purposive practice of inquiry and having a
goal, of completeness, comprehension, etc., this cannot be understood
metaphysically, as a real object that can someday be encountered, or not:
“If the teleological viewpoint is claimed in this way for critical philosophy,
then it is without any metaphysical hypostasizing of the concept of the end,
and so it is therein that the fundamental difference appears in which
philosophy finds itself to the rest of the sciences,” in which the everyday
distinction between representations and their external objects can be
assumed, as in Kant’s “empirical realism” (Windelband 1883, in Luft
2015: 275).
In his Strassburg presidential address a decade later, “History and Natural
Science,” Windelband introduced his famous distinction between “nomo-
thetic” and “idiographic” sciences. This is not in the first instance a distinc-
tion of scientific subject matters, but of scientific methods: “this
methodological dichotomy classifies only modes of investigation, not the
contents of knowledge itself.” “Nomothetic” sciences proceed by abstraction
and aim at generalizations or laws, “idiographic” sciences aim at descrip-
tions of particulars, or nomothetic sciences at the “form which invariably
remains constant” and idiographic ones at the “unique, immanently defined
content of the real event” (Windelband 1894, in Luft 2015: 291). This
distinction does not line up neatly with a distinction between natural and
human or social sciences, because while much natural science does aim at
164    

discovering laws of nature, natural science also uses discovered laws to

reconstruct individuals, such as the actual geological history of the earth
or the actual course of evolution, while the human sciences use general-
izations about human behavior to make inferences about what must have
happened (or will happen) in particular cases. But abstraction always begins
from perception, and the description of particulars begins from perception
even more so, thus “the predominance of abstraction in natural science
and of perceptuality in history” (Windelband 1894, in Luft 2015: 294),
so all forms of knowledge are rooted not only in norms (or “value-
presuppositions”) but in perception and therefore the human point of
view as well. There is no attempt to reduce all of reality to perception or
other mental states in Windelband or Neo-Kantianism more generally,
but both human perception and human values are the foundations of all
forms of sciences. This is classical idealist epistemology without idealist
metaphysics.
Windelband’s insights would be systematized by Rickert in a series of
lengthy works, each of which grew over multiple editions, including his
habilitation thesis, Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis (“The Object of
Knowledge”), which went through six editions from 1892 to 1928
(Rickert 2018), and his best-known work, Die Grenzen der naturwis-
senschaftlichen Begriffsbildung (“The Limits of Scientific Concept-
Formation”), which went through four editions from 1896 to 1921 and
which was translated (abridged) into English in 1986 (Rickert 1986). The
latter work developed Windelband’s distinction between nomothetic and
idiographic sciences in great detail, and the former work made the Kantian
argument that the standard of truth for judgments could not be some
independent object to which judgments could be compared, but rather
internal standards for judgment—in other words, value-presuppositions—
themselves. The truth-value of judgment rather than any object in an
ordinary sense thus becomes the “object of knowledge,” while the judging
subject rather than an external object becomes the primary focus of
knowledge. But this was not a reduction of reality to mind or subject,
and Rickert continued the Neo-Kantian project of doing epistemology
without metaphysics, and thus of accepting an idealist approach to episte-
mology without commitment to idealist metaphysics. But let’s turn here
from Southwestern to Marburg Neo-Kantianism.
Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), the founder of the school, was one of the
very first unconverted Jewish professors in Germany (although Germany
was not unique in that regard; the first Jewish philosophy professor in Great
       165

Britain, the Australian Samuel Alexander, was also appointed at Manchester

at the same time as Cohen in Marburg). (A comprehensive study of Cohen’s
life and work is Beiser 2018.) He was the son of a cantor from Coswig,
Saxony-Anhalt, only 15 kilometers from the birthplace of Moses
Mendelssohn, the great German-Jewish philosopher of the previous century.
He started rabbinical studies at Breslau at 16, but left that after four years to
pursue secular philosophy at Breslau and Berlin, finally taking his Ph.D. at
Halle. Like an eighteenth-century scholar, he then had to scrape by for some
years as a tutor before becoming a Privatdozent in Marburg in 1873 and
finally a professor in 1876. By then he had already published his first book,
Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (“Kant’s Theory of Experience”) in 1871, his
interpretation of Kant’s first critique, which would be followed by similar
books on Kant’s moral philosophy and the third critique, namely Kants
Begründung der Ethik (“Kant’s Foundation of Ethics,” 1877) and Kants
Begründung der Ästhetik (“Kant’s Foundation of Aesthetics,” 1889). The
last book is striking for its strongly pro-German tone, arguing that only the
German combination of artistic and philosophical accomplishment could
have led to the discipline of aesthetics, and, although a prominent Jewish
intellectual in the Wilhelmine period, Cohen was never a Zionist but
believed that Jews had a proper place in German culture. (He was long
dead by 1933.) His commentaries on Kant were followed by a series of works
in which he developed his own systematic philosophy, more loosely inspired
by Kant, namely the Logik der reinen Erkenntnis of 1902, Ethik des reinen
Willens of 1904, and Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls of 1912 (“Logic of Pure
Knowledge,” “Ethics of Pure Will,” and “Aesthetics of Pure Feeling”). His
final, posthumously published work was Religion der Vernunft aus den
Quellen des Judentums (“Religion of Reason from the Sources of Judaism,”
1919), obviously inspired by Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere
Reason although aimed at rebutting Kant’s Spinoza-inspired argument that
although individual Jews could be as rationally moral as anyone else,
Judaism was not a genuine religion at all, a fortiori not an expression of
pure morality in terms of religious symbols, like Christianity, at least in its
original form, but merely the civil legislation of a long-vanished theocratic
state. In addition to all of this, a crucial work in Cohen’s own philosophical
development and that of the Marburg school generally was his 1883 book
Das Princip der Infinitesimal-Method und seine Geschichte: Ein Kapitel zur
Grundlegung der Erkenntniskritik (“The Principle of the Infinitesimal
Method and its History: A Chapter in the Foundation of Critique of
Knowledge”).
166    

Cohen’s approach to Kant, evident from his first book, was grounded on
the “analytic“ method of the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics more
than the supposedly “synthetic” method of the Critique of Pure Reason: he
saw Kant as analyzing the presuppositions of the Newtonian physics of his
time taken as “facts” rather than attempting to derive the principles of
Newtonian physics from something even more basic, such as the unity of
apperception or the conditions for time-determination. “Since Newton,
there has existed a science built on principles, conscious of its foundations
and presuppositions, and which proceeds according to the mathematical
method” (Cohen 1883, quoted from Luft 2015: 105). This approach to Kant
was and has continued to be widely influential. But Cohen did not think
of the “facts” of Newtonian science as facts about what the individuals
alive at a particular time happened to believe. A general tendency in
Cohen’s appropriation of Kant’s theoretical philosophy and in his own
theory of knowledge—signaled by his phrase “pure knowledge”—is a non-
psychological account of knowledge: the structures or functions limned by
the transcendental philosophy are not to be identified with psychological
tendencies of individuals, because they are to be universally valid. This “anti-
psychologism” was a common feature of the period, evident in the work of
Frege and Husserl as well, and in all, at least in part, a response to John
Stuart Mill’s attempt at an empiricist philosophy of mathematics. Kant
himself had of course insisted that transcendental philosophy could not be
founded in empirical psychology—that was the gist of his critique of Locke
and Hume. But even if one does not start philosophy with the results of
empirical psychology, but starts instead from a priori principles of logic and
mathematics, or from “value-presuppositions” or “facts,” one must attribute
to human beings at least the psychological abilities necessary to experience
and think in accordance with the presuppositions or structures that are
inferred from scientific beliefs accepted as fact. This would be “transcen-
dental psychology”: psychological generalizations as presuppositions rather
than premises of other scientific principles or facts. It is hard to see how to
eliminate this from philosophy.
Cohen’s book on infinitesimals introduced another idea that would be
crucial to Marburg Neo-Kantianism. The ontological status of infinitesimals
had been an issue since the time of Newton and Leibniz, and how to
understand infinites in general had become a central issue in nineteenth-
century mathematics. Cohen’s particular strategy was to start from Kant’s
often ignored second principle of empirical judgment, the “Anticipations of
Perception,” which asserts that “sensation” and the “real that corresponds to
       167

it” always has some degree or “intensive magnitude,” and to argue that we
“are justified in ascribing reality to something when it can be generated or
produced through a continuum of intensive magnitude” (Beiser 2018: 138).
The key move here is to avoid the ontological difficulties that arise in trying
to think of infinitesimals as objects that are always smaller than any object
by instead thinking of them as more like moments in a process of experien-
cing or thinking. Here the philosopher tries to avoid ontology altogether,
although the process of thinking is fundamental. Or, as Cohen puts the point
in more general terms in Kants Theorie der Erfahrung,

Not the stars in the heavens are the objects of [the transcendental] method
teaches us to contemplate, but the astronomical calculations; those facts of
scientific reality are, as it were, the real which is to be accounted for, as
that at which the transcendental gaze is directed. What is the basis of this
reality that is given in such facts? . . . Those facts of law are the objects, not
the star-objects (Cohen 1871: 20).

The objects of knowledge are the processes of thought themselves and their
product, not something standing apart from and over against thought. Not
so different from Rickert’s idea in the Object of Knowledge, Cohen’s thought
thus stands in the tradition of idealism that we saw beginning with Fichte
(although Fichte was not much mentioned throughout the Neo-Kantian
period), and will lead to Cassirer’s most basic philosophical move; also, we
can say, an anti-ontological but epistemologically idealist move, namely,
thinking in terms of functions rather than substances.
We will come back to that shortly, but first one last characteristic idea of
Cohen’s should be mentioned, namely, his reinterpretation of the Kantian
idea of the thing in itself. Like his close contemporary Charles Sanders
Peirce, Cohen did not think of the thing in itself ontologically, as an extant
but otherwise unknowable object that “affects” us with the sensations that
we synthesize, in accordance with the forms of space, time, and the cate-
gories, into our experience of the external and internal worlds. As Beiser has
put it, “Cohen argues that it really makes no sense to talk about a thing-in-
itself as a reality beyond or outside our representations: the objective
correlate and cause of our representations is nothing more than an hypos-
tasis of the concept of an object” (Beiser 2018: 74, emphasis added). This
really implies two things: that we bring the concept of an object, or more
concretely the forms of intuition and conceptualization that we use to think
about objects, to our experience, and that we have the idea of completeness
168    

in our knowledge of objects, although this is not an ontological or as Kant

would say “constitutive” idea but a regulative ideal, always driving us to
gather further data and expand and refine our conceptual and theoretical
comprehension (see Horstmann 2008 b). Cohen’s concept of the thing in
itself is not an ontological concept, not a concept of a non-mental substance
nor a concept of a supermind like Royce’s absolute. It is simply a goal for
human inquiry, or perhaps the ever-moving goalposts for human inquiry.
Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) came from a much wealthier and more
cosmopolitan Jewish family than did Cohen, which cushioned his even
longer wait for a professorship: in spite of a vast array of publications, he
had to wait until 1919, thus age 45, for a professorship at the new university
of Hamburg—which he held only until 1933, when he fled Nazi Germany,
finding refuge first at Oxford, then in Sweden, finally at Yale and Columbia
in the US. He had studied first in Berlin, then with Cohen at Marburg, as
well as with Paul Natorp there. He completed his dissertation on Descartes
in 1899, then included this in his first book on Leibniz’s System in its
Scientific Foundation in 1902. This was followed by the first two volumes
of Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren
Zeit (“The Problem of Knowledge in the Philosophy and Science of Modern
Times”) in 1906 and 1907, a vast study of the influence of the development
of modern science on modern philosophy from the Renaissance through
Kant. (A third volume, on the post-Kantian systems, appeared in 1920, and a
final volume, on “Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel,” was fin-
ished in Sweden but left behind there and not published until 1957, and then
in an English translation, the only volume of the series to have been
translated.) Meanwhile, Cassirer published his first systematic work,
Substanz und Funktion, in 1910, translated into English as Substance and
Function with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in 1921. The term “systematic”
has to be used advisedly, since, in the Marburg tradition, Cassirer thought of
philosophy as reflection upon science and its history, in due course as
reflection upon all the sciences including the “human” or as he preferred
“cultural sciences,” and he almost always presented his views in the form of
commentary on the sciences, in his broad sense, and their history. The
Hamburg years of the 1920s saw the publication of the three volumes of
his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (also eventually followed by a fourth,
posthumous volume), which has been translated into English not once but
twice, and which Cassirer later summarized in English as An Essay on Man
(1944). The turbulent 1930s saw the publication, among other works, of Die
Philosophie der Aufklärung (1932; in English as The Philosophy of the
       169

Enlightenment, 1951), and Determinismus und Indeterminismus in der

modernen Physik (1936; in English as Determinism and Indeterminism in
Modern Physics, 1955), his attempt to incorporate the results of quantum
mechanics into his Neo-Kantian framework. He published a methodological
work on the Logic of the Cultural Sciences in 1942 and his final completed
book, The Myth of the State, his critique of fascism, appeared in 1946, the
year after his death, again in English before German. The recent edition of
his unpublished texts is as large as the edition of his published works, and
much in this vast corpus remains untranslated. (On Cassirer generally, see
Krois 1987; Lofts 2000; Luft 2015; Matherne 2021; and Truwent ed. 2021.
On Cassirer and analytic philosophy, Friedman 2000. On Cassirer and
Heidegger, Gordon 2010 and Truwent 2022. For an extensive bibliography
of Cassirer’s work, see Matherne 2021: 261–5.)
Cassirer remained true to his Marburg heritage in two important regards.
First, although he called his own position “critical idealism,” he attempted to
develop the epistemological insight of idealism, in his eventual terms that we
always experience reality through symbolic forms of our own making, he
abjured idealist metaphysics: the fact of human consciousness and of the
human activities of representation through symbolic forms is ineliminable,
but no reductionist program, whether the materialist program of reducing
thought to physical properties and behavior or the idealist program of
reducing physical objects to thought, is either necessary or possible. And
more generally, philosophy begins with fact, or perhaps better, with facts,
namely, the facts of science, or, better, of the sciences. But, Cassirer empha-
sizes, perhaps even more than Cohen, the facts of science are constantly
evolving, and therefore philosophy, as reflection on those facts, is also
constantly evolving. As he put it already in 1906, “The ‘fact’ of science is
by its nature and surely remains an historically evolving fact.” The “forms of
judgment,” are not, as Kant thought, fixed once and for all, but rather
“signify the unitary and living motives of thinking, that proceed through
all the multiplicity of their particular figurations and are activated in the
creation and formulation of ever new categories” (Erkenntnisproblem 1:
14–15). Cassirer agrees with Kant that at the most basic level, humans
work to comprehend reality in some form of spatial, temporal, explanatory,
and meaningful relations, but does not regard any scheme at the next level of
concreteness, such as Newtonian mechanics or Laplacean determinism, as
fixed once and for all.
Our use of the word “relations” in the last sentence was intentional:
Cassirer’s fundamental philosophical move, explicit in Substance and
170    

Function but underlying all his work, is to advocate, and argue that the
progress of science requires, a transition from an ontology of substances to
one of relations or “functions.” Thought and knowledge do not consist in
discovering and imitating or reproducing the fixed properties of independ-
ently existing objects, but in establishing relations among our experiences by
means of functions that, like mathematical functions that take us from one
value for a variable to others, can carry us from one experience to others in
ways that we find explanatory, predictive, and useful. Cassirer writes,

If we determine the object not as an absolute substance beyond all knowl-

edge, but as the object shaped in progressing experience, we find that there
is no “epistemological gap” to be laboriously spanned by some authorita-
tive decree of thought, but a “transsubjective command.” For this object
may be called “transcendent” from the standpoint of a psychological
individual; from the standpoint of logic and its supreme principles,
nevertheless it is to be characterized as purely “immanent.” It remains
strictly within the sphere, which these principles determine and
limit, especially the universal principles of mathematical and scientific
knowledge. This simple thought alone constitutes the kernel of critical
“idealism.” (Substance and Function 297).

This way of looking at things begins with mathematics: numbers are not
things counted, but the products of counting, not objects but so to speak
objectifications of our process of counting, or organizing, calculating, etc. It
continues on to physical science: particles, forces, waves, etc., are not objects
independent of our increasingly refined equations, but objectifications of
our equations, we might even say the sediments they deposit. And so on for
other forms of thought, for example grammatical categories. As Cassirer
continues,

we do not know “objects” as if they were already independently determined

and given as objects,—but we know objectively, by producing certain
limitations and by fixating certain permanent elements and connections
within the uniform flow of experience. The concept of the object in this
sense constitutes no ultimate limit of knowledge, but is rather the funda-
mental instrument, by which all that has become its permanent expression
is expressed and established. The object marks the logical possession of
knowledge, and not a dark beyond forever removed from knowledge.
(Substance and Function 303)
       171

This approach is clearly inspired by Kant’s famous statement in the

second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that “An object is that in
the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united” (B 137)—
or, objects have been replaced by concepts of object. The difference with
Kant—or at least with how the Kant of the first Critique and the
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), Kant’s attempted
deduction of Newtonian physics, have typically been read, although the
third Critique might suggest otherwise—is that for Cassirer these organiz-
ing concepts are not fixed once and for all, nor is there any reason to
expect that they ever will be, but they are constantly evolving as what Kant
would call our (collective) manifold of intuition, that is, the human
experience in the ordinary sense of that term, is constantly evolving and
expanding.
Cassirer’s development of this position begins with mathematics and
natural, especially physical, science in Das Erkenntnisproblem and
Substance and Function: thus it was well within place by 1910. His
work of the following decades was to extend his approach to the rest
of human experience and thus the rest of the “cultural sciences.” This
was the task of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. There is no room here
to detail his lengthy explorations of myth, religion, language, and history
as forms of human organization of experience, or his account of art, a
projected volume on which never appeared but which he explored in
many articles (see Guyer 2014: 3: 335–51). But a few passages from the
late Essay on Man sum up Cassirer’s program (in the title of the work
and in these passages, of course, Cassirer uses “man” in a non-gendered
sense, but now we would say “human being,” “humankind,” etc.—a
transition that Cassirer does anticipate in the first of these passages
with the word “humanity”):

We cannot define man by any inherent principle which constitutes his

metaphysical essence—nor can we define him by any inborn faculty or
instinct that may be ascertained by empirical observation. Man’s outstand-
ing characteristic, his distinguishing mark, is not his metaphysical or
physical nature—but his work. It is this work, this system of human
activities, which defines and determines the circle of “humanity.”
Language, myth, religion, art, science, history are the constituents, the
various sectors of this circle. A “philosophy of man” would therefore be a
philosophy which would give us insight into the fundamental structure of
each of these activities . . . (Essay on Man 68).
172    

That was what the philosophy of symbolic forms was supposed to do.
And further:

[S]pontaneity and productivity is the very center of all human activities. It

is man’s highest power and it designates at the same time the natural
boundary of our human world. In language, in religion, in art, in science,
man can do no more than to build up his own universe—a symbolic
universe that enables him to understand and interpret, to articulate and
organize, to synthesize and universalize his human experience.
(Essay on Man 220–1)

However, Cassirer’s recognition of the multiplicity of symbolic forms should

not be understood as any form of mere relativism, or as implying that the
several forms are incommensurable with each other and that there can be
arbitrary choice among them. His view is that humans naturally strive for a
unitary and comprehensive understanding of their condition, and that the
mathematical and natural sciences have a central, organizing role to play in
this project. He even says that science is “the last step in man’s mental
development and it may be regarded as the highest and most characteristic
attainment of human culture” (Essay on Man 207). But this does not mean
that everything else must be reduced to or explained in terms of natural
science. It means something more like that our other symbolic forms cannot
ultimately be incompatible with natural science. This might mean that some
form, or some aspects of some forms, such as myth, may indeed be left
behind in human history, but it is not a reductionist program.
Rather, the only thing that is reduced in Cassirer’s philosophy is the
independent, substantial “object,” and it should be clear that his approach
precludes idealist, but also for that matter, materialist metaphysics. There is
no independent object, mental or physical, to which everything else can be
reduced; there are physical but also mental ways of thinking about our
experience. We can certainly organize aspects of our experience in terms
of numbers, particles, waves, etc., without thinking of these as things that
think, although we think about them; but we can equally, and indeed must
organize some of our thinking about our experience in terms of mental
functions such as representation, symbolization, and consciousness itself—
and have no reason not to do so. These mental functions are just as much
part of our experience and thought as the mathematical and physical objects
that we conceive, just as much facts of our experience, and we have no reason
to gainsay this. Of course, Cassirer’s entire program depends on the
       173

assumption of the reality of our own mental activity: “All objective truth, all
certainty about the outer world as well as all certainty about itself that
mankind is able to attain, appears to depend on the function of representa-
tion. Man knows the world and himself only through the image that he
makes of both” (Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 4 [1996]: 93).
Should we worry if contemporary science cannot explain the fact of
consciousness, as many allege, or be driven to any metaphysical form of
idealism or dualism by that? No, for two reasons. One, just suggested, is that
our own consciousness and abilities of representation and symbolism,
whether or not they are shared by any other forms of being with which we
are acquainted, are facts, as much as any other facts, and we cannot
understand even the most stripped down form of physical science except
as a mode of our own representational and symbolic activity. It would
therefore be self-contradictory for physical science to cast doubt on the
reality of thought, even if it cannot explain it. Second, we have no reason,
certainly on Cassirer’s account, to believe that we have approached anything
like the final stage of physical science. At the very least, assertion of phys-
icalism or materialism as a metaphysical doctrine would be premature. But
in Cassirer’s view we have no particular reason to think that we shall ever
have reached the final stage of natural science. Materialism will always be
premature. But then again, there is no reason to insist upon an idealist
reduction of reality to thought. We just have to allow the reality of thought.
 10
Further into the Twentieth Century

The English philosopher Robin George Collingwood (1889–1943) was half a

generation younger than Cassirer, although he died two years before the
latter, his life cut short by ill health. His position is in many ways similar to
that of Cassirer, although he is often identified as a Hegelian idealist. This is
in part because of his association with the Italian Benedetto Croce
(1866–1952), whose book on Giam Battista Vico (Croce 1911) and autobi-
ography (Croce 1918) he translated into English. But although Croce was
something of a Hegelian, and called his philosophy a philosophy of the
spirit, he was also something of a Kantian, and in any case he was not a
metaphysical idealist. He was Kantian in dividing human experience into the
two great categories of the theoretical and the practical, and then dividing
those into the domains of the intuitive or aesthetic and cognitive or con-
ceptual on the one hand, and the economic or prudential and the moral on
the other, and he was Hegelian in his vision of the gradual emergence of
more adequate from less adequate ways of experiencing and thinking in all
these areas. Croce’s systematic philosophy was presented in his Aesthetics
(1902), Logic (1905), Philosophy of the Practical (1909), and Theory and
History of Historiography (1917). But in his book What is Living and What is
Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel (Croce 1907) Croce explicitly abjured any
metaphysical interpretation of “spirit,” identifying his conception of spirit
strictly with human consciousness and making no attempt to reduce
all reality to human consciousness although of course we experience all
of it through the forms of human consciousness, the four forms thereof
on his account. Collingwood was a working archaeologist as well as a
philosopher—he became the leading expert of his time on the physical traces
as well as history of Roman Britain—and he hardly doubted the reality of the
physical world or attempted to reduce it to some form of thought, human or
otherwise. But, like Cassirer with his functions and symbolic forms,
Collingwood held that our experience of reality was never immediate, but
always mediated by what he called “absolute presuppositions,” assumptions
like “Every event has a cause” in the period of classical mechanics, which
frame our inquiries and hypotheses. They are not themselves demonstrable,

Idealism in Modern Philosophy. Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Oxford University Press.
© Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848574.003.0010
      175

but they do evolve; in one case, he argues, the absolute presupposition of the
Newtonian period that everything happens as a result of a cause has been
replaced in modern physics by the absolute presupposition that “everything
happens according to laws” so that “Cases of impact, for example, are no
longer regarded as cases in which the Laws of Motion are rendered inoper-
ative by interference with one body on the part of another; they are regarded
as cases of ‘free’ motion (that is, motion not interfered with) under peculiar
geometrical conditions, a line of some other kind being substituted for the
straight line of Newton’s first law” (Collingwood 1940: 50–1). Another
obvious comparison to Collingwood’s conception of absolute presupposi-
tions is Thomas Kuhn’s conception of paradigms as frameworks within
which scientific inquiry takes place and which are adjusted to accommodate
refractory data, until they can no longer be easily adjusted and are replaced.
Unlike the Neo-Kantians, Collingwood was happy to retain the term
“metaphysics,” but what he meant by it was a “historical science,” the
description and analysis of the absolute presuppositions underlying the
more specific questions asked and answered in the inquiries of particular
times and places (Collingwood 1940: 49). He also calls this “metaphysics
without ontology” (p. 17). So although he accepted the term that Neo-
Kantians like Cassirer rejected, like Cassirer he saw philosophy as essentially
connected to history, and his “systematic” works too always included much
history. A good example of this is his posthumous Idea of Nature
(Collingwood 1945). Along with rejecting ontology, Collingwood rejected
being labeled as either a realist or an idealist. By his rejection of realism, he
meant to reject not only naive realism, the view that we perceive things
exactly as they really are, without any mediation let alone distortion by our
own perceptual and intellectual faculties, but also the kind of Oxford realism
in which he had been educated, most closely associated with John Cook
Wilson (1849–1915), which asserted the reality of propositions independ-
ently of our thought of them—in this regard not so different from the early
views of Moore and Russell, and as plausibly considered a form of Platonic
idealism as of realism, that is, a realism about ideas. Collingwood rejected
the reality of propositions as abstract objects, and instead held that human
thought must be understood in terms of questions and answers: in real
contexts of inquiry, real people ask real questions, including about their
presuppositions, although not about their absolute presuppositions, and
arrive at real answers to them (Collingwood 1939: 44–52). In his
Autobiography, Collingwood tells a charming story of how he arrived at
this view. On his walk in London to and from the Admiralty Intelligence
176    

Division, where he worked during World War I, he would pass the Albert
Memorial. He thought it “loathsome,” but he could not believe that its
designer had set out to create something ugly. So he finally asked himself,
what had the designer (Sir George Gilbert Scott) thought that he was doing:
what problem had he set himself, what question had he asked, to which he
could have thought this was the answer? (Collingwood 1939: 29–43;
Collingwood was only 49 when he wrote this, but he had already suffered
a major stroke and knew he could not count on a long life.) Collingwood’s
approach is not metaphysical idealism, but it does show a strong faith in
human rationality: the presumption is always that human beings have what
they think is a good reason for doing what they do, and the task of an
interlocutor, whether a historian, a philosopher, or another person in
everyday life is to figure out what that reason is. Something like this is
what has come to be called the principle of charity.
In Collingwood’s philosophy of history, he calls this process “re-
enactment” (Collingwood 1946). This might be thought to mean that the
historian is to literally re-create the original event in her mind, but it does
not really mean anything metaphysical like that: it just means that the task of
the historian is to put herself into the shoes of her subject, try to see the
situation as the protagonist did and to figure out why the protagonist
thought that what she did—starting this campaign, instituting this law,
etc.—was the right thing to do—and only then, if at all, to judge how wise
the protagonist was. So Collingwood’s doctrine of historical re-enactment is
not a metaphysical or ontological form of idealism. The closest that
Collingwood seems to come to metaphysical idealism is in the first part of
his Principles of Art (Collingwood 1938) where, in distinguishing (fine) art
from mere craft, he dismisses the creation of a physical medium for a work
of art from the creation of the work itself, a mere engineering puzzle, and
thinks of the latter as complete in the mind or imagination of the artist. But
this is best seen as an extreme way of stating that the artist’s conception of
what she is trying to do—what question she is posing and what she thinks
the answer is—is a necessary condition of making a work of art (an antic-
ipation of Arthur Danto’s later view that a work of art exists only within a
theory of art); in any case, as the book proceeds, Collingwood makes it clear
that the artist’s task is to find a way to express an emotion in a medium
accessible to others (Part Two), and that the artist’s work typically pro-
gresses in interaction with a public and in many cases (e.g., painting,
sculpture) physical medium. As the artist works, she steps back and looks
at what she has done, modifies it in response, and so on until she is satisfied
      177

with the result, at least for the time: it is a physical as well as a mental process,
that takes place in a physical as well as a mental world. Even Collingwood’s
aesthetics is not a metaphysical form of idealism. (On Collingwood gener-
ally, see Mink 1969; Duessen 1981; D’Oro 2002; Dharamsi, D’Oro, and
Leach eds. 2018. On Collingwood’s philosophy of art, see Guyer 2014: 3:
189–233.)
There has been increasing interest in the work of Collingwood in recent
years, going hand in hand with publication of much additional material. But
in his lifetime and mostly since Collingwood has not been regarded as part
of the mainstream of anglophone, analytic philosophy. In that mainstream,
the label of “idealist” has generally been rejected, with horror, although it is
our view that at least the epistemological motivation toward idealism has
continued to be active, even powerful. To trace its subterranean presence of
at least epistemological idealism throughout the remainder of twentieth-
century philosophy would exceed the scope of this book. But we will now
offer some examples of leading twentieth-century philosophers who were
influenced by idealist epistemology, at least at the beginning through trans-
mission from Neo-Kantianism, as well as a few outliers who were actually
willing to identify themselves as metaphysical idealists.
Neo-Kantianism influenced the broader stream of analytic philosophy
most strongly through the work of Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), whose
Logical Construction of the World (1928) analyzes knowledge in terms of
relations constructed on perceived similarities in qualities of objects, thus
taking a subjectivist starting point and then adding constructive activities of
the mind to it—a form of epistemological idealism (see Carus 2007: espe-
cially ch. 4; as well as Friedman 1999 and 2000). Nelson Goodman’s
(1906–98) Structure of Appearance (1951) undertook a similar project.
Subsequent to the Logical Construction, in influential work in the 1930s
(e.g., Carnap 1937), Carnap distinguished between questions “internal” to a
conceptual framework or system and “external” questions about which
conceptual framework to adopt, which can be decided only on pragmatic
or even aesthetic grounds, and this too might be considered a form of
epistemological idealism, although it also demonstrates the interrelation of
epistemologically motivated idealism with pragmatism that we observed
going back to Peirce and Royce. Thomas Kuhn’s (1922–96) famous concep-
tion of “paradigms” of science which are not automatically rejected
because of refractory evidence but are given up only when an alternative
paradigm comes to seem preferable can be seen as being in the
Carnapian tradition (Kuhn 1962), as can Hilary Putnam’s (1926–2016)
178    

“internal realism” of the 1980s (Putnam 1981), and both these positions thus
reflect the continuing influence of the epistemological motivation for ideal-
ism. Even W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000), who was a committed physicalist in
the sense of believing that other sciences are in principle reducible to
physics, nevertheless shared an aspect of idealist epistemology in his con-
ception of the “web of belief,” that is, the idea that knowledge consists in a
body of beliefs, from particular observation statements up to logical princi-
ples, which faces experience only as a whole and which can be modified at
any point within it in order to accommodate refractory experience, as
seems best (see Quine and Ullian 1970). As we have seen, similar ideas
were already to be found in Cassirer’s Substance and Function and
Collingwood’s Essay on Metaphysics. Wilfrid Sellars’s conception of the
“space of reasons,” taken up in Robert Brandom’s inferentialism, also
reflects this impulse, although Sellars always considered himself, like his
father, a scientific realist, and his most explicitly Kantian work, Science and
Metaphysics (1968), gives what might be regarded as a pragmatist rather
than idealist spin to Kant’s phenomena/noumena distinction, interpreting
the noumenal as what would be known if science were complete, an idea
clearly inspired by Charles Sanders Peirce—although also found in
Hermann Cohen and not completely different in spirit from Royce’s idea
that the error of our particular beliefs can be understood only by comparison
to a body of complete and completely true beliefs, not to some independent,
non-belief reality. These are just a few examples of how some of the
most prominent paradigms, to borrow Kuhn’s term, of analytic philosophy
still reflect the impulse to epistemological idealism even though the name
“idealism” was anathematized by Moore, Russell, and the New Realists.
A few anglophone philosophers have been willing to identify themselves
as idealists. Before we continue on to consider some of those who have not
been but have nevertheless been influenced by idealist epistemology, let us
look at a few of those. One mid-twentieth-century philosopher who had no
qualms about identifying himself as an idealist was Brand Blanshard
(1892–1987). The difference between Blanshard and many of the mid-
twentieth-century analytic philosophers is precisely that Blanshard accepted
the assumption that there must be a necessary isomorphism between
knowledge and its object, and so was not content to posit something real
outside of the web of belief or space of reasons, but brought reality into the
realm of thought.
Blanshard was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, then won
a Rhodes scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where his tutor was
      179

H. W. B. Joseph (1867–1943), one of the Oxford realists, but where he also

met Bradley, a lifelong research fellow at Merton. After earning an MA at
Columbia, where he participated in a research project under John Dewey,
and then World War I service in France, he completed his Oxford BA and
then a Ph.D. at Harvard under the supervision of C. I. Lewis (1883–1964)—
so he had a very diverse philosophical education. He taught at Swarthmore
College from 1925 to 1944 and at Yale from 1944 until 1961. Remarkably,
Blanshard was at different points in this career in the same department as
each of the Sellarses—he was an undergraduate at Michigan when the “new
realist” Roy Wood Sellars (1880–1973) was a young teacher there, and was
then the colleague of Wilfrid Sellars (1912–89) during the latter’s tenure at
Yale from 1958 to 1963. There are affinities between his views and theirs,
especially with Wilfrid Sellars’s model of conceptually informed perception;
but they differ decidedly on the issue of idealism versus material realism.
Blanshard’s idealism was at full-strength in the two volumes of The
Nature of Thought (1939), which was dedicated to the Oxford idealists
H. H. Joachim (1868–1938) and E. F. Carritt (1876–1964); many arguments
remained the same but the inference to idealism was somewhat toned-down
in his later trilogy, Reason and Goodness (1961), Reason and Analysis (1962),
and Reason and Belief (1974).
The affinity with Wilfrid Sellars lies in Book I of The Nature of Thought,
“Thought in Perception,” in which Blanshard argues that we always perceive
something “as this rather than that,” thus that “the recognition of the
universal and the placing it in relation to other universals” are always
inseparable from perception (1939: 1: 65). This recognition of the concep-
tually infused character of perception, the position adopted by such
Sellarsians as John McDowell (McDowell 1994) and currently known as
“conceptualism,” does not by itself entail idealism. Rather, Blanshard’s
idealism is on display in volume 2, Book III of his work, “The Movement
of Reflection,” where he offers his theory of truth. Here he argues that
coherence rather than correspondence is not only the “test” but also the
“nature” of truth:

It is hard to see . . . how anyone could consistently take coherence as the test
of truth unless he also took it as a character of reality. (1939: 2: 267)

Here Blanshard evinces the premise that knowledge must be isomorphic

with the known that underlies many arguments for idealism. His next move,
the characterization of the coherence of reality in terms of systematicity,
180    

seems sufficiently abstract to remain neutral about the ontology of reality.

But he also argues that knowledge or thought must be part of a single system
with its object, the world (1939: 2: 292), which, since knowledge is incon-
trovertibly mental, pushes the whole system in that direction. His idealism
becomes even clearer in his defense of the Bradleian doctrine that all
relations are internal relations, and as such necessary relations, so that

[t]hese old sharp lines of mutual exclusion between essence, property,

and accident are like the lines of a surveyor, of great convenience, no
doubt, to ourselves, but misleading when taken as divisions marked out
by nature (1939: 2: 480)

and when he further asserts

(i) that all things are causally related, directly or indirectly; (ii) that being
causally related involves being logically related. (1939: 2: 492)

This makes sense if the character of reality is ultimately either conceptual or

mental in nature, subject to logical relations, and not purely physical, subject
merely to causal relations. Blanshard’s statement that the “old sharp lines”
between essence and accident are not so sharp after all might sound like
W. V. O. Quine’s thesis that there is no sharp distinction between the
analytic and the synthetic (Quine 1951), but while this leads Quine to
treat all our beliefs as if they are synthetic, ultimately dependent upon our
total response (the web of belief) to observation of external reality,
Blanshard’s position is more that all our beliefs are ultimately analytic,
that is, analyses of the conceptual structure of reality, or of reality as a
conceptual structure. Blanshard concludes his lengthy argument with claims
reminiscent of Hegel:

The aim of thought from its very beginning . . . was at understanding. The
ideal of complete understanding would be achieved only when this system
that rendered it necessary was not a system that itself was fragmentary and
contingent, but one that was all-inclusive and so organized internally that
every part was linked to every other by intelligible necessity . . . . If our
account of the end is accepted, it will be found to throw light backward
along the whole course of the inquiry. For it presents the goal which
thought, from its first stirrings in perception, has more or less unknowingly
been seeking, the end potential in every idea, the whole implicitly at work
      181

at every stage in the movement of reflection, exercising its steady pressure

against irrelevant excursions and toward the completion of fragmental
knowledge into stable system. (1939: 2: 518)

Knowledge must be knowledge of necessary connections, and reality itself

must be an intrinsically intelligible system of connections or internal rela-
tions. Blanshard’s combination of the premise of the necessary isomorphism
of knowledge and the known with the doctrine of internal relations exem-
plifies both an epistemological and an ontological argument for idealism.
Blanshard’s view that the goal of thought is in some way already present in
thought is reminiscent of Royce’s conception of the absolute as well.
Since the work of Blanshard two further anglophone philosophers have
attempted an explicit defense of idealism. Both John Foster (1941–2009), in
The Case for Idealism (1982) and Timothy L. S. Sprigge (1932–2007) in The
Vindication of Absolute Idealism (1983) constructed defenses of what Foster
defined by the three theses

(1) Ultimate contingent reality is wholly mental. (2) Ultimate contingent

reality is wholly non-physical. (3) The physical world is the logical product
of facts about human sense-experience (Foster 1982: 3)

and what Sprigge called “panpsychism.” In both cases their defenses were
based on the epistemological premise that the object of perception is fully
present in the act of perception; Sprigge added the argument that we must
presuppose some noumenal ground for our phenomenal objects; but unlike
Kant, who after he stripped things in themselves of their spatiality and/or
temporality, insisted that we remain otherwise agnostic about their nature,
Sprigge argued for

the noumenal backing or “in itself” of the physical by saying that it consists
in innumerable mutually interacting centres of experience, or, what comes
to the same, of pulses and flows of experience. (Sprigge 1983: 85)

In other words, the noumenal “backing” of the phenomenal is nothing but

the sum total of actual and possible human experience, which Sprigge
considers, in terms going back to Bradley, a “concrete universal.” One
could argue that this confuses the sum total of experience or thought
about reality with reality itself, but Sprigge rejects that kind of distinction
from the beginning of his argument; basically, he holds all knowledge to be
182    

knowledge by acquaintance, and what we have when we subsume any

experience under a concept or universal is an immediate relation to a part
of a concrete universal—so all of reality is itself mental in nature.
These arguments have remained outliers, for analytical philosophy has
been overwhelmingly influenced by the paradigm of the natural sciences,
and often committed to some form of naturalism. Or so it would seem;
however, as the examples of Green and Royce as well as earlier idealists such
as Schelling make clear, there is no necessary incompatibility between
idealism and some forms of naturalism. In particular, naturalism, especially
broadly understood as a methodology rather than ontology, is not automat-
ically committed to the kinds of realism, especially the naive realism of
assuming that our representations reproduce the physical constitution of
external objects, that were initially opposed to idealism. One might even get
the impression that in contemporary scientifically oriented philosophy
idealism is no longer considered a threat. The way in which in current
discussions in the philosophy of mind some idealistic conceptions under
the general name of “Panpsychism,” already used by Sprigge, are taken
seriously (Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers) seems to be a good indicator
of this tendency.
In so-called “continental” philosophy, we might suggest, the main alter-
native to the idealism of the nineteenth century and lingering tendencies to
idealism in both Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology has not
been any straightforward form of realism, but rather the “life philosophy”
(Lebensphilosophie) pioneered by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1916), then
extensively developed by Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and, without
Heidegger’s political baggage, by the French philosopher Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1908–61). The central idea of this approach to philosophy
is that the starting point of thought and knowledge is neither anything
“subjective” like sense-data or ideas nor anything simply objective like the
objects of science, but the lived experience of “being-in-the-world,” from
which both the “subjective” such as sense-data and the “objective” such as
objects theorized by science are abstractions or constructions made for
specific purposes, but which should not be reified in any way that creates a
problem of getting from one side to the other, let alone any possibility of
reducing one side to the other and thus ending up with a choice between
idealism and realism. Apart from all issues of style, and whether this
has been clear to the two parties or not, perhaps the deepest reason for
the ongoing divide between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy is the
ongoing tension between the impulse to epistemological idealism and the
      183

attraction of the idea that “being-in-the-world” precedes the very distinction

between subjective and objective. But then again, this underlying idea of the
Heideggerian approach to philosophy may already be suggested in the work
of Schelling, so perhaps the fundamental debate within twentieth-century
philosophy has taken place within a framework itself inspired by a form
of idealism, namely phenomenology. But this would be a long story, for
another day.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, idealism, under-
stood as a philosophical program, may be sharing the fate of many other
projects in the history of modern philosophy. Originally conceived in the
middle of the eighteenth century as a real alternative to materialistic and
naturalistic perspectives, it may now become sublated and integrated into
views about the nature of reality that ignore metaphysical oppositions or
epistemological questions connected with the assumption of the priority of
mind over matter or the other way round. Instead the focus may be shifting
to establishing a “neutral” view according to which “anything goes” (Paul
Feyerabend) as long as it does not contradict or at least is not incompatible
with our favored metaphysical, epistemological, and scientific (both natural
and social) methods and practices.
Epistemological and metaphysical theories that involve an explicit or
implicit stance toward idealism in the twentieth century as discussed so far
can lead to the impression that at least in the English-speaking regions of
Western civilization idealism became a matter of concern in roughly the
same manner it was of interest in the pre-Kantian era. This leap back in time
is indicated quite bluntly by the spiritualistic undertones from Bradley’s,
McTaggart’s, and Royce’s defenses of idealism up to Blanshard’s attempt of a
vindication, defenses that are strongly reminiscent of programs in the wake
of Berkeley’s immaterialism. This retrospective attitude also is suggested by
another characteristic feature of the twentieth-century positions to which we
have drawn attention. This feature shows up in the persistent habit, shared
not only by the self-confessed idealists but also by their modern opponents,
whether they identify themselves as realists, materialists, or naturalists (from
Moore and Russell to Carnap and Quine and even the Neo-Kantians), of
dealing with epistemological and metaphysical questions within a frame-
work that holds on to a traditional, common-sensical understanding of the
world. Within this framework we are asked to think of reality as consisting
of both mind-endowed subjects and physical, bodily objects. They are both
conceived of as self-standing, individual substantial items paradigmatically
exemplified by conscious human beings on the one hand and by
184    

appropriately sized natural bodies like trees or stars or atoms on the other,
standing in various physical (e.g., spatial, temporal, causal) and mental (e.g.,
conceptual, judgmental, inferential) relations. By not questioning this
framework, the discussion of the ultimate constitution of reality and of
our knowledge of it was thus restricted to an exchange of opinions and
arguments as to what kind of substance, physical or mental, is better suited
to do justice to our most cherished epistemological and metaphysical beliefs
regarding the circumference and the limits of what we know and what we
cannot know about the world. As we have been suggesting, this discussion
led to an impasse because it turned out that traces of epistemological
idealism could be found even in the supposedly realistic, materialistic,
and/or naturalistic positions, just as well as aspects of realism and natural-
ism remained in philosophies that explicitly endorse metaphysical idealism
(again, think of Schelling, Green, and Royce).
However, the twentieth century was not a period only of regression in
metaphysics and epistemology to pre-Kantian idealism. One can also
observe that especially in the non-English-speaking, “continental” world a
renewed interest in what could be called a reshaping of idealistic conceptions
under different brand names like Vitalism, Phenomenology, Existentialism
took place. But these tendencies emerged not only on the “Continent.” They
also appeared in Anglo-American contexts around the second half of the last
century. Although it is difficult to tell what exactly initiated this change in
attitude, two motives are obvious: the acknowledgment of the constitutive
function of a social dimension not only in all our practical dealings with
reality but also in our theoretical approach to the world, and the move away
from talk about the mental to a language that favors terms like “the
conceptual” or “conceptuality” instead. A reason for this shift might have
been that talk about the conceptual is less prone to give rise to psychological
connotations that are invariably connected with a mentalistic vocabulary
(and were already rejected by nineteenth-century philosophers like Frege,
Husserl, and Cohen) and because of a closer affinity to linguistic practices
that are supposed to govern our conceptual activities. Looking at Anglo-
American philosophy of the last seventy years or so against the background
of a new orientation fueled by motivations like the two mentioned, it is not
that surprising that elements of Hegel’s idealism, especially his conceptual
realism connected with his social conception of what he calls “Spirit,”
became of interest again. At any rate, with the exception of Wittgenstein
all of the better-known representatives of positions that integrate concep-
tuality and sociality into their epistemological and metaphysical teachings
      185

(e.g., Sellars, McDowell, Brandom) are quite explicit about a Hegelian

influence on their theories. This influence, however, almost never shows
up directly but is mediated by references to (American) forerunners such
as George Herbert Mead, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and
John Dewey.
This most recent phase of the history of modern Western, in particular
Anglo-American, philosophy might also be described as a renewed attempt
to answer questions about what grounds knowledge on the basis of the
assumption that the constitution of knowledge and the constitution of the
world are processes of reciprocal dependence: knowledge-claims are taken
to depend on the world while at the same time what counts as the world is
dependent on what is taken to be knowable. If mind-dependence of the
world is the distinguishing mark of idealistic theories and the world-
dependence of the mind is the peculiar characteristic of the alternative
positions (realism, materialism, naturalism), then one can expect these
new attempts to find out the conditions of knowledge to reject both una-
dulterated idealism and its unmitigated alternative. And so they do. To think
of these approaches to epistemological questions in terms of the time-
honored opposition between idealism and realism has become obsolete.
Thus in looking at what has been suggested in the last few decades the
question cannot be whether or not the respective proposals match patterns
of thinking representative of traditional idealism or realism. Rather one can
look for traces of idealistic motives in their philosophical viewpoints.
If one takes this limited objective as a guideline, then three of the more
recent ventures into broadly epistemological issues are of special interest.
These are the remarks of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), published
posthumously under the title On Certainty, the position that Wilfrid
Sellars (1912–89) endorses in his Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,
and the stance that John McDowell (1942–) takes up in his Mind and World.
They are of special interest because although their authors do not explicitly
endorse idealism, they tend toward conclusions that seem to make idealistic
elements in epistemology unavoidable.
Wittgenstein’s engagement with questions concerning the conditions of
knowledge in the widest possible sense is documented most tellingly in his
remarks collected in On Certainty (1969). They were apparently sparked by
a renewed interest in G. E. Moore’s discussion of skeptical challenges to the
possibility of knowledge. In two influential papers, “A Defense of Common-
Sense” (1925) and “Proof of an External World” (1939), Moore had pre-
sented arguments devised to refute philosophical skepticism. Wittgenstein,
186    

it seems, felt induced by Moore’s considerations to explore the space of

conceivable answers to questions as to the mostly hidden implications and
presuppositions involved in the use of the verb “to know” (wissen) in
different settings ranging from philosophical and mathematical via scientific
and legal to everyday contexts. He pursued this task not just in order to
come to grips with skeptical challenges in the narrow sense (i.e., with
problems like “is there an external world? can I know that I have two
hands? can I distinguish between dream and reality?”) but to delve into
the vast terrain of what might be considered to be reasonable bases for
justifying knowledge-claims in different circumstances. In these late remarks
Wittgenstein sticks to his peculiar manner of discussing philosophical topics
without taking up a clear-cut question or providing a straightforward
answer. Instead he tries to find a way to formulate the questions he is
interested in that already points to the obstacles to answering them. The
prevalent scheme of his notes could be characterized as staging an interplay
between two rhetorical acts, first describing a scenario in which a certain
manner of speaking seems to make sense and then surveying what has to be
the case if the manner of speaking under scrutiny were indeed to make sense
in the envisioned situation. Suggestive instances of this rhetorical practice
are his treatment of the avowal “I am in England” (§§419ff.), his discussion
of Moore’s example that “he knows that the earth existed long before his
birth” (§§84ff. and elsewhere), and especially his remarks as to the appro-
priateness or the inappropriateness of the use of the expression “I know . . .”
(e.g., §§553ff. passim) in different circumstances. A remark that he incorpo-
rates in his notes could be read as indicating that the methodological reason
for relying on this rhetorical device has to do with his personal attitude
toward topics in philosophy, an attitude that he compares to a stance toward
a painting. “It is,” Wittgenstein writes, “as if I were to see a painting (say a
painted stage-set) and recognize what it represents from a long way off at
once and without the slightest doubt. But now I step nearer: and then I see a
lot of patches of different colours, which are all highly ambiguous and do not
provide any certainty whatever” (§481). In Wittgenstein’s eyes, the some-
what opaque fact of the simultaneous presence of a specious certainty and a
manifest ambiguity in philosophical claims is the main obstacle to the
attempt to implement an assertive mode of reasoning, in the spirit of a
cast-iron proof, as the proper style in philosophy. The best that can be
achieved in philosophy is something else which, he thinks, his remarks
reveal in a paradigmatic way. One can open up different ways of looking
at phenomena and become attentive to the twists and turns connected with
      187

focusing on them. Wittgenstein expresses this sentiment nicely by resorting

to a metaphor: “I believe it might interest a philosopher, one who can think
himself, to read my notes. For even if I have hit the mark only rarely, he
would recognize what targets I have been ceaselessly aiming at” (§387).
Against the background of this attitude toward philosophical problems it
should not be expected that Wittgenstein would provide definite answers to
anyone who decided to accompany him on his bumpy road. Rather, his
analyses are meant to induce a thoughtful person to pursue lines of thought
that point to conceptual spaces within which resources might be found that
could lead either to understanding why the problem at hand has become a
problem or to its dissolution. The directions to which he points in the case of
the problem of knowledge can be characterized by three -isms, namely
foundationalism, contextualism, and, somewhat awkwardly, social empiri-
cism. In each of these -isms, in their Wittgensteinian version, one might
detect idealistic traces.
At the center of his discussion of the conditions of knowledge lies what is
called here Wittgenstein’s foundationalism, that is, his belief that every
knowledge-claim is grounded in a Weltbild, a “picture of the world.” By a
knowledge-claim he means a speech act that expresses a conviction that
is based on a reason or a ground (cf. §§91, 243). A Weltbild “is the
inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false”
(§94), “it is the substratum of all my enquiring and asserting” (§162, cf.
§167; Wittgenstein’s formulations here are remarkably reminiscent of
Collingwood’s conception of absolute presuppositions, which play precisely
this role). According to Wittgenstein there are many ways in which a
knowledge-claim is anchored in whatever it is that counts as a Weltbild.
Judging from his examples, these ways include, for instance, perception,
logical inference, hearsay, and everything else that seems to be a legitimate
means of justifying a claim (memories, learning, etc.). What is important for
him to emphasize is that a knowledge-claim is not just vague but in a certain
sense meaningless if it is not founded in a Weltbild, a thesis that entails
foundationalism.
Three questions unfold immediately: (1) What exactly does a Weltbild
consist in? (2) How does the anchoring of a claim in a Weltbild take place?
And (3) what is the truth-status of a Weltbild (is it itself right or true, or
wrong or false)? The short answer to (1) is that a Weltbild in its broadest
meaning is determined by what he also calls “our whole system of evidence”
(§185, cf. §247), where however exactly what is included in this system
remains somewhat vague. All that he is prepared to imply, to infer
188    

from his examples, is that whatever counts as an item that is beyond

reasonable doubt, whether it is a proposition, a fundamental attitude
(Grundanschauung) (cf. §238), a fact, an event, could be a member of this
system. The justification of the evidence for both the item and the system
does not consist in an apparent insight into the truth of either of them but in
our acting accordingly: “Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence,
comes to an end;—but the end is not certain propositions’ striking us
immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting,
which lies at the bottom of the language-game” (§204). What counts as an
item beyond reasonable doubt is a flexible matter and depends on circum-
stances. Although a Weltbild is presumably meant to be a system that is
internally coherent and hence void of internal tensions, it seems to be open
to adjustments that are made necessary or have become unavoidable because
of changes in individual outlooks based on experiences and cultural and
historical developments that somehow shatter hitherto sacrosanct beliefs
and convictions. (Again, Weltbilder can change under historical pressure as
Collingwood’s absolute presuppositions and Kuhn’s paradigms do.) What
Wittgenstein has in mind as to how these experiential and social processes
take place everyone is free to guess. It is within this framework that a
Weltbild is conceived of by Wittgenstein. The even shorter answer to (2) is
that the anchoring, the grounding of a knowledge claim in a Weltbild does
not seem to be a special act performed by the knower. It consists rather in a
disposition not to give credence to anything that could count as a disproof of
the claim in question (cf. §245). This disposition is triggered by all the
available, appropriate ways of grounding, of anchoring a claim, perhaps
above all by direct experience (perception, memory, hearsay) (cf. §66) but
also by what has been picked up in standard learning processes (through
teachers, parents, or other authorities) (cf. §§93, 159ff.). The leading ideas to
which Wittgenstein wants to draw attention are that knowledge-claims are
connected with the disposition to believe certain things unconditionally and
that any references to an objective fact that would function as the provider of
justification by correspondence are purely circumstantial (cf. §§191, 203).
Finally, the shortest answer can be given to (3). The question as to the truth-
status of a Weltbild is ill-conceived because truth-values are assigned to the
propositions that a knowledge-claim contains on the basis of their depend-
ence on a Weltbild. (Unlike Collingwood, Wittgenstein continues to speak of
propositions.) One and the same knowledge-claim can be true in one picture
of the world but not in another. The picture of the world itself is neither true
nor false. It is only within its boundaries that the distinction between
      189

true and false can be made. This, at least, indicates the direction in which
Wittgenstein’s reflections tend to move (cf. §§94, 162).
These foundational tendencies in Wittgenstein’s considerations already
provide a lot of material that from an idealistic point of view could be seen as
highly reminiscent of idealist epistemology if not ontology, as our compar-
isons with Collingwood already suggest. After all, already the mental con-
notations to which the very concept of a Weltbild is prone to give rise and
the grounding function that is attributed to it can easily remind not only the
idealist of traditional tendencies in idealistic theories to favor mind-
dependence of the world in one form or another in the attempt to account
for the possibility of knowledge. Idealistic tendencies could also be detected
in what is called here Wittgenstein’s contextualism, that is, his view that a
Weltbild is not a stable, unchanging arrangement of a number of different
beliefs, convictions, attitudes, and dispositions but forms a coherent system
that varies in accordance with circumstances. Rather than being conceived
of as the expression of a collection of eternal truths, it has to be characterized
as only the provider of an ever-changing context within which a knowledge-
claim can be evaluated as true, false, or meaningless. Wittgenstein does not
clearly explain how such Weltbilder understood in this contextual sense
come about and what makes them change. The leading idea seems to be that
a Weltbild can be assessed from at least two very different perspectives, from
a personal, subjective stance and a non-personal, objective one. In both cases
it proves to be a flexible, almost amorphous structure that is shaped by and
in accordance with many factors ranging from experiences via learning
processes to social and cultural circumstances. Looked at from a personal
point of view a Weltbild is the by and large obscure and rarely directly
available background against which a person forms her judgments about
what is the case or not. What is contained in this background, the beliefs,
convictions, and attitudes to which the subject is ultimately committed, is
something of which that subject is not immediately aware but what it has to
find out by paying attention to what in the end it is unable and unwilling to
put into question (cf. §512). In what exactly these background assumptions
consist seems to be impossible to tell in advance because they are revealed in
processes the significance of which depends largely on the context in which a
knowledge-claim is made. It is easy to imagine situations in which a person
is surprised about what turns out to be an item she cannot but hold on to
unshakably. This is so because our life is embedded in our Weltbild, “it is
there—like our life” (§559). In the case of a non-personal, objective per-
spective a Weltbild understood as the totality of beliefs and attitudes that
190    

cannot be given up though they are not based on grounds (cf. §§410f.) is
subject to random and incidental changes because of its dependence-
relation to historical, cultural, and other social contexts. Which set of
items the participants of a specific culture in a particular historical situation
are prepared to defend by all means, that is, which Weltbild will be dominant
at a certain time, will be influenced by many factors. Some have to do with
the varying degrees in which the members of a life-form take science,
religion and other ideological institutions to provide justifying reasons for
knowledge-claims. However, most of these factors will determine what sort
of experience can count as evidence in what context. Consequently, a
Weltbild understood as a system of evidence is dependent again on processes
and practices that are steadily in flux and hence cannot be established as a
stable context for once and for all (cf. §§105, 136, 140, 350). The picture that
emerges is that epistemically accessible reality, that is, reality understood as
the context in which knowledge-claims can be substantiated, turns out to be
what a knower cannot but help to take for granted (cf. §87). Traces of
idealism can easily be found in this line of reasoning. In particular, the
assumption that knowledge-claims are not grounded in hard facts but find
their legitimation in a somewhat opaque web of beliefs (cf. §225) and
attitudes that ultimately reflects subjective evidences can be seen as pointing
in this direction. The expression “web of belief” of course reminds us of
Quine; at the same time, it might be worth mentioning that if one is willing
to share the perspective that this Wittgensteinian line of thought opens up
then Michel Foucault’s research program for an Archaeology of Knowledge
(1969) also emerges at the horizon: in order to find out what a Weltbild
consists in, how it changes and eventually gives rise to a new one, one has to
look at statements (énoncées) and the changing conditions of their mean-
ingful use in a manner that is informed by how an archaeologist tackles her
pre-historic findings. The line between “analytic” and “continental” philos-
ophy is not always as sharp as is sometimes thought.
What could be called idealistic tendencies that emphasize the mind-
dependence of what we take to be reality also play a major role in what is
called here, perhaps somewhat uncomfortably, Wittgenstein’s social empir-
icism. What is meant by this term is the view that he discusses repeatedly in
On Certainty that the respective Weltbilder are constituted by what is
revealed through or becomes manifest in what is accepted in a given social
context as empirical evidence on which a knowledge-claim is based. Such a
position is a version of empiricism because it gives precedence to experience
as a source of evidence. It is a social empiricism in that it takes what counts
      191

as empirical evidence to be a social phenomenon, and it expresses an

idealistic sentiment since it conceives of social constellations as being
dependent on decisions, habits, and other mental attitudes of individuals
or groups of individuals. In other words, what is meant by social empiricism
here is a view operating on the assumption that a Weltbild, a picture of the
world, is a social construction that is reflected in the attitude of individuals
toward what they agree to acknowledge as empirical evidence or as reasons.
Wittgenstein arrives at this view by reconsidering the question about the
alleged grounding function of empirical evidence in the process of the
justification of knowledge-claims.
An attempt to reconstruct his reflections on this topic can start from two
assumptions that he endorses, first that a knowledge-claim apparently needs
to be defended or justified by giving reasons (cf. e.g., §§350, 438, 441, 563
passim), and second that what counts as a reason depends on the context
provided by the Weltbild (cf. e.g., §§465–8, 482–5, 516). With these two
assumptions in the background Wittgenstein tries to find out to what degree
and in what sense empirical evidence or experience has justifying power and
hence can function as a reason (cf. §§83f., 519). He distinguishes between
two kinds of empirical evidence expressed in empirical propositions
(Erfahrungssätze), those that can and those that cannot be doubted (cf.
§§96f., 136, 167, 213). Interestingly, he wants the distinction between what
can and what cannot be doubted to be drawn within the realm of what can
count as empirical evidence (cf. §§574f.). This suggests that he does not
think of this division primarily, if at all, as a criterion in order to distinguish
between empirical and, for example, a priori or logical and mathematical
propositions. As to empirical propositions, it seems to be obvious that in
principle every knowledge-claim that is based on empirical evidence and
thus appeals to experience can be doubted. Yet Wittgenstein denies this view
on the basis of an examination of normal practices for justifying knowledge-
claims. According to him, in a normal process of justification the challenge
expressed by a doubt will be met by referring to another piece of empirical
evidence that can function as a reason for holding the claim in question.
This asking for and giving reasons can go on for quite some time. However,
at some point or other this game will come to an end because the defender of
the knowledge-claim will refuse to give further corroborating reasons. (In
Collingwood’s terms, asking and answering questions comes to a stop at the
level of absolute presuppositions.) Instead, they will declare something like:
“if I were to allow a doubt against this particular piece of empirical evidence
I brought forward just now then for me nothing would be certain anymore,
192    

I would have to put my entire system of beliefs into question. This piece of
evidence is for me beyond doubt and I hold fast to it under all circum-
stances” (cf. e.g., §§69–75, 245–8, 279). It is at this point in the process of
defending a knowledge-claim against skeptical doubts that the knower
singles out an item of empirical evidence that cannot be doubted because
she is not willing or prepared to do so. Hence there are empirical proposi-
tions that are taken to be certain although there is no justifying reason
available to the person who relies on them (cf. §§111f., 401). The sum
total of these indisputable propositions make up the Weltbild of a person,
the background against which everything else is affirmed or denied
(cf. §§105, 514).
The outcome of Wittgenstein’s analysis of this process is not just the
obvious contention that each holder of a knowledge-claim, each individual
knower, is equipped with a collection of empirical propositions that for her
individually are indubitable pieces of empirical evidence, or that each person
has their own private Weltbild. His main objective seems to have been more
ambitious and leads again to the question of the constitution of Weltbilder.
From what has been outlined so far, it is safe to say that each individual lives
within a personal Weltbild that functions as the foundation of her
knowledge-claims. Wittgenstein complements this finding with suggestions
about the motives a person might have for sticking to certain propositions
unconditionally. His remarks on this point hint at an attempt to integrate
social aspects into his views on Weltbild-constitution. He very likely holds
that only those propositions are convincing candidates for incontestable
beliefs of a person and hence indicative of their Weltbild that she considers
to be shared by and with others (cf. §§144, 280ff.).
This stance fits well into Wittgenstein’s general outlook regarding the
interplay between a Weltbild and a knowledge-claim. He seems to reckon
that for an ordinary knowledge-claim to become controversial there always
has to be some community or other in which the claim is put forward
(cf. §298). Otherwise it could not be challenged. Thus the task of defending
a claim by relying on empirical evidence expressed in empirical propositions
already appeals to social constellations. Furthermore, for a person even to
assume of an empirical proposition that it cannot but be true presupposes
that there is a publicly accessible source for this conviction. A person who
sticks unconditionally to some conviction or other must be prepared to
answer questions about the origin and the source of this conviction not just
to others but also to herself. She might point to a teacher, to something she
has read in a scientific book, or even to God as a source that for her
      193

guarantees the faithfulness of the proposition in question. This means that

in a situation in which recourse to indubitable propositions is involved a
communal aspect is present right from the outset. The communities that
play a role in these examinations function as appropriate providers of shared
pictures of the world by establishing the framework within which what can
be doubted and what not has to be settled (cf. §361). These communities
vary according to circumstances. In mathematical contexts the relevant
community is presumably the community of mathematicians, in scientific
contexts the scientific community, and in matters of religion the community
of religious people (although of course the last of these communities is
typically more fractured than the former, or consists of multiple commu-
nities rather than a single one). These communities demarcate domains
within which a sensible discourse is to be established by somehow providing
criteria about what is reasonable or not in a given social context (cf. §336).
However, they are not rigid frameworks that are carved in stone. They can
and will vary internally because they are subject to change (cf. §256). What
the community of, for example, astronomers is currently committed to, that
is, what its members share as their astronomical Weltbild at the present
point in time, is different from what they shared in the Ptolemaic era. The
same is true of all other communities. In the end, they all provide pictures of
the world that are open to modifications, adjustments, and even amend-
ments, depending on what their members are willing to accept as empirical
evidence (cf. §378).
This assessment has far-reaching and radical consequences, for it leads to
a view according to which empirical evidence and experience turn out to be
social phenomena (cf. §144) that are based on a shared picture of the world.
The view endorsed is that there is just shared experience of and in a shared
world, and only within the parameters of what can be shared do questions
concerning knowledge and reality make sense. For an idealist this outcome
might confirm the mindedness of reality, although the mind envisioned here
is not the individual mind but a social universal that finds its expression in a
multitude of ever-changing communities (what Croce called spirit, although
he thought that Hegel meant something more by that term). For a realist,
this result might be acceptable either because it seems to acknowledge the
independence of reality from any acts of individual knowers although the
independence appealed to here is not meant to implicitly grant priority to
matter over mind. It is in virtue of this tolerance toward both interpreta-
tions, the idealistic and the realistic one, that Wittgenstein’s position can
rightly be regarded as trying to establish a point of view that goes beyond
194    

traditional dualisms in metaphysics. But that is what many others who were
willing to call themselves idealists in some sense, for example, “critical
idealists,” had been doing since the time of Neo-Kantianism, if not since
the period of so-called German Idealism itself.
A way of tackling problems in epistemology and metaphysics that can
also be seen as having idealistic undertones has been pursued especially in
the American philosophical scene in the second half of the twentieth
century. Prominent representatives of these new approaches include
Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell. They come to mind most readily
because they explicitly connect their theories with elements of what they
take to be philosophical messages and insights of major positions in classical
German philosophy, especially of Kant’s epistemology (Sellars) and Hegel’s
metaphysics (McDowell). This does not mean that they deal with these
classical views in a literal sense, although they have both done detailed
interpretative work on Kant and/or Hegel. Rather, within their own philo-
sophical projects they refer to these historical predecessors to a certain
extent in order to pay homage to the influence of Kant’s and Hegel’s ideas
on their own themes and topics.
At first sight it may seem far-fetched to detect idealist motives in the
philosophical work of Sellars. In his “Autobiographical Reflections” he states
as his goal in philosophy “to formulate a scientifically oriented, naturalistic
realism which would ‘save the appearances’ ” (289), a statement that led his
one-time student Willem deVries to “call his philosophy of science a ‘prag-
matic realism’ because he insists on our commitment to the reality of the
objects to be posited by Peircean ideal science, while explicating most of the
structural features of science in terms of the pragmatic force of their
linguistic expression” (deVries 2021). Talk about realism, whether natural-
istic or pragmatic, seems antithetical to idealistic tendencies. However, when
we take into account the results and implications of Sellars’s famous criti-
cism of what he calls the “Myth of the Given” and his equally renowned
distinction between what he calls the manifest and the scientific image of
man-in-the-world a different picture emerges, a picture that can indeed raise
idealistic sentiments, especially if one keeps in mind what was emphasized
in the foregoing chapters that since the days of Kant and Hegel the priority
of the conceptual has become a distinguishing mark of positions that can be
considered idealist at least epistemologically if not metaphysically.
The topic of the priority of the conceptual over and against the non-
conceptual in contexts in which knowledge-claims are at stake plays a
central role in Sellars’s discussion of the shortcomings of sense-datum
      195

theories elaborated in his celebrated essay “Empiricism and the Philosophy

of Mind” (originally published in 1956, here cited in the 1997 book version
edited by Robert Brandom). Sense-datum theories are of interest for him not
for their own sake but as examples of a certain type of empiricist philosophy
based on the belief that knowledge is founded in something that is imme-
diately or non-inferentially given. Thus the main object of Sellars’s attack is
not to point to inconsistencies or other defects connected with sense-datum
discourse alone, rather he is concerned with what he takes to be a funda-
mental mistake of all traditional empiricist theories, namely falling victim in
one way or the other to “the Myth of the Given” when it comes to the
foundation of knowledge. He characterizes this myth as follows:

The idea that observation “strictly and properly so-called” is constituted by

certain self-authenticating nonverbal episodes, the authority of which is
transmitted to verbal and quasi-verbal performances when these perfor-
mances are made “in conformity with the semantical rules of the language”
is . . . the heart of the Myth of the Given. For the given, in epistemological
tradition, is what is taken by these self-authenticating episodes. These
“takings” are, so to speak, the unmoved movers of empirical knowledge,
the “knowings in presence” which are presupposed by all other knowledge,
both the knowledge of general truths and the knowledge “in absence” of
other particular matters of fact. Such is the framework in which traditional
empiricism makes its characteristic claim that the perceptually given is the
foundation of empirical knowledge. (Sellars 1997 §38)

Sellars rejects this framework by insisting that epistemic facts like empirical
knowledge-claims cannot be “analyzed without remainder” (§5) into non-
epistemic facts consisting of inner episodes of sensations and impressions
that can have a founding function. This is by no means meant to imply that
he rejects the idea of a foundation of knowledge tout court. On the contrary,
empirical knowledge claims are in one way or another causally related to
what is “out there” (cf. Sellars 1997: §29), thus having their roots in a
subject-independent reality. What has to be given up is, according to
Sellars, the misguided belief that “the fundamental associative tie between
language and the world must be between words and ‘immediate experi-
ences’ ” (ibid.) in the form of inner episodes. Sellars sketches out how this
belief comes about by providing a mythological story of a prehistoric
philosophical ancestor named Jones who somehow manages to develop
the idea of inner episodes out of an original interpretation of “intelligent
196    

nonhabitual behavior” of others (Sellars 1997: §56, cf. §46), an interpretation

that leads to the concept of immediate experience. According to Sellars, it is
along the lines of such a story that one can understand how the ill-advised
talk about the foundation of empirical knowledge in immediate experience
became part of the philosophical agenda. Instead of focusing on questions of
foundations we are, in Sellars’s eyes, better advised to think of empirical
knowledge as “a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in
jeopardy, though not all at once” (Sellars 1997: §38). In short, it is easy to
see that Sellars’s attack on the Myth of the Given is compatible with an
epistemological version of idealism, especially in its Kantian guise. Sellars’s
view was clearly inspired by Peirce as well as by Kant, but it has affinities
with the views we have found in Collingwood and Wittgenstein as well
(whether or not he would have liked these comparisons).
Sellars’s critical stance against an empiricist conception of the Given is
not the only aspect of his position that could be read as sympathetic to the
spirit although not necessarily the letter of idealism. However, it is not just
epistemologically motivated idealism with respect to the foundations of
knowledge that comes to mind when we look at Sellars’s philosophical
views. What deVries calls his “pragmatic realism” could also be seen as
open to ways of thinking that can be encountered in versions of traditional
metaphysical idealism of the Anglo-American kind of the late nineteenth
century, paradigmatically represented by Peirce. It is in this metaphysical
context that Sellars starts to deviate from an epistemological project that can
be framed in Kantian terms and to move toward an endorsement of a view
of the nature of reality that seems to be closer to Hegel’s metaphysical
outlook. Whereas Kant not only refrained from any speculation about the
ultimate constitution of reality but positively denied our ability to find out
what reality is in itself (or did so at least in the theoretical context if not, as
we saw, in his practical philosophy), Sellars follows Hegel’s lead and ven-
tures an account of what reality proper consists in. He transforms Hegel’s
belief in the logical-conceptual constitution of reality into a less pretentious-
sounding view according to which “science is the measure of all things, of
what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not” (Sellars 1997: §42), a
statement meant to echo the homo-mensura dictum of Protagoras, “man is
the measure of all things.” The guiding idea seems to be that since science is
the most reliable way of describing and explaining reality, the categories and
concepts that science makes available are the only candidates that we will
have for an assessment of the nature of things. That is, for lack of a
reasonable alternative we cannot but accept as ultimately real what the
      197

science of our time tells us. However, Sellars, contrary to Hegel but like other
figures we have considered beginning with the Neo-Kantians, does not
believe in a static and unchangeable set of reality-constituting concepts
and categories. For him science is embedded in an ever-changing historical
process in the course of which new categories and concepts turn up.
Hence at any specific point in history reality is revealed in new conceptual
clothes. But—and this is indeed reminiscent of Hegel—the so to speak
metaphysical fact remains that what there is is ultimately constituted by
variable and time-dependent concepts and categories. In the case of Hegel
they have their roots in purely conceptual requirements, in the case of Sellars
they are the result of scientific research where science is understood as an
ensemble of social practices.
Another much discussed attempt that could be read as integrating ideal-
istic motives into an account of the possibility of empirical knowledge, an
attempt that also hopes to overcome the opposition between idealism and
several forms of realism, is outlined by John McDowell in his influential
book Mind and World, which first appeared in 1994. McDowell sets up his
approach to the problem of empirical knowledge within a framework that
goes back to Kant in both terminology and substance: Empirical knowledge-
claims based on experience have to be seen as the joint product of the
faculties of sensibility and the understanding. Sensibility is a passive faculty
that is responsible for receptivity, that is, for the ability of the knower to
receive data passively from a subject-independent “outside” reality. The
understanding is an active faculty that is rooted in the spontaneity of the
knower and provides conceptual structures on the basis of which these data
from the outside are transformed into empirical judgments. McDowell
stresses that he follows Kant (1) in calling these abilities receptivity and
spontaneity respectively, (2) in attributing them to the faculties of sensibility
and the understanding, and (3) in taking them to be conditions of experi-
ence and empirical knowledge. With these Kantian tools in place he can
formulate his leading question: how to establish a theory of empirical
knowledge that accepts this Kantian analysis and that at the same time
can avoid the deficiencies that are connected with what he takes to be two
palpable although misleading attempts to respond to Kant’s claim about the
nature of empirical knowledge? The first is the attempt to conceive of the
data received from “outside” reality via receptivity as something that is non-
conceptually given. According to McDowell, this maneuver gives rise to the
problems that were outlined by Sellars in his criticism of the Myth of the
Given. The second tactic is to deny that in the case of knowledge there is
198    

room for anything non-conceptual, hence any room for non-conceptual

data. This line leads to what McDowell calls “coherentism,” a stance he
associates with a position held by Donald Davidson. Coherentism “does not
acknowledge an external rational constraint on thinking” (1994: 46), it leads
to “a frictionless spinning in a void” (1994: 66) and hence does not allow
outside reality to show up in the shape of something purely, that is, non-
conceptually given and to play a role in processes of gaining and justifying
empirical knowledge.
McDowell aims at a position that does not fall victim to either the
shortcomings of Sellars’s Myth of the Given or the problems connected
with an equally dissatisfying Davidsonian coherentism. He starts by stipu-
lating (1) that empirical knowledge consists in conceptually articulating
“that things are thus and so” (1994: 26), (2) that empirical knowledge is
based on experience, (3) that in experience the operations of receptivity
and spontaneity are somehow related, and (4) that in epistemology the
split between the non-conceptual and the conceptual makes no sense and
thus cannot be used to characterize the respective achievements of recep-
tivity and spontaneity. On the basis of these premises he wants to convince
us that the only way to avoid the confusions connected with the idea of a
non-conceptual given on the one hand and with conceptual coherentism
on the other and yet to stay within a broadly Kantian framework is by
overcoming the aporetic oppositions between receptivity and spontaneity,
sensibility and understanding, the non-conceptual and the conceptual by
providing a model according to which in the context of knowledge these
oppositions break down. Instead of accepting an irreconcilable split
between receptivity and spontaneity and anchoring the non-conceptual
at the side of sensibility while putting the conceptual exclusively on the
side of the understanding, and then denying that it is possible to provide a
reasonable link between them, McDowell suggests something else. On his
view, what we experience as the (passive) receptivity of sensibility is
already permeated with conceptual elements stemming from the sponta-
neity of the understanding. In his words, “we must insist that the under-
standing is already inextricably implicated in the deliverances of sensibility
themselves. Experiences are impressions made by the world on our senses,
products of receptivity; but those impressions themselves already have
conceptual content” (1994: 46). Or again, “having things appear to one a
certain way is already itself a mode of actual operation of conceptual
capacities” (1994: 62). In short, receptivity and spontaneity are already
inseparably linked right from the beginning of the cognitive process.
      199

McDowell is perfectly well aware that his suggestion might easily invoke
the charge of idealism, “in the sense in which to call a position ‘idealism’ is to
protest that it does not genuinely acknowledge how reality is independent of
our thinking” (1994: 26)—not a metaphysical insistence that reality is
ultimately mental, but the epistemological position that we can never
know reality except as it appears to us. The reasoning behind this worry
might be outlined thus: if conceptual activities are rooted in the spontaneity
of the understanding then they must be considered as subjective contribu-
tions of the cognizing subject, contributions that are independent of the
world. This leaves both “outside” and “inside” reality, like Kant’s “outer” and
“inner” senses, a conceptual construct of some mind or other, and this is
exactly the way the idealist wants us to think of the world. However, in
McDowell’s eyes this charge is misguided in his case because he has a story
to tell as to why conceptual content is already present in the deliverances of
passive experiences, that is, in the impressions from an outside and subject-
independent world, a story that does allow conceptual content to be part of
how the world impinges on us.
McDowell’s account turns around our understanding of the concept of
nature. According to him there are two ways of thinking about nature that
are both deeply rooted in the history of Western philosophy. The first is the
distinctively modern view that tries to make nature intelligible as an object
governed by natural laws. This modern stance is realized by relying on the
tools and methods provided by natural science. From this perspective, one is
committed to the assumption that receptivity is a natural capacity whose
deliverances are determined by natural laws. This means that it becomes
impossible to integrate conceptual spontaneity into nature. After all, con-
ceptual spontaneity as a capacity sui generis is supposed to be non-natural,
that is, to be independent from natural receptivity. The second way
of thinking about nature goes back to “a common medieval outlook”
(1994: 71) according to which the intelligibility of nature depends on the
degree to which human beings can make sense of and see meaning in nature
by relying on what we experience. The attitude here is to look at nature “as if
all of nature were a book of lessons for us” (ibid.). Nature thus conceived
presents itself to us as something that is not alien to knowledge but is
structured in a meaningful way that is expressed in conceptual relations,
relations whose actual presence is documented in what human beings
experience, namely that “that things are thus and so.” In order to highlight
the contrast that he wants to emphasize McDowell alludes to Max Weber’s
metaphorical distinction between enchanted and disenchanted nature
200    

(cf. 1994: 70). Whereas in a scientific, “disenchanted” view of nature a stone,

for example, is just a piece of matter that is subject to the laws of physics, and
this alone makes it a part of nature, this very same natural stone might be
experienced by a human being as a gravestone or a cenotaph, that is, as a
part of an “enchanted” nature that is filled with conceptual elements and
connotations. This “other” or “richer” concept of nature does not necessarily
conflict with the concept of nature understood in the scientific sense. It just
allows us to amplify or to enrich the concept of what is natural in such a way
that conceptual elements are included and at the same time to hold fast to
the (Kantian) claim that conceptual spontaneity is a capacity sui generis
(cf. 1994: 108f.). The Neo-Kantian background of Weber’s distinction, as a
version of the distinction between the natural and the cultural sciences,
should be obvious; Weber was a student of Heinrich Rickert. So McDowell
too stands in the shadow of Neo-Kantianism.
Against the background of the two connotations connected with the
concept of nature, McDowell’s problem is to find a way of reconciling
non-natural conceptual spontaneity with receptivity’s natural passivity, a
way that permits conceptuality to remain a capacity sui generis that operates
autonomously and independently of receptivity while at the same time
integrating it into a subject-independent nature. McDowell’s solution leads
to a position that he calls “naturalism of second nature” or “naturalized
Platonism” (1994: 91). According to this kind of naturalism, it makes no
sense to look at the capacities of (sensuous) receptivity and of (conceptual)
spontaneity in isolation and then to ask how their respective achievements
can be brought together in order to yield knowledge of empirical objects.
Instead, in the case of empirical knowledge receptivity is informed from the
outset by conceptual elements stemming from spontaneity and at the same
time conceptual activities are disciplined from the outset by the deliveries of
the senses, that is, by receptivity. In order to establish this reciprocity, which
is constitutive of McDowell’s naturalism, he wants us to start by realizing
that epistemic subjects are first of all participants in cultural and social
processes that provide the subject-independent conceptual means without
which even the most basic (passive) experiences would have no recognizable
content. These means are part of the natural development of human subjects
of knowledge, a development in the course of which we acquire the concep-
tual means mandatory for successfully dealing with the phenomena that we
experience. The sum total of these natural processes, which, according to
McDowell, form the character of a person, he characterizes with the German
word Bildung, a term that has the connotations of “education” (Ausbildung)
      201

and “forming” (Herausbildung) as well. Bildung, a term popularized by the

post-Kantian statesman and educator Wilhelm von Humboldt, consists in
being socially initiated into the right use of conceptual capacities “which
include responsiveness to . . . rational demands” (1994: 84) when it comes to
experience. By being immersed in and as the result of these processes,
humans acquire what McDowell calls in allusion to Aristotle a “second
nature” (ibid.). This term is meant to capture the idea that it belongs to
the nature of human beings to relate to whatever they passively experience
via receptivity in a way that is already conceptually informed. If concep-
tuality is conceived of as integrated into receptivity in this manner, the
traditional but problematic dualism in philosophy between spontaneity
and receptivity, conceptual activities and passive experiences can be over-
come or, perhaps more accurately, undercut. McDowell summarizes thus:
“We can conceive exercises of capacities that belong to spontaneity,” that is,
conceptual activities, “as elements that belong to the course of life,” that is, as
natural events. “An experiencing and acting subject is a living thing, with
active and passive bodily powers that are genuinely her own; she is herself
embodied, substantially present in the world that she experiences and acts
on. This is a framework for reflection that really stands a chance of making
traditional philosophy obsolete” (1994: 111) and of thereby contributing to
overcome its inherent deficiencies.
Obviously McDowell’s “naturalism of second nature” has nothing to do
with traditional idealism as metaphysics. That is based on accepting the
mind–body dichotomy, which in turn leads to mind–matter dualism, a
dualism without which the need to make a metaphysical choice between
idealistic and materialistic ontologies could not have come about. On the
contrary, McDowell’s position is unequivocally directed against an idealism
that is conceived of as standing in opposition to realism or materialism.
However, the very idea of making conceptuality part of nature by thinking of
conceptual capacities as natural products that are shaped and determined by
social and cultural processes might be read as pointing to what could be
called an “idealism of second nature.” According to this reading, for episte-
mological reasons we already have to assume that cognitive “openness to
reality” (1994: 111ff.), openness to what is “out there,” is made possible by
imposing on reality a conceptual structure that people in the course of their
social and cultural development have acquired and that guides or deter-
mines their experiences. In other words, if there were no conceptual struc-
ture that could be either imposed on or extracted from the world, there
could be no knowledge of anything that is part of reality. McDowell’s
202    

naturalism would be distinguished from Kant’s transcendental idealism only

by denying Kant’s distinction between things in themselves and our subjec-
tive forms of intuition and by replacing both with developmental processes
that take place in nature (reminiscent of Cohen’s and Cassirer’s functions).
Then McDowell’s naturalism of second nature becomes an epistemological
form of idealism, or at least reproduces the epistemological motivation
for idealism.
Depending on how one conceives of the conceptual elements that a
person acquires in order to be cognitively open to reality, one might even
be tempted to bring McDowell’s naturalism into close connection to a
metaphysical idealism à la Hegel according to which reality is nothing but
an expression or a manifestation of a conceptual structure. On this inter-
pretation, a person’s conceptual openness to reality is not just founded on
practices stemming from social interactions in a cultural environment that
lead to the imposition of conceptual structures on reality. Instead, these
structures would be conceived of as the result of a socially initiated learning
process that reveals the conceptual elements constitutive of reality as such.
Thus it would be reality itself that discloses its constitutive conceptual
structure by divulging the adequate set of concepts and categories to a
person via a socially mediated learning process. Read this way, a version of
metaphysical idealism would lurk in the background of McDowell’s second
nature-naturalism. Whether he is indeed tacitly going in this direction
is hard to tell. At one point he remarks as to the relation of Kant and
Hegel: “. . . I have described a philosophical project: to stand on the
shoulders of the giant, Kant, and see our way to the supersession of tradi-
tional philosophy that he almost managed, but not quite. The philosopher
whose achievement that description best fits is someone we take almost no
notice of, in the philosophical tradition I was brought up in, . . . : namely,
Hegel” (1994: 111). This could be read as bringing Hegel back into the
picture of how an idealism naturalized by second nature might look, a
picture that would reward metaphysical idealism with a second chance in
epistemological and metaphysical discussions yet to come in the twenty-first
century.
 11
Conclusion

This is a short book, and we have not been completely sparing of judgment
along the way. So there should not be any need for an extensive summary of
what we have said nor for an extended evaluation of the views we have
discussed. But some concluding words might not be amiss.
The legacy of idealism in modern philosophy is ambivalent. On the one
hand, the metaphysical thesis of idealism proper as we have defined it,
namely that reality is ultimately mental in character, in the end does not
seem very promising: We do not have a clear enough idea about what the
mental ultimately is, nor about how it could subsist entirely on its own, to
make such a reduction either adequately informative or adequately plausi-
ble. The everlasting obscurity of the idea of the mental is well documented in
the foregoing pages. The shift from God in Berkeley to the Concept in Hegel
to the Absolute in Schelling, Bradley, and Royce as paradigms or instantia-
tions of the mental bears witness to this. Yet the same could also be said
about physicalism: We do not have a clear enough idea about what the
physical ultimately is, nor about how it could ground, cause, or explain the
undeniable fact of our own consciousness, to speak of nothing else, to make
a physicalist reductionism of the mental any more informative or plausible
than a mentalistic reduction of the physical. This can easily be illustrated
from the case of the recent discovery of the Higgs boson particle. Physicists,
or at least science journalists, celebrated this as solving the mystery of
matter, namely what binds particles together: namely, another particle.
Philosophers, taught by Kant to use the “skeptical method” even if they
need not end up as skeptics (see “The Discipline of Pure Reason,” CPuR
A 738–57/B 766–85), are paid to doubt assertions like this, and there are
obvious problems with the claim: First, what does it really mean to call
something a “particle” that is supposed to exist only for a tiny fraction of a
second—why not just call it a moment in a process? Second, how can a
particle be the ultimate answer to what holds particles together? In antiquity,
Plato’s theory of forms met with what is called the “Third Man” objection—
actually, Plato raised it himself. Namely, if an ordinary particular object is
what it is because it resembles a form—a particular human being is one

Idealism in Modern Philosophy. Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Oxford University Press.
© Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848574.003.0011
204    

because it resembles the Form of the Human, a bed because it resembles the
Form of the Bed—don’t we need yet another form, the Form of
Resemblance, to see that the particular resembles the first form? And then
yet another Form of Resemblance to see that this second case of resemblance
is in fact a case of resemblance? And so on. Be that as it may, and however
compelling you might think the theory of the Higgs boson particle is,
philosophers should properly be wary of claims to have discovered the
ultimate nature of reality. The problem is not so much with either the
mental or the physical as it is with the claim to know how things ultimately
are. This is another lesson we should have learned from Kant. The result of
his Antinomy of Pure Reason is that while it is the nature of human reason
to seek the “unconditioned,” that which needs no further explanation or
ground, and that idea—Idea of Pure Reason, as he calls it—may have an
indispensable use in practical philosophy, where we must regard the moral
law as unconditionally valid, binding us even when we would vehemently
prefer otherwise, it has no use within the theoretical sphere: whatever might
seem the most fundamental level of explanation in our currently best
scientific theories might itself be further explained, at some point and in
some way that we cannot even currently even imagine. Science, and by this
we mean all well-founded, or not yet refuted, claims to knowledge, is never
more than our currently best explanation, and it is sheer intellectual effron-
tery to claim more than that.
On the other hand, there seems to be something profoundly right, even
inescapable, about at least the epistemological argument for idealism: Of
course we experience the world from the human point of view, and must
perceive and conceive it through our own faculties of perception and
conception. In a way, this is just a tautology: Our experience is after all
our experience, or, as Kant once again put it, the conditions of the possibility
of our experience are the conditions of the possibility of the objects of our
experience. Objects in the most general sense are what we experience, so of
course they are as we experience them. How else could we experience them?
Indeed, even when we scientifically and experimentally investigate the
perceptual and cognitive systems of organisms other than homo sapiens,
when we discover that dogs can hear acoustic frequencies that we cannot,
that insects with their multi-lensed eyes or arachnids with their more than
two eyes must perceive the world differently than we do, we still have to
interpret their experience in terms of our own—we cannot simply have their
experience, though we try to imagine it from our point of view. To be sure,
Kant’s philosophy was not confined to this triviality: he took the crucial step
  205

of understanding our experience through the activity of judgment, and

subsequent idealists such as Fichte and Hegel tried to deepen Kant’s insight
by conceiving of the mental as activity as such. The approaches of the latter
may be assessed either positively or negatively. The negative assessment
would be that they made a fundamental mistake: They ran afoul of the
problem of ultimate explanations, so perhaps they would have been better
off to let Kant’s warning about the unknowability of things in themselves
stay in place, and contented themselves with furthering and improving his
account of what our mental—cognitive, practical, emotional, aesthetic—
activity is actually like. Or, on a positive note, the German idealists can be
praised for having explored the metaphysical consequences of not subjecting
themselves to Kant’s metaphysical humility. Instead they relied in a radical
way on what Kant too considered the root of what the world can be for us,
namely a construction. However, whereas for Kant this construction was
based on the essential contributions of both intuitions and thoughts of
human subjects, the subsequent idealists focused on the essential contribu-
tion of pure thinking alone, thus making conceptuality a metaphysical topic.
Our conclusion should not seem novel. On the one hand, the rejection of
metaphysics altogether was the underlying premise, whether stated or not, of
much of the best twentieth-century philosophy. Take phenomenology as
pioneered by Edmund Husserl, for example, about which we have said little:
Husserl’s first move was to “bracket” ontological or ultimate metaphysical
questions altogether and to focus on describing the structure of our
thought—“noesis” in his peculiar diction—and the objects of thought as
we think about them—“noemata.” Or take perhaps the most interesting of
his successors, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: for him the description of human
experience comes first, science is practiced within the confines of human
experience, and can hardly undermine its reality, and ultimate, metaphysical
questions do not even need to be mentioned. Or take some moments in the
history of analytic philosophy: after A. J. Ayer and other “logical positivists”
inspired by the Vienna Circle in the 1930s had declared metaphysical
assertions meaningless nonsense because there is no way to verify them,
that is, by appeal to our own experience, subsequent movements in analytic
philosophy, such as the “ordinary language” philosophy of J. L. Austin,
could simply leave further discussion of metaphysics aside and instead
describe the structure of human experience, both thought and practice, by
describing the structure of the language through which we talk about it. All
of these approaches can be described under the general rubric that we have
used here to describe the historical movement of Neo-Kantianism: idealist
206    

epistemology without idealism, that is, without idealist metaphysics. On the

other hand, many recent philosophers have been more receptive to calling
their work “ontology” and “metaphysics,” but they are still in the business of
trying to uncover how the essential features of human thought, especially of
conceptualization and judgment, structure our experience of reality.
 Bibliography

All translations are by the authors unless otherwise noted.

Primary Literature, Cited and Suggested

Armstrong, David M., 1968, A Materialist Theory of the Mind, London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 1739, Metaphysics: A Critical Translation with
Kant’s Elucidations, Selected Notes, and Related Materials, Courtney J. Fugate
and John Hymers (ed. and trans.), London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Beattie, James, 1776, Essays on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, On Poetry and
Music, On Laughter, On the Utility of Classical Learning, Edinburgh: William
Creech.
Berkeley, George, 1710, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.
Reprinted in Berkeley, Works 2: 21–115. Citation by part then section number.
Berkeley, George, 1948–57, The Works of George Berkeley, A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop
(eds.), 9 vols., London and Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons.
Blanshard, Brand, 1939, The Nature of Thought, 2 vols., London: George Allen &
Unwin.
Blanshard, Brand, 1961, Reason and Goodness, New York: Macmillan.
Blanshard, Brand, 1962, Reason and Analysis, London: Routledge.
Blanshard, Brand, 1974, Reason and Belief, London: Allen & Unwin.
Bosanquet, Bernard, 1885, Knowledge and Reality, London: Kegan Paul, Trench &
Trubner.
Bosanquet, Bernard, 1888, Logic, or the Morphology of Knowledge, Oxford:
Clarendon Press. Second edition, 1911.
Bosanquet, Bernard, 1912, The Principle of Individuality and Value, London:
Macmillan.
Bosanquet, Bernard, 1913a, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, London:
Macmillan.
Bosanquet, Bernard, 1913b, The Distinction between Mind and its Objects,
Manchester: Sherratt and Hughes.
Bradley, Francis Herbert, 1876, Ethical Studies, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Second
edition, 1927.
Bradley, Francis Herbert, 1883, The Principles of Logic, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Second edition, 1922.
Bradley, Francis Herbert, 1893 [1897], Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical
Essay, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Second edition, 1897.
208 

Bradley, Francis Herbert, 1914, Essays on Truth and Reality, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bradley, Francis Herbert, 1935, Collected Essays, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Brandom, Robert, 1994, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive
Commitment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Caird, Edward, 1879, “Mr. Balfour on Transcendentalism,” Mind, old series, 4(13):
111–14. doi:10.1093/mind/os-4.13.111.
Caird, Edward, 1883, Hegel, Edinburgh: William Blackwood.
Caird, Edward, 1889, The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, 2 vols., Glasgow:
James Maclehose.
Caird, Edward, 1892, Essays on Literature and Philosophy, 2 vols., Glasgow: James
Maclehose.
Caird, Edward, 1893, The Evolution of Religion, Glasgow: James Maclehose.
Caird, Edward, 1904, The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, Glasgow:
James Maclehose.
Carnap, Rudolf, 1928, Der logische Aufbau der Welt, Leipzig: Felix Meiner Verlag;
translated as The Logical Structure of the World, Rolf A. George (trans.). Second
edition, LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 2003.
Carnap, Rudolf, 1937, The Logical Syntax of Language, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Cassirer, Ernst, [ECW], 1998–2009, Gesammalte Werke, Birgit Recki (ed.), 26 vols.,
Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.
Cassirer, Ernst, 1906–57, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft
der neueren Zeit. ECW vols. 2–5.
Cassirer, Ernst, 1910–21, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity,
William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (trans.), Chicago: Open Court,
1923.
Cassirer, Ernst, 1923–9, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Ralph Manheim (trans.),
3 vols., New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1953–9.
Cassirer, Ernst, 1927, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy,
Mario Domani (trans.), New York: Harper, 1963.
Cassirer, Ernst, 1932, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Fritz C. A. Koelln and
James A. Pettegrove (trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cassirer, Ernst, 1936, Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics: Historical
and Systematic Studies of the Problem of Causation, O. Theodore Benfey (trans.),
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956.
Cassirer, Ernst, 1942, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, S. G. Lofts (trans.), New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Cassirer, Ernst, 1944, An Essay on Man, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Cassirer, Ernst, 1946a, The Myth of the State, New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009.
Cassirer, Ernst, 1946b, Language and Myth, Susanne K. Langer (trans.), New York:
Harper & Brothers.
Cassirer, Ernst, 1957, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History
since Hegel, William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (trans.), New Haven:
Yale University Press.
  209

Cassirer, Ernst, 1996, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, John Michael Krois
and Donald Philip Verene (eds.), New Haven: Yale University Press.
Cohen, Hermann, 1871, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, Berlin: F. Dümmler.
Cohen, Hermann, 1877, Kants Begründung der Ethik, Berlin: F. Dümmler.
Cohen, Hermann, 1883, Das Princip der Infinitesmal-Method und seine Geschichte,
Berlin: F. Dümmler.
Cohen, Hermann, 1889, Kants Begründung der Ästhetik, Berlin: F. Dümmler.
Cohen, Hermann, 1902, Logik des reinen Erkenntnis, Berlin: Bruno Cassirer.
Cohen, Hermann, 1904, Ethik des reinen Willens, Berlin: Bruno Cassirer.
Cohen, Hermann, 1912, Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls, Berlin: Bruno Cassirer.
Cohen, Hermann, 1919, Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, Berlin:
Bruno Cassirer.
Collier, Arthur, 1713 [1909], Clavis Universalis: Or, A New Inquiry after Truth, Being
a Demonstration of the Non-Existence, or Impossibility, of an External World,
London: Gosling. Reprinted Ethel Bowman (ed.), LaSalle, IL: Open Court.
Collingwood, Robin George, 1924, Speculum Mentis, or The Map of Knowledge,
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Collingwood, Robin George, 1933, An Essay on Philosophical Method, Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Collingwood, Robin George, 1938, The Principles of Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Collingwood, Robin George, 1939, An Autobiography, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Revised edition, David Boucher and Teresa Smith (eds.), 2013.
Collingwood, Robin George, 1940, An Essay on Metaphysics, Oxford: Clarendon
Press. Revised edition, Rex Martin (ed.), 1998.
Collingwood, Robin George, 1942, The New Leviathan. Revised edition, David
Boucher (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Collingwood, Robin George, 1945, The Idea of Nature, T. M. Knox (ed.), Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Collingwood, Robin George, 1946, The Idea of History, T. M. Knox (ed.), Oxford:
Oxford University Press. Revised edition, W. J. van der Dussen (ed.), Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992.
Croce, Benedetto, 1902, Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and General Linguistic,
Douglas W. Ainslie (trans.), London: Macmillan, 1909.
Croce, Benedetto, 1905, Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept, Douglas W. Ainslie
(trans.), London: Macmillan, 1917.
Croce, Benedetto, 1907, What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel,
Douglas W. Ainslie (trans.), London: Macmillan, 1915.
Croce, Benedetto, 1909, Philosophy of Practice, Economics, and Ethics, Douglas
W. Ainslie (trans.), London: Macmillan, 1913.
Croce, Benedetto, 1911, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, R. G. Collingwood
(trans.), London: Latimer, 1913.
Croce, Benedetto, 1917, Theory and History of Historiography, Douglas W. Ainslie
(trans.), London: Harrop, 1921.
Croce, Benedetto, 1918, Autobiography, R. G. Collingwood (trans.), Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1927.
210 

Davidson, Donald, 1984, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in his Inquiries
into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 183–98.
Davidson, Donald, 2001, Essays on Actions and Events. Second edition, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Descartes, René, c.1628, Regulae ad directionem ingenii (Rules for the Direction of the
Mind), unpublished in his lifetime. Translated and printed in his Philosophical
Writings 1: 7–78.
Descartes, René, 1637, Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et
chercher la vérité dans les sciences (Discourse on the Method of Rightly
Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences), Leiden.
Translated and printed in his Philosophical Writings 1: 109–76.
Descartes, René, 1641, Meditationes de prima philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et
animæ immortalitas demonstratur (Meditations on First Philosophy), Paris.
Translated and printed in his Philosophical Writings 2: 1–61.
Descartes, René, 1644, Principia philosophiae (Principles of Philosophy), Amsterdam:
Elzevir. Translated and printed in his Philosophical Writings 1: 177–292.
Descartes, René, 1985–91, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, John Cottingham,
Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (eds.), 3 vols.,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Falckenberg, Richard, 1886, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie von Nikolaus von
Kues bis zur Gegenwart, Leipzig: Veit. Second edition, 1892.
Feder, Johann and Christian Garve, 1782, “Critik der reinen Vernunft Von Immanuel
Kant,” Zugabe zu den Göttingischen Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, 3. Stück,
19 January 1782, pp. 40–8. Translated in Sassen 2000: 53–8.
Feyerabend, Paul, 1975, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of
Knowledge, New York: Humanities Press.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 1794/5, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, GA 1, 2.
Leipzig. Translated as Doctrine of Science or Foundations of the Science of
Knowledge.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 1797a, Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre, in
Philosophisches Journal 5: 1–47. Augsburg.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 1797b, Zweite Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre, in
Philosophisches Journal 5: 319–78; 6: 1–40. Augsburg. Translated as First and
Second Introduction into the Doctrine of Science.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, [Werke] 1845–6, Johann Gottlieb Fichtes sämmtliche Werke,
Immanuel Hermann Fichte (ed.), Berlin: Veit. [Citation by volume and page
number.]
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, [GA] 1962–2012, Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie
der Wissenschaften, 42 vols., Reinhard Lauth, Erich Fuchs, and Hans Gliwitzky
(eds.), Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog. [Cited as GA followed by series, volume,
and page number.]
Foster, John, 1982, The Case for Idealism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Garve, Christian, 1783, “Kritik der reinen Venunft, von Immanuel Kant,” Allgemeine
deutsche Bibliothek, Anhang zu dem 37ten bis 52ten Bande, Zweite Abtheilung,
pp. 838–62. Translation in Sassen 2000: 59–77.
  211

Goodman, Nelson, 1951, The Structure of Appearance, Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.
Green, Thomas Hill, 1874, Introduction to Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature.
Reprinted in his Works 1: 1–371.
Green, Thomas Hill, 1883, Prolegomena to Ethics, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fifth
edition, 1907. [Green 1883 available online.]
Green, Thomas Hill, 1885–8, Works of Thomas Hill Green, R. L. Nettleship (ed.),
3 vols., London: Longmans, Green, and Co.
Green, Thomas Hill, 1886a, Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant, in Works 2: 1–155.
Green, Thomas Hill, 1886b, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, in
Works 2: 335–553.
Haering, Theodor, 1910, Der Duisburgsche Nachlass und Kants Kritizismus um 1775,
Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, [Difference-Writing] 1801, Differenz des
Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie, Jena. Translated as The
Difference between Fichte and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, H. S. Harris and
Walter Cerf (trans.), Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, [Faith and Knowledge] 1802, “Glauben und Wissen
oder die Reflexionsphilosophie der Subjektivität,” Kritisches Journal der
Philosophie (Critical Journal of Philosophy), vol. 2, pt. 1.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1802–3, Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten
des Naturrechts, seine Stelle in der praktischen Philosophie und sein Verhältnis zu den
positive Reschtswissenschafte (On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, on its
Place in Practical Philosophy, and its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Right, in
Political Writings), Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, Schelling and Hegel (eds.),
December 1802 and May 1803.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1804–5, Jena Systemdraft II, in GW 7: 3–338.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1807, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Bamberg and
Würzburg: Joseph Anton Goebbardt. Translated as Phenomenology of the Spirit,
Arnold V. Miller (trans.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, [SoL] 1812, Wissenschaft der Logik, Nürnberg.
Translated as Science of Logic, George di Giovanni (trans.), Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, [Enc.] 1817, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen
Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in
Basic Outline), Heidelberg. Second edition, 1827.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1833, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie
(Lectures on the History of Philosophy), Karl Ludwig Michelet (ed.), Berlin.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, [GW] 1968–, Gesammelte Werke, Rheinisch-
Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.), Hamburg: Felix Meiner
Verlag. [Citation by volume and page number.]
Hobbes, Thomas, 1640, Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, Ferdinand Toennies
(ed.), 1889, London: Simpkin & Marshall. [Cited by part, chapter, section.]
Hobbes, Thomas, 1651, Leviathan, Noel Malcolm (ed.), 3 vols., Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2012.
212 

Hobbes, Thomas, 1655, De Corpore, in his Body, Man, and Citizen, Richard S. Peters
(ed.), New York: Collier Books, 1962.
Hume, David, 1739–40, A Treatise of Human Nature, David Fate and Mary J. Norton
(eds.), 2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. [Cited by book, part, section, and,
sometimes, paragraph.]
Hume, David, 1748, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Tom
L. Beauchamp (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.
Hume, David, 1874, The Philosophical Works of David Hume, T. H. Green and
T. H. Grose (eds.), 4 vols. Reprinted Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1964.
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 1787, David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus
und Realismus: ein Gespräch, Breslau: Gottlieb Löwe. Translated as David Hume
on Faith or Idealism and Realism: A Dialogue, in The Main Philosophical Writings
and the Novel “Allwill,” George di Giovanni (ed.), Montréal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1994, pp. 253–338.
Kant, Immanuel, 1770, De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis
(On the Forms and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible Worlds), University of
Königsberg.
Kant, Immanuel, [CPuR] 1781/7, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Riga. Translated as
Critique of Pure Reason, Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (trans.), Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Kant, Immanuel, 1783, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als
Wissenschaft wird auftreten können, Riga. Translated as Prolegomena to Any
Future Metaphysics, Gary Hatfield (trans. and ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997. Also in Kant 2002.
Kant, Immanuel, [MANW], 1786. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft,
Riga. Translated as Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Michael Friedman
(trans. and ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Also in Kant 2002.
Kant, Immanuel, [CPJ] 1790, Kritik der Urteilskraft. Translated as Critique of the
Power of Judgment, Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (trans.), Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Kant, Immanuel, [MM] 1797, Metaphysik der Sitten, Königsberg, translated as
Metaphysics of Morals, Mary J. Gregor (trans. and ed.). In Kant, 1996.
Kant, Immanuel, 1900–, Kants gesammelte Schriften, Royal Prussian (later German,
then Berlin-Brandenburg) Academy of Sciences (ed.), 29 vols., Berlin: Georg
Reimer, later Walter de Gruyter.
Kant, Immanuel, 1996, Practical Philosophy, Mary J. Gregor (trans. and ed.),
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, Immanuel, 2002, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, Henry E. Allison and Peter
Heath (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Kant, Immanuel, 2005, Notes and Fragments, Paul Guyer (ed.), Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kim, Jaegwon, 1993, Supervenience and Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kuhn, Thomas S., 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, c.1680–4, “Primae veritates” (First Truths), unpublished
in his lifetime. Translated in PPL: 267–71.
  213

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 1686, Discours de métaphysique (Discourse on

Metaphysics), unpublished in his lifetime. Ttranslated in PPL: 303–30.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 1702, “Reply to the Thoughts on the System of
Preestablished Harmony Contained in the Second Edition of Mr. Bayle’s Critical
Dictionary, Article Rorarius. Translated in PPL: 574–85.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, c.1714, “La Monadologie” (The Monadology), unpub-
lished in his lifetime. Translated in PPL: 643–53.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, [PPL] 1969, Philosophical Papers and Letters, Leroy
E. Loemker (ed.). Second edition, Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Liebmann, Otto, 1865, Kant und die Epigonen: eine kritische Abhandlung, Stuttgart:
Carl Schober.
Locke, John, 1690, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Peter H. Nidditch
(ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. [Cited by book, chapter, section.]
Luft, Sebastian (ed.), 2015, The Neo-Kantian Reader, London: Routledge.
McDowell, John, 1994, Mind and World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis, 1896, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis, 1901a [1934], “The Further Determination of the
Absolute,” in McTaggart 1901b: 252–92 (ch. IX). Reprinted in McTaggart 1934:
210–72 (ch. X).
McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis, 1901b, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. Second edition, 1918.
McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis, 1910, A Commentary on Hegel’s Logic, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis, [NE] 1921–7, The Nature of Existence, 2 vols.,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sections 1–293 in vol. 1; sections
294–913 in vol. 2.
McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis, 1924 [1934], “An Ontological Idealism,” in
Contemporary British Philosophy (first series), J. H. Muirhead (ed.), London:
Allen & Unwin, pp. 251–69. Reprinted in McTaggart 1934: 273–92 (ch. XI).
McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis, 1934, Philosophical Studies, S. V. Keeling (ed.),
London: Arnold.
Malebranche, Nicolas, 1674–5, The Search after Truth, Thomas M. Lennon and Paul
J. Olscamp (trans.), Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1980.
Malebranche, Nicolas, 1688, Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, Nicholas Jolley
and David Scott (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Moore, George Edward, 1899, “The Nature of Judgment,” Mind, new series, 8(2):
176–93. doi:10.1093/mind/VIII.2.176.
Moore, George Edward, 1903, “The Refutation of Idealism,” Mind, new series 12(4):
433–53. doi:10.1093/mind/XII.4.433.
Moore, George Edward, 1918, “The Conception of Reality,” Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, 18(1): 101–20. doi:10.1093/aristotelian/18.1.101.
Moore, George Edward, 1925, “A Defense of Common Sense,” in Contemporary
British Philosophy (2nd series), J. H. Muirhead (ed.), London: Allen and Unwin,
pp. 193–223.
214 

Moore, George Edward, 1939, “Proof of an External World,” Proceedings of the

British Academy, 25: 273–300.
Moore, George Edward, 1922, Philosophical Studies, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Moore, George Edward, 1959, Philosophical Papers, London: George Allen and Unwin.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, [BoT] 1872, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik,
Leipzig. Translated as The Birth of Tragedy, Raymond Geuss and Ronald Spiers
(eds.), Ronald Spears (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1882, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Chemnitz. Translated as The
Gay Science, Bernard Williams (ed.), Josefine Nauckhoff (trans.), Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1887, Zur Genealogie der Moral: eine Streitschrift, Leipzig.
Translated as On the Genealogy of Morality, Keith Ansell-Pearson (ed.), Carol
Diethe (trans.). Second edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1888–9, Ecce homo: wie man wird, was man ist, unpublished
manuscript.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, [KSA] 1980, Sämtliche Werke: kritische Studienausgabe in 15
Bänden, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (eds.), Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
[Citation by volume number and fragment number(s).]
Nietzsche, Friedrich, [eKGWB], Digitale kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke und Briefe,
Paolo D’Iorio (eds.), Nietzsche Source, eKGWB BVN-1888, 1135.
Peirce, Charles Sanders, [] 1982, Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological
Edition, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. [Cited by volume and page
number.]
Peirce, Charles Sanders, [CP] 1931, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce,
Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (eds.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press. [Cited by volume and page number.]
Peirce, Charles Sanders, [EP] 1992, The Essential Peirce, 2 vols., Peirce Edition
Project (ed.), Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. [Cited by volume and
page number.]
Putnam, Hilary, 1981, Reason, Truth, and History, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Quine, Willard Van Orman and Joseph Ullian, 1970, The Web of Belief, New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Reid, Thomas, 1785a, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common
Sense, Fourth edition, Derek R. Brookes (ed.), University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2000.
Reid, Thomas, 1785b, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Derek R. Brookes
(ed.), annotations by Derek R. Brookes and Knud Hakkonssen, University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.
Rickert, Heinrich, 1924, Kant als Philosoph der modernen Kultur, Tübingen:
J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).
Rickert, Heinrich, 1986, The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science:
A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences. Ed, and trans. by Guy Oakes.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  215

Royce, Josiah, 1885, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy: A Critique of the Bases of
Conduct and Faith, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. [Royce 1885 available online.]
Royce, Josiah, 1892, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy: An Essay in the Form of
Lectures, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. [Royce 1892 available online.]
Royce, Josiah, 1899–1901, The World and the Individual, First and Second Series,
2 vols., New York: MacMillan.
Royce, Josiah, 1918, The Problem of Christianity, New York: MacMillan.
Royce, Josiah, 1919, Lectures on Modern Idealism, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Russell, Bertrand, 1912 [1974], The Problems of Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford
University Press. Reprinted 1974.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, [IP] 1797 [1988], Ideen zu einer Philosophie der
Natur als Einleitung in das Studium dieser Wissenschaft, Jena and Leipzig:
Breitkopf und Härtel, in SW 1: 653ff. Translated as Ideas for a Philosophy of
Nature: As Introduction to the Study of this Science, Errol E. Harris and Peter
Heath (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. [Page numbers in
citations from the translation.]
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 1798, Von der Weltseele, eine Hypothese der
höheren Physik zur Erklärung des allgemeinen Organismus (On the World Soul: An
Hypothesis of Higher Physics for Explaining Universal Organism), Hamburg:
Perthes. In SW 1: 413ff.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 1800, System des transcendentalen Idealismus,
Tübingen. Translated as System of Transcendental Idealism, Peter Heath (trans.),
Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1978.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, [SW] 1856–61, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
Schelling’s Sämmtliche Werke, Karl F. A. Schelling (ed.), I Abtheilung (vols.
1–10), II Abtheilung (vols. 1–4), Stuttgart: Cotta. [Citation by volume and page
number.]
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1813, Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden
Grunde (On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason), doctoral
dissertation, Jena.
Schopenhauer, Arthur, [WWR] 1819 [2010], Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,
Leipzig. Translated as The World as Will and Representation, Judith Norman,
Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010. [Page numbers in citations from the translation.]
Sellars, Wilfrid, 1963, Science, Perception, and Reality, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Sellars, Wilfrid, 1968, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes,
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Sellars, Wilfrid, “Autobiographical Reflections” (February 1973), in Action,
Knowledge, and Reality: Studies in Honor of Wilfrid Sellars, H.-N. Castañeda
(ed.), Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975, pp. 277–93.
Sellars, Wilfrid, 1997, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Robert B. Brandom
(ed.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Smart, J. J. C., 1963, Philosophy and Scientific Realism, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
216 

Spinoza, Baruch, 1677, Ethics, in The Collected Works of Spinoza (vol. 1), Edwin
Curley (ed. and trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985; see also
Spinoza: Complete Works, Samuel Shirley (trans.), Michael L. Morgan (ed.),
Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.
Sprigge, T. L. S., 1983, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Tarski, Alfred, 1936, “Der Wahrheitsbegriff in den formalisierten Sprachen,” Studia
Philosophica 1: 261–405, J. H. Wodger (trans.), “The Concept of Truth in
Formalized Languages,” in Tarski, Logic, Semantics, and Metamathematics:
Papers from 1923 to 1948, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tarski, Alfred, 1944, “The Semantic Conception of Truth,” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 4: 431–76.
Whitehead, Alfred North, 1929, Process and Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Williams, Donald Cary, 1936, “Empirical Realism,” in Williams, Principles of
Empirical Realism, Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1986.
Windelband, Wilhelm, 1883, “On Critical and Genetic Method,” in Luft 2015.
Windelband, Wilhelm, 1894, “History and Natural Science,” in Luft 2015.
Windelband, Wilhelm, 1914, Präludien. Sixth edition, Jŏrn Born and Sebastian Luft
(eds.), Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2021.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1969, On Certainty, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright
(eds.), G. E. M. Anscombe and D. Paul (trans.), Oxford: Blackwell.
Wolff, Christian, 1720 (1751), Vernünftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt, und der
Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt, Neue Auflage hin und wieder
vermehret, Halle: Renger.

Secondary Literature, Cited and Suggested

Adams, Robert M., 1994, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Alexander, Peter, 1985, Locke, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Allais, Lucy, 2015, Manifest Reality, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Allison, Henry E., 1983, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and
Defense, New Haven: Yale University Press. Second edition, 2004.
Allison, Henry E., 1990, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Allison, Henry E., 2001, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Allison, Henry E., 2011, A Commentary to Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics
of Morals, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Allison, Henry E., 2020, Kant’s Conception of Freedom: A Developmental and Critical
Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Altmann, Matthew C. (ed.), 2014, The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
  217

Ameriks, Karl, 1982, Kant’s Theory of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Second edition, 2000.
Ameriks, Karl, 2000a, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation
of the Critical Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/
CBO9781139173346.
Ameriks, Karl (ed.), 2000b, The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521651786.
Ameriks, Karl, 2012, Kant’s Elliptical Path, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199693689.001.0001.
Anscombe, G. E. M., 1976, “The Question of Linguistic Idealism,” Acta Fennica
Philosophica, 28: 188–215. Reprinted in her Collected Papers, Volume I: From
Parmenides to Wittgenstein, Oxford: Blackwell, 1981, pp. 112–33.
Atwell, John E., 1995, Schopenhauer on the Character of the World, Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Barrett, Clifford, 1932, Contemporary Idealism in America, New York: Macmillan.
Baugh, Bruce, 2003, The French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism, London:
Routledge.
Beaney, Michael (ed.), 2013, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic
Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Beck, Lewis White, 1960, A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Beck, Lewis White, 1969, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Beebee, Helen, 2006, Hume on Causation, London: Routledge.
Beiser, Frederick C., 1987, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to
Fichte, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Beiser, Frederick C., 2002, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism,
1791–1801, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Beiser, Frederick C., 2005, Hegel, London: Routledge.
Beiser, Frederick C., 2011, The German Historicist Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Beiser, Frederick C., 2014a, The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Beiser, Frederick C., 2014b, Late German Idealism: Trendelenburg and Lotze, Oxford:
Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199682959.001.0001.
Beiser, Frederick C., 2018, Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Berlin, Isaiah, 2013a, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder.
Second edition, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Berlin, Isaiah, 2013b, The Roots of Romanticism. Second edition, Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Bird, Graham, 1962, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Boucher, David and Andrew Vincent, 2012, British Idealism: A Guide for the
Perplexed, London: Continuum.
Bowie, Andrew, 1993, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction,
London: Routledge.
218 

Boyle, Nicholas and Liz Dizley (eds.), 2013, The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of
Post-Kantian German Thought, 4 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
See especially vol. 1.
Vol. 1: Philosophy and Natural Sciences, Karl Ameriks (vol. ed.).
Vol. 2: Historical, Social and Political Thought, John Walker (vol. ed.).
Vol. 3: Aesthetics and Literature, Christoph Jamme and Ian Cooper (vol. eds.).
Vol. 4: Religion, Nicholas Adams (vol. ed.).
Brandom, Robert B., 2000, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Brandom, Robert B., 2002, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the
Metaphysics of Intentionality, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Brandom, Robert B., 2009, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Brandom, Robert B., 2019, A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Brandt, Reinhard, 1991, Die Urteilstafel. Kant-Forschungen, vol. 4, Hamburg: Felix
Meiner Verlag.
Breazeale, Daniel, 2013, Thinking Through the “Wissenschaftslehre”: Themes from
Fichte’s Early Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:
oso/9780199233632.001.0001.
Bristow, William F., 2007, Hegel and the Transformation of Philosophical Critique,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Broad, C. D., 1933–8, An Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy, 2 vols.,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bubner, Rüdiger, 2003, The Innovations of Idealism, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511498046.
Butler, Judith, 1987, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century
France, New York: Columbia University Press.
Campbell, Charles Arthur, 1931, Scepticism and Construction: Bradley’s Sceptical
Principle as the Basis of Constructive Philosophy, London: George Allen and
Unwin.
Campbell, Charles Arthur, 1938, “In Defence of Free-Will,” Glasgow inaugural
lecture. Reprinted in his In Defence of Free-Will, with Other Essays, London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1967.
Campbell, Charles Arthur, 1956, “Self-Activity and Its Modes,” in Contemporary
British Philosophy: Personal Statements, third series, H. D. Lewis (ed.), London:
Macmillan, pp. 85–115.
Carl, Wolfgang, 1987, Der schweigende Kant: Die Entwürfe zu einer Deduktion der
Kategorien vor 1781, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Cartwright, David E., 2010, Schopenhauer: A Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Carus, A. W., 2007, Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication as
Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chalmers, David, 1996, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  219

Chalmers, David, 2013, Pansychism and Panprotopsychism: The Amherst Lecture in

Philosophy 8: 1–35, <http://www.amherstlecture.org/chalmers2013/>.
Chalmers, David, 2019, “Idealism and the Mind–Body Problem,” in The Routledge
Handbook of Pansychism, William Seager (ed.), London: Routledge, ch. 28.
Clark, Maudemarie, 1990, Nietzsche on Truth in Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Clendenning, John, 1999, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, Nashville: Vanderbilt
University Press.
Connelly, James and Stamatoula Panagakou (eds.), 2010, Anglo-American Idealism:
Thinkers and Ideas, Oxford: Peter Lang.
Cunningham, G. Watts, 1933, The Idealistic Argument in Recent British and
American Philosophy, New York: Century.
Danto, Arthur C., 1965, Nietzsche as Philosopher, New York: Macmillan.
De Pierris, Graciela, 2015, Idea, Evidence, and Method: Hume’s Skepticism and
Naturalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
deVries, Willem A., 2009, “Getting beyond Idealism,” in Empiricism, Perceptual
Knowledge, Normativity, and Realism: Essays on Wilfrid Sellars, Willem
A. deVries (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 211–45.
deVries, Willem, “Wilfrid Sellars,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall
2021 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/
entries/sellars/>.
Dharamsi, Karim, Giuseppina D’Oro, and Stephen Leach (eds.), 2018, Collingwood
on Philosophical Methodology, Cham: Springer.
Dicker, Georges, 2011, Berkeley’s Idealism: A Critical Examination, Oxford: Oxford
University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195381467.001.0001.
di Giovanni, George, 2005, Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate
Successors, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
D’Oro, Giuseppina, 2002, Collingwood’s Metaphysics of Experience, London:
Routledge.
Dudley, Will, 2007, Understanding German Idealism, London: Acumen.
Dunham, Jeremy, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Sean Watson, 2011, Idealism: The
History of a Philosophy, London: Acumen.
Dussen, W. J. van der, 1981. History as a Science: The Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood.
The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Emundts, Dina, 2004, Kants Übergangskonzeption im Opus postumum, Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter & Co.
Emundts, Dina, 2010, “The Refutation of Idealism and the Distinction between
Phenomena and Noumena,” in Guyer 2010: 168–89.
Emundts, Dina, 2012, Erkennen und Erfahren: Hegels Theorie der Wissenschaft,
Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
Emundts, Dina and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, 2002, G. W. F. Hegel: Eine Einfŭhrung,
Stuttgart: Reclam.
Ewing, Alfred Cyril, 1934, Idealism: A Critical Survey, London: Methuen.
Ewing, Alfred Cyril, 1957, The Idealist Tradition: From Berkeley to Blanshard,
Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
220 

Findlay, John N., 1970, Ascent to the Absolute, London: George Allen and Unwin.
Flew, Antony, 1961, Hume’s Philosophy of Belief, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Flower, Elizabeth and Murray G. Murphey, 1977, A History of Philosophy in America,
2 vols., New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons.
Fogelin, Robert J., 1985, Hume’s Skepticism in the “Treatise of Hume Nature,”
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Förster, Eckart, 2000, Kant’s Final Synthesis: An Essay on the Opus postumum,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Förster, Eckart, 2011 [2013], 25 Jahre der Philosophie: eine systematische
Rekonstruktion, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Translated as The
Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction, Brady Bowman
(trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Forster, Michael, 2008, Kant and Skepticism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Forster, Michael and Kristin Gjesdal (eds.), 2015, The Oxford Handbook of German
Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Foster, John, 1982, The Case for Idealism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Franks, Paul, 2005, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and
Skepticism in German Idealism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Friedman, Michael, 1999, Reconsidering Logical Positivism, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Friedman, Michael, 2000, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, Heidegger,
Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court.
Fulda, Hans Friedrich, 1965, Das Problem einer Einleitung in Hegels Wissenschaft der
Logik, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
Fulda, Hans Friedrich, 2003, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Munich: C. H. Beck.
Garber, Daniel, 2009, Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Garber, Daniel and Beatrice Longuenesse (eds.), 2008, Kant and the Early Moderns,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gardiner, Patrick, 1953, Schopenhauer, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Gardner, Sebastian and Paul Franks, 2002, “From Kant to Post-Kantian German
Idealism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 76:
211–46. doi:10.1111/1467-8349.00096 and doi:10.1111/1467-8349.00097.
Garrett, Don, 1997, Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy, New York:
Oxford University Press.
Geach, Peter, 1979, Truth, Love, and Immortality: An Introduction to McTaggart’s
Philosophy, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Gentry, Gerard and Konstantin Pollok (eds.), 2019, The Imagination in German
Idealism and Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gjesdal, Kristin (ed.), 2016, Debates in Nineteenth-Century European Philosophy,
New York: Routledge.
Goldschmidt, Tyron and Kenneth L. Pearce (eds.), 2017, Idealism: New Essays in
Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gordon, Peter E., 2010, Continental Divide: Heidegger-Cassirer-Davos, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
  221

Grier, Michelle, 2001, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.
Griffin, Nicholas, 1991, Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship, Oxford: Oxford University
Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198244530.001.0001.
Guyer, Paul, 1979, Kant and the Claims of Taste, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press. Second edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Guyer, Paul, 1983, “Kant’s Intentions in the Refutation of Idealism,” Philosophical
Review, 92: 329–83.
Guyer, Paul, 1987, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511624766.
Guyer, Paul, 2000, “Absolute Idealism and the Rejection of Kantian Dualism,” in
Ameriks 2000b: 37–56. Second edition, 2017: 43–64.
Guyer, Paul, 2005a, Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Guyer, Paul, 2005b, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom: Selected Essays, Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Guyer, Paul, 2006, Kant, London: Routledge. Second edition, 2014.
Guyer, Paul, 2007, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Reader’s
Guide, London: Continuum.
Guyer, Paul, 2008, Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Guyer, Paul (ed.), 2010, The Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Guyer, Paul, 2014. A History of Modern Aesthetics. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Guyer, Paul, 2017, “Transcendental Idealism: What and Why?,” in The Palgrave
Kant Handbook, Matthew C. Altman (ed.), London: Palgrave Macmillan,
pp. 71–90.
Guyer, Paul, 2020a, Reason and Experience in Mendelssohn and Kant, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Guyer, Paul, 2020b, “The Revised Method of Physicotheology: Kant’s Refined
Teleology,” in Teleology, Jeffrey McDonough (ed.), Oxford; Oxford University
Press, pp. 186–218.
Guyer, Paul, forthcoming, The Impact of Kant’s Moral Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Hammer, Espen (ed.), 2007, German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives, London
and New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203030837.
Hatfield, Gary, 1991, The Natural and the Normative, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hatfield, Gary, 2018, “René Descartes,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall
2018 edition.
Henrich, Dieter, 1971, Hegel im Kontext, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Henrich, Dieter, 2003, Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Henrich, Dieter, 2019, Das Ich, das viel besagt: Fichtes Einsicht nachdenken. Frankfurt
am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
222 

Hill, R. Kevin, 2003, Nietzsche’s Critiques of the Kantian Tradition, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Hofweber, Thomas, 2017, “Conceptual Idealism without Ontological Idealism,” in
Idealism: New Essays in Metaphysics, Tyron Goldschmidt and Kenneth L. Pearce
(eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 124–41.
Hönigswald, Richard, 1913, Grundfragen der Erkenntnislehre, Bad Godesberg: Junker
und Dünnhaupt (1966).
Hösle, Vittorio and Fernando Suárez Müller (eds.), 2015, Idealismus heute: aktuelle
Perspektiven und neue Impulse, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Horstmann, Rolf-Peter, 1984, Ontologie und Relationen: Hegel, Bradley, Russell und
die Kontroverse über interne und externe Beziehungen, Königstein: Athenäum.
Horstmann, Rolf-Peter, 2004, Die Grenzen der Vernunft: eine Untersuchung zu Zielen
und Motiven des Deutschen Idealismus. Third edition, Frankfurt: Klostermann Verlag.
Horstmann, Rolf-Peter, 2008a, “Fichtes anti-skeptisches Programm: zu den
Strategien der Wissenschaftslehren bis 1801/02,” in Internationales Jahrbuch des
deutschen Idealismus 5: 47–89.
Horstmann, Rolf-Peter, 2008b, “Hermann Cohen on Kant’s Transcendental
Aesthetic”, in The Philosophical Forum XXXIX, 2, 127–38.
Horstmann, Rolf-Peter, 2017a, “The Early Philosophy of Fichte and Schelling,” in
The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. Second edition, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 154–80.
Horstmann, Rolf-Peter, 2017b, “Hegel on Objects as Subjects”, in Zuckert, Kreines
(Eds): Hegel on Philosophy in History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 12–38.
Horstmann, Rolf-Peter, forthcoming, “Hegel on Subjects as Objects”.
Hyder, David J., 2009, The Determinate World: Kant and Helmholtz on the Physical
Means of Geometry, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.
Hylton, Peter, 1990, Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy,
Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019824018X.001.0001.
Hylton, Peter, 2013, “Idealism and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy,” in Boyle and
Disley 2013: 1: 323–46. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139626675.014.
Jacquette, Dale, 2005, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Montreal and Kingston:
McGill Queen’s University Press.
Jaeschke, Walter and Andreas Arndt, 2012, Die Klassische Deutsche Philosophie nach
Kant: System der reinen Vernunft und ihre Kritik 1785–1845, Munich: C. H. Beck.
Janaway, Christopher, 1989, Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Kemp Smith, Norman, 1924, Prolegomena to an Idealist Theory of Knowledge,
London: Macmillan.
Kemp Smith, Norman, 1941, The Philosophy of David Hume: A Critical Study of Its
Origins and Central Doctrines, London: Macmillan.
Köhnke, Klaus Christian, 1986 [1991], Entstehung und Aufstieg des
Neukantianismus: die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und
Positivismus, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated as The Rise of Neo-
Kantianism: German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism,
R. J. Hollingdale (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
  223

Kreines, James, 2015, Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and Its Philosophical
Appeal, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Krois, John Michael, 1987. Cassirer, Symbolic Forms and History. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Kuklick, Bruce, 1977, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1860–1930, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Kuklick, Bruce, 1985a, Josiah Royce: An Intellectual Biography, Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Co.
Kuklick, Bruce, 1985b, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to
John Dewey, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Kutschera, Franz v., 2006, Die Wege des Idealismus, Paderborn: Mentis.
Loeb, Louis E., 2002, Stability and Justification in Hume’s Treatise, New York: Oxford
University Press.
Lofts, Steven G., 2000, Ernst Cassirer: A “Repetition” of Modernity, Albany, NY:
SUNY Press.
Longuenesse, Béatrice, 1981 [2007], Hegel et la critique de la métaphysique: étude sur
la doctrine de l’essence, Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin. Translated as Hegel’s
Critique of Metaphysics, Nicole J. Simek (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511487262.
Luft, Sebastian, 2015, The Space of Culture: Towards a Neo-Kantian Philosophy of
Culture (Cohen, Natorp, and Cassirer), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McDowell, John, 2009, Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel and Sellars,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McLaughlin, Peter, 1990, Kant’s Critique of Teleology in Biological Explanation.
Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press.
Magee, Bryan, 1983, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Makkreel, Rudolf and Sebastian Luft, “Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians: The Dispute
over the Status of the Human and Natural Sciences,” in Moyar 2010: 554–97.
Makkreel, Rudolf and Sebastian Luft (eds.), 2010. Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary
Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mander, W. J., 1994, An Introduction to Bradley’s Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Mander, W. J., 1997, “McTaggart’s Argument for Idealism,” Journal of Speculative
Philosophy, 11(1): 53–72.
Mander, W. J. (ed.), 2000, Anglo-American Idealism, 1865–1927, Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press.
Mander, W. J., 2011, British Idealism: A History, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199559299.001.0001.
Mander, W. J., 2016, Idealist Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mander, W.J., 2020. The Unknowable: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British
Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mander, W. J. and Stamatoula Panagakou (eds.), 2016, British Idealism and the
Concept of the Self, London: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-46671-6.
Manser, Anthony, 1983, Bradleys Logic, Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books.
Martin, Wayne, 1997, Idealism and Objectivity: Understanding Fichte’s Jena Project,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
224 

Matherne, Samantha, 2021, Cassirer, London: Routledge.

Mink, Louis O., 1969, Mind, History, and Dialectic, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Moore, Adrian W., 2000, Points of View, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
doi:10.1093/0198250622.001.0001.
Moore, Adrian W., 2011, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of
Things, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139029223.
Moyar, Dean (ed.), 2010, The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century
Philosophy, London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203856581.
Muirhead, J. H., 1931, The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy: Studies in
the History of Idealism in England and America, London: George Allen and
Unwin.
Murphey, Murray G., 1961, The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Myers, Gustavus, 1925, The History of American Idealism, New York: Boni and
Liveright.
Nagel, Thomas, 1986, The View from Nowhere, New York: Oxford University Press.
Nagel, Thomas, 2012, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian
Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nauern, F.-G., 1971, Revolution, Idealism, and Human Freedom: Schelling, Hölderlin,
and Hegel and the Crisis of Early German Idealism, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Nehamas, Alexander, 1985, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Nehamas, Alexander, 1998, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to
Foucault, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Neuhouser, Frederick, 1990, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Nicholson, Peter P., 1990, The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists: Selected
Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Norman, Judith, and Alistair Welchman (eds.), 2004, The New Schelling, London:
Continuum.
O’Hear, Anthony (ed.), 1999, German Philosophy since Kant (Royal Institute of
Philosophy Supplements 44), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
doi:10.1017/CBO9780511524110.
O’Neill, Onora, 1975, Acting on Principle, New York: Columbia University Press.
Second edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Oppenheim, Frank J., SJ, 2005, Reverence for the Relations of Life: Re-Imagining
Pragmatism via Josiah Royce’s Interactions with Peirce, James, and Dewey, Notre
Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press.
Ostaric, Lara (ed.), 2014, Interpreting Schelling, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Passmore, John, 1966, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, second edition.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Paton, Herbert James, 1936, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience, 2 vols, London: George
Allen and Unwin.
  225

Paton, Herbert James, 1947, The Categorical Imperative, London: Hutchinson.

Pinkard, Terry P., 1994, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Pinkard, Terry P., 2000, Hegel: A Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Pinkard, Terry P., 2002, German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511801846.
Pippin, Robert B., 1989, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511621109.
Pippin, Robert B., 1997, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139172943.
Pippin, Robert B., 2019, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic and Metaphysics in the
Science of Logic, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pitcher, George, 1977, Berkeley, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Prauss, Gerold, 1974, Kant und das Problem der Ding an sich, Bonn: Bouvier Verlag.
Proops, Ian, 2021, The Fiery Test of Critique: A Reading of Kant’s Dialectic, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Quine, Willard Van Orman, 1951, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Philosophical
Review, 60: 20–43. Reprinted in From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1953.
Quinton, Anthony M., 1971, “Absolute Idealism,” Proceedings of the British
Academy, 57: 303–29. [Quinton 1971 available online.]
Rawls, John, 2000, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, Barbara Herman
(ed.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Redding, Paul, 2007, Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511487620.
Reginster, Bernard, 2021, The Will to Nothingness: An Essay on Nietzsche’s Genealogy
of Morals, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reich, Klaus, 1948, The Completeness of Kant’s Table of Judgments. Second edition,
Jane Kneller and Michael Losonsky (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1992.
Reich, Klaus, 2009, Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche, London: Routledge.
Rescher, Nicholas, 1973, Conceptual Idealism, Oxford: Blackwell.
Rescher, Nicholas, 1987, Ethical Idealism, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Rescher, Nicholas, 1991, Human Knowledge in Idealistic Perspective, Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Rescher, Nicholas, 2005, Reason and Reality: Realism and Idealism in Pragmatic
Perspective, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Rickless, Samuel C., 2013, Berkeley’s Argument for Idealism, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Rockmore, Tom, 2021, After Parmenides: Idealism, Realism, and Epistemic
Constructivism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rödl, Sebastian, 2018, Self-Consciousness and Objectivity: An Introduction to
Absolute Idealism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
226 

Rogers, Dorothy, 2005, America’s First Women Philosophers: Transplanting Hegel

1860–1925, London: Continuum.
Rosen, Gideon, 1994, “Objectivity and Modern Idealism: What Is the Question?,” in
Philosophy in Mind, Michaelis Michael and John O’Leary-Hawthorne (eds.),
Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 277–319. doi:10.1007/978-94-011-1008-
2_17.
Russell, Paul, 2008, The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and
Irreligion, New York: Oxford University Press.
Sandkühler, Hans Jörg (ed.), 2005, Handbuch deutscher Idealismus, Stuttgart:
J. B. Metzler.
Sassen, Brigitte (ed.), 2000, Kant’s Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the
Theoretical Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schiemann, Gregor, 2009, Hermann von Helmholt’s Mechanism: The Loss of
Certainty, Dordrecht: Springer.
Silk, M. S. and J. P. Stern, 1981, Nietzsche on Tragedy, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Snow, Dale E., 1996, Schelling and the End of Idealism, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Sprigge, T. L. S., 2006, The God of Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
doi:10.1093/0199283044.001.0001.
Sprigge, T. L. S., 2011, The Importance of Subjectivity: Selected Essays in Metaphysics
and Ethics, Leemon B. McHenry (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Stern, Robert, 1990, Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object, London: Routledge.
Stern, Robert, 2002, Routledge Philosophy Guide Book to Hegel and the
“Phenomenology of Spirit,” London: Routledge. Second edition, 2013.
Stern, Robert, 2009, Hegelian Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199239108.001.0001.
Stove, D. C., 1973, Probability and Hume’s Inductive Scepticism, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Strawson, Peter F., 1959, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, London:
Methuen.
Strawson, Peter F., 1966, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on the Critique of Pure
Reason, London: Methuen.
Stroud, Barry, 1977, Hume, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Stuart, Matthew, 2013, Locke’s Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, A. E., 1903, Elements of Metaphysics, London: Methuen.
Thomas, James, 1999, Intuition and Reality: A Study of the Attributes of Substance in
the Absolute Idealism of Spinoza, Dartmouth: Ashgate.
Tipton, Ian C., 1974, Berkeley: The Philosophy of Immaterialism, London: Methuen.
Truwent, Simon, 2022, Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Truwent, Simon (ed.), 2021, Interpreting Cassirer, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Vogel, Jonathan, 1993, “The Problem of Knowledge in Kant’s ‘Refutation of
Idealism’: Two Recent Views,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53
(4): 875–87.
  227

Watkins, Eric, 2005, Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Willmann, Otto, 1894–7, Geschichte des Idealismus, 3 vols., Braunschweig: F. Vieweg.
Winkler, Kenneth P., 1989, Berkeley: An Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Wolff, Michael, 1995, Kants Urteilstafel, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
Wollheim, Richard, 1959, Bradley, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Wood, Allen W., 1990, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139172257.
Young, Julian, 1987, Willing and Unwilling: A Study in the Philosophy of Arthur
Schopenhauer, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Young, Julian, 2005, Schopenhauer, London: Routledge.
Young, Juliam, 2010, Friedrich Nietzsche: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Zöller, Günter, 1998, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of
Intelligence and Will, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zuckert, Rachel, 2007, Kant on Biology and the Beautiful, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
 Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on
occasion, appear on only one of those pages.

Absolute, the 85–6, 89–90, 101–2, 131–3, Belief/faith (Glaube) 6–7, 17–18, 26–7, 43,
137–8, 203–4 47–8, 62–8, 75–6, 87–9, 108
Absolute presuppositions 174–6, 187–9, 191–2 web of 6–7, 177–8
Acquaintance 30–1, 155–8 Berkeley, George 2–3, 5, 25–8, 33–9, 41–2,
Activity 9–12, 71–2, 75–6, 78–85, 91–2, 102–10 54–5, 58, 76–7, 105–6, 142–3, 150–3,
Adams, Robert M. 15–16, 21 157–8, 183–4, 203–4
Aestheticism 119–21 Berlin, Isaiah 70–1
Aesthetics 59–60, 119–21, 164–5 Bildung 200–1
Albert Memorial 175–6 Bird, Graham 54
Alexander, Samuel 33–4, 164–5 Blanshard, Brand 125–7, 178–81, 183–4
Allais, Lucy 54 Body 9–10, 20–1, 65–6, 112–13. See also Matter
Allison, Henry 54, 56–7, 63–4, 66–7 Bosanquet, Bernard 5–6, 121–3
Ameriks, Karl 72–3 Bowman, Ethel 39–40
Analytic philosophy vii, 121–4, 150, 159, Bradley, Francis Herbert 5–6, 121–3, 125–7,
177–8, 182–5, 189–90, 205–6 129–34, 137–9, 142–3, 149–51, 157–9,
Antinomies 40, 87–9, 203–4 181–4, 203–4
Anti-psychologism 166, 184–5 Brandom, Robert 177–8, 184–5
Appearance 12–13, 47–52, 56–7, 60–2, 70–1, Bristow, William F. 87–9
97–8, 112–13 Broackes, Justin viii
Apperception 55, 62–3, 75–6 Broad, Charlie Dunbar 132–3
Aristotle 101–2, 200–1
Armstrong, David 10–11 Caird, Edward 125–7
Arndt, Andreas 72–3 Carl, Wolfgang 51
Art 66–7, 85, 176–7 Carnap, Rudolf 4–5, 121–3, 159, 177–8,
Atomism, logical 125–7, 152–5 183–4
Atwell, John 110 Carritt, E. F. 178–9
Austin, John Langshaw 205–6 Cartwright, David 110
Ayer, Alfred Jules 205–6 Carus, A. W. 177–8
Cassirer, Ernst 121–4, 159, 161–2, 167–78
Bauer, Bruno 160–1 Categorical imperative 63–6, 71–2
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 9, 14, 21, Causality 36–7, 41–2, 44, 58, 60–2
23–4, 68 Chalmers, David 10–11, 182
Beauty 7–8, 66–7 Character, empirical and intelligible 61–2,
Beaney, Michael 121–3 64–5, 67–8
Beattie, James 44 Clark, Maudemarie 114
Beebee, Helen 42–3 Clendenning, John 138–9
Beck, Lewis White 64–5 Cognition/knowledge 17–18, 26–8, 36–7,
Being, conceptions of 140–1 41–2, 55, 68–9, 78–9, 83–6, 94–5,
Beiser, Frederic C. 70–1, 73–6, 87–9, 160–1, 98–9
164–5, 167–8 a priori 2–3, 48–9, 59–60
230 

Cohen, Hermann 159, 162–9, 184–5 Existentialism 184–5

Coherentism 197–8 Experience 31–2, 43, 47–50, 96–101
Collier, Arthur 25–6, 33–4, 39–42, 55–6 Explanation 67–8
Collingwood, Robin George 174–7, 187–9,
191–2, 195–6 Falckenberg, Richard 6
Concepts 20, 26–7, 34–5, 47–8, 55, 68, Fascism 168–9
76–7, 83–5, 94, 98–9, 103–9, 154–5, Feder, J. G. H. 50, 57
203–4 Feuerbach, Ludwig 160–1
Consciousness 27–8, 58, 71–2 Feyerabend, Paul 183
Contextualism 187 Fichte, Immanuel Herman 160–1
Continental philosophy 182–5, 189–90 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 9–10, 12, 56–7, 68,
Contradiction 66, 87–9 72–3, 75–93, 99–100, 105–6, 108–11,
Croce, Benedetto 174–5, 193–4 162–3, 167, 204–5
Cudworth, Ralph 26–7 Flew, Antony 41–2
Cultural sciences 168–9. See also Human Flower, Elizabeth 6, 138–9, 143–4
sciences Förster, Eckart 50, 73–4
Fogelin, Robert J. 41–2, 44
Danto, Arthur Coleman 114, 176–7 Force 9–13, 76–7, 85
Davidson, Donald 4–5, 10–11, 121–3, 197–8 Forms 12–13, 47–8, 58, 103–4
Dedekind, Richard 142 Plato’s theory of 7–8, 22, 203–4
De Pierris, Graciella 41–2 symbolic, see Symbolic forms
Descartes, René 8–10, 14–19, 25–7, 32–3, Foster, John 125–7, 181–2
39–40, 42–3, 45–6, 58, 106–8, 168–9 Foucault, Michel 189–90
deVries, Willem 3, 194, 196–7 Foundationalism 187
Determinism 169 Freedom (of the will) 7–8, 50–2, 59–65,
Dewey, John 125–7, 184–5 73–5, 161–2
Dialectic 55–6 Frege, Gottlob 121–3, 166, 184–5
Dicker, Georges 34–7 Friedman, Michael 121–3, 159, 168–9, 177–8
di Giovanni, George 72–3 Fulda, Hans Friedrich 87–9, 92–3
Dilthey, Wilhelm 161–2, 182–3 Functions 121–3, 169–71
Dogmatism 76–7, 89–92, 111
D’Oro, Giuseppina 176–7 Garber, Daniel 15–16
Dualism 10–11, 15–16, 21, 23 Gardiner, Patrick 110
Dunham, Jeremy 4 Garve, Christian 50–2, 57
Dussen, W.J. van der 176–7 Garrett, Don 41–2, 44
Geach, Peter 132–3
Einstein, Albert 168–9 Given, the Myth of the 194–6, 198
Empiricism 26–7, 44, 95–6, 121–3, 192–3. God 16–17, 22, 38–9, 50–2, 55–6, 65–6,
See also Social empiricism 74–5, 142–3, 203–4
Emundts, Dina 50, 58, 87–9 Goodman, Nelson 177–8
Enlightenment 70–3 Gordon, Peter E. 160, 168–9
anti- 70–1 Grant, Iain Hamilton 4
Epicurus 12–13 Green, Thomas Hill 5–6, 22, 33–4, 41–2,
Erklären 161–2 121–3, 125–9, 141–3, 182–4
Error, argument from 139–40 Guyer, Paul 54, 66–8, 70–1, 176–7
Eschenbach, Johann Christian 39
Ethics 60–5 Haering, Theodor 50
Evil, radical 66 Hamann, Johann Georg 70–1
Ewing, A. C. 3–5 Harmony, pre-established 9, 20–3
Existence 38, 66–7, 74–9, 106–8 Hatfield, Gary 160
  231

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 9–10, 12, Idiographic sciences 161–4

56–7, 59–60, 72–3, 83–110, 121–3, Immaterialism 2–3, 27–8, 34, 36–7
125–7, 132, 141, 147, 155, 160–3, 174–5, Immortality 60, 65–6
180, 184–5, 193–4, 196–7, 202–5 Impression 27–8, 42–4
Heidegger, Martin 160, 162–3, 168–9, 182–3 Induction 44
Helmholtz, Hermann von 160 Infinitesimals 164–7
Hempel, Carl Gustav 121–3 Intelligence 23, 65–6, 85
Henrich, Dieter viii, 72–3, 78, 87–9 Introspection 135–6
Herder, Johann Gottfried 70–1 Intuition 17–18, 47–8, 55, 68, 85
Highest good 59–60, 65–6
Hill, R. Kevin 114 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 59–60, 70–2, 75–6
Hobbes, Thomas 25–30 Jacquette, Dale 110
Hofweber, Thomas 5 Jaeschke, Walter 72–3
Holt, E. B. 150 James, William 125–7, 142–4, 149–50, 184–5
Horstmann, Rolf-Peter 129 Janaway, Christopher 110
Human sciences 161–4, 168–9, 171–2. Joachim, Harold H. 178–9
See also Cultural sciences Joseph, H. W. B. 178–9
Humboldt, Wilhelm von 200–1 Jowett, Benjamin 125–7
Hume, David 25–6, 41–8, 59–60, 75–6, 111, Judgment 47–8, 66–7, 78–81, 94, 103–4, 169
117–18, 127, 166 Judaism 164–5
Husserl, Edmund 91–2, 162–3, 166, 184–5,
205–6 Kant, Immanuel 2–3, 9–12, 40–1, 47–69,
Hyder, David 160 71–5, 94–5, 97–9, 108–12, 114–15,
Hylton, Peter 153 118, 121, 127–8, 141, 144, 152, 160–9,
171, 177–8, 194–8, 201–5
Idea 4, 22, 26–7, 30–1, 34, 41–2, 55–6, 106–8 Kemp Smith, Norman 41–2, 44
Idealism vii, 1–3, 121–3 Kim, Jaegwon 10–11
absolute 15–16, 85–6, 110 Kreines, James 103–4
Anglophone 5–6, 121–49 Krois, John Michael 168–9
critical 2–3, 57, 169 Kuhn, Thomas 174–5, 177–8
definitions of 1–3, 5, 12–13 Kuklick, Bruce 6, 142–4
dogmatic 2–3, 14
epistemological arguments for vii, 4–8, Lambert, Johann Heinrich 59–60
16–17, 25–6, 110–11, 114, 117, 119, Larmore, Charles viii
123–9, 131–2, 137, 139–44, 157–8, Law 55–6, 60, 64–5, 79–80
161–2, 164, 177–8, 196–7, 199, 204–6 Lebensphilosophie 182–3
metaphysical (ontological) arguments Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 9, 12–16, 18–21,
for vii, 4–8, 25–6, 38, 40, 111, 119, 23–6, 31–2, 37–8, 47–9, 68, 103–4,
125–7, 129–31, 133–8, 143–4, 157–8, 137–8, 166–9
172–3, 176–7, 201–4 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 70–1
Nietzsche on 114–17, 121–3 Lewis, Clarence Irving 178–9
practical 50 Liebmann, Otto 159
objective 83–5 Locke, John 25–6, 30–4, 36–7, 166
refutation of 2–3, 23 Loeb, Louis E. 41–2
Kant’s 54–5 Lofts, Steven 168–9
Moore’s 150–2 Logic 28, 92–3, 100–1, 104–5
subjective 83, 86–7, 102–3 Logical positivism 205–6
transcendental 2–3, 47–52, 55–8, 74–5, Longuenesse, Béatrice 87–9
108–9, 111, 121, 201–2 Lotze, Rudolf Hermann 160–3
Identity 41–2, 71–2, 83, 85–94, 100–1, 106–8 Love 66, 133–4
232 

Lovejoy, Arthur O. 150 Newtonian physics 166, 169, 171

Luft, Sebastian 168–9 Nietzsche, Friedrich 114–23
Nomothetic sciences 161–4
Magee, Brian 110 Norris, John 40
Malebranche, Nicolas 9, 15–16, 22, 26–7, Noumena 48–9, 61–2, 177–8. See also
36–8, 40, 50 Things in themselves
Mander, W. J. 5–6, 125–7, 132–3
Marx, Karl 108–9, 160–1 Objectivity, objective 7–8, 73–4, 85–6,
Masham, Damaris 26–7 99–100
Materialism 4, 15–16, 27–8, 36–7, 62–3, Occasionalism 9, 22
90–1, 121–3, 172–3. See also Matter Ontology 18–19, 25–6, 76–7, 83–5, 108–9
Mathematics 52–4, 170–1 Oppenheim, Frank J. 6, 138–9
Matherne, Samantha 168–9 Organism, organic 66–7, 96–7
Matter 8, 18–19, 50, 83–5, 135, 172–3.
See also Body, Materialism Pain 37–8
McDowell, John 179, 184–5, 194, 197–202 Panagakou, Stamapoula 5–6
McLaughlin, Kevin viii Panpsychism 181–2
McLaughlin, Peter 67–8 Paradigms 177–8
McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis 5, 121–3, Parr, Samuel 39
125–7, 132–8, 142–3, 150, 183–4 Passmore, John 121–3, 131–3
Mead, George Herbert 184–5 Peirce, Benjamin 143–4
Meaning 139–40 Peirce, Charles Sanders 125–7, 138–9, 142–9,
Mendelssohn, Moses 59–60, 70–1, 164–5 161–2, 167–8, 177–8, 184–5, 195–7
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 182–3, 205–6 Perception 19–20, 39, 41–2, 44–5, 135–7
Metaphysics 26–7, 33–4, 52, 67–8, 94, Perfectionism 127
103–4, 175–6. See also Idealism, Perry, Ralph Barton 150
metaphysical arguments for Perspectivism 114, 117–19
Meysenburg, Malwida von 114 Phenomena 20–1, 48–9, 68, 85, 177–8.
Mill, John Stuart 125–7, 166 See also Appearance
Mind, the mental 2, 8, 22, 27–8, 38–9, 45–6, Phenomenalism 118–19
60–1, 74–5, 85–6, 106–8, 128–9, 132, Phenomenology 92–104, 182–5, 205–6
137–8, 141–3 Physicalism 203–4
Mink, Louis O. 176–7 Pinkard, Terry 72–3, 87–9
Monads, monadology 18–19 Pippin, Robert 87–9, 103–4
Monism 12–13, 16–17, 41–2, 85–6, 108, 125–7 Plato 5, 7–8, 12–13, 22, 48–9, 87–9, 115–16,
Moore, George Edward 121–7, 129–30, 153, 157, 203–4
132–3, 136, 150–5, 159, 175–8, 183–7 Pluralism 15–16
Morality 50, 60, 63–4, 66, 68–9 Positivism 118. See also Logical positivism
Murphey, Murray G. 6, 138–9, 143–4 Pragmatism 27–8, 97–8, 125–7, 149, 196–7
Prauss, Gerold 54
Nagel, Thomas 182 Presuppositions, see Absolute presuppositions
Natorp, Paul 159, 168–9 Principle 28–9, 55, 63–4, 78–9, 108–9
Nature 50–2, 60, 63–9, 83–6 Proops, Ian 52, 55–6
second 199–202 Propositions 20, 29, 34–5, 54, 80–1, 153–4
Naturalism 182, 185, 199–202 Protagoras 196–7
Nehamas, Alexander 114, 116 Purpose, purposiveness 59–60, 66–7, 141
Neo-Kantianism 121–4, 159–73, 177–8, Putnam, Hilary 121–3, 177–8
182–4, 193–4, 196–7, 199–200, 205–6
Neo-Platonism 26–7 Qualities 129–31
New Realists 125–7, 150, 177–8 Quine, Willard Van Orman 4–5, 121–3,
Newton, Isaac 17, 166–7, 174–5 177–8, 180, 183–4, 189–90
  233

Rationalism 12, 26–7 Sensation 22, 29, 36, 85

Rationality, rational 64–5, 70–3 Sense data 157–8, 194–5
Realism 36–7, 75–6, 86, 106–8, 114, 137, Sensibility, sensible 47–8, 55, 74–5. See also
175–6, 185, 194 Receptivity
empirical 47–8, 58, 74–5 Silk, M. S. 116
Reason 27–8, 44, 55–6, 62–3, 74–5, 108 Skepticism 15–16, 18–19, 25–6, 33–4, 38–9,
fact of 50, 55–6, 65–6 44, 74, 111, 119–21, 203–4
Receptivity 62, 199–200 Smart, J. J. C. 10–11
Re-enactment 176–7 Social empiricism 187, 190–1
Reginster, Bernard 116 Socrates 119–21
Regulative ideal 48–9, 167–8 Space 20–1, 47–8, 57–8, 111–12
Reid, Thomas 39, 44 Spirit 23–4, 27–8, 32, 96–7, 103–4, 193–4.
Reichenbach, Hans 121–3, 159 See also Mind
Relations 41–2, 104–5, 129–31, 179–81 Spiritualism 129–38
Relativism 70–1 Spontaneity 55–6, 71–2, 197–8
Relativity 168–9 Sprigge, Timothy L. S. 125–7, 181–2
Religion 41–2, 66, 164–5 Strawson, Peter 8
Representations 144–7 Stern, J. P. 116
Rescher, Nicholas 5 Stern, Robert 87–9, 103–4
Resentment (ressentiment) 116–17 Steward, Dugald 39
Rickert, Heinrich 161–4, 167, 199–200 Steward, Matthew 33–4
Rickless, Samuel C. 34–5 Stove, Donald C. 42–3
Rockmore, Tom 4–5 Strauss, David Friedrich 160–1
Royce, Josiah 5–7, 22, 121–3, 125–7, Stroud, Barry 41–2, 44
138–44, 147, 149–50, 161–2, 177–8, Subjectivity, subjective 85–6, 89–90
182–4, 203–4 Sublimity 66–7
Russell, Bertrand 121–7, 129–30, 132–3, Substance, substantial 9–12, 17, 20, 31,
135–6, 142–3, 151–3, 155–9, 175–8, 33–4, 42–3, 45–6, 60–1, 76–7, 102–3,
183–4 133–8
Russell, Paul 41–2 Sulzer, Johann Georg 59–60
Symbolic forms 121–3, 169, 171–3
St. Louis Hegelians 138–9 Symbolism: in Peirce 144–5
Sassen, Brigitte 50, 57 in Cassirer: see Symbolic forms
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Josef 9–10, Synechism 148–9
68, 83–7, 90–1, 105–6, System 48–9, 72–3, 87–90
182–4, 203–4
Schiemann, Gregor 160 Tarski, Alfred 95–6
Scholasticism 26–7 Teleology 60
Schopenhauer, Arthur 110–14, 119–23, 132 Things in themselves 62, 112–14, 128,
Science 28, 68, 77–8, 93–4, 194. See also 161–2, 167–8, 201–2
Cultural Sciences, Human Sciences, Thought, thinking 18–19, 34–5, 55, 75–6,
Idiographic Sciences, Nomothetic 101–2, 106–8
Sciences Time, temporal 21, 48–9, 54–7, 60–1,
Scott, George Gilbert 175–6 111–12, 134–6
Self 27–8, 44–5, 55–6, 59–60 Tragedy 119–21
Self-consciousness 55, 68–9, 71–2, 75–8. Transcendental psychology 166
See also Apperception Transcendentalists 138–9
Sellars, Roy Wood 150, 178–9 Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf 160–1
Sellars, Wilfrid 128, 150, 177–8, 184–5, Truth 17–18, 95–6, 114–15, 137,
194–8 156, 179
234 

Truwent, Simon 168–9 Weisse, Christian Hermann 160–1

Tychism 149 Weltbilder 187–93
Whitehead, Alfred North 9–12
Ullian, Joseph 177–8 Will 60, 64–5, 85, 112–14. See also Freedom
Understanding 48–9, 55, 67–8, 73–4 of the will
Universals 156–7 Wilson, John Cook 175–6
Utilitarianism 127 Windelband, Wilhelm 159, 161–4
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 123–4,
Validity 48–9, 66–7, 73–4, 161–2 185–96
Value 160–2 Wolff, Christian 9, 12–14, 23–4, 31
Verstehen 161–2 Wilson, Margaret Dauler viii
Vico, Giam Battista 174–5 Wizenmann, Thomas 70–1
Vienna Circle 159, 205–6 World 55–6, 62–3, 70–1,
Vitalism 184–5 94, 106–8
Vogel, Jonathan 58
Young, Julian 110, 114
Wagner, Richard 119–21
Watson, Sean 4 Zalta, Ed viii
Weber, Max 199–200 Zuckert, Rachel 67–8