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Hegel, Humility, and the Possibility of Intrinsic Properties1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2013

Jonathan L. Shaheen
Jonathan L. Shaheen*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, [email protected]
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Abstract

Rae Langton (1998) offers a non-idealist interpretation of Kantian things in themselves according to which we have no knowledge of things in themselves – the intrinsic nature of things – just because our epistemic access to things is via their relational, non-intrinsic properties. Whatever the merits of her account as an interpretation of Kant's metaphysics, its plausibility presupposes the coherence of her notion of intrinsic properties. According to the account of intrinsic properties Langton uses, as we will see, there are only intrinsic properties if certain worlds are possible. Allais (2006) attacks one half of the modal intuitions on which Langton relies, but is adequately rebutted by Langton (2006). This paper discusses another, far more radical critique of the other half of the modal intuitions underlying Langton's account of intrinsic properties, intuitions which are also the basis of Langton and Lewis' (1998) account of the same. The account of intrinsicness under fire here depends on the possibility of objects existing alone in worlds in which no other objects (not counting their parts) exist. But according to Hegel's Logik, such worlds are simply not possible. To develop this critique, we cast a broad net by linking Langton (1998) with Lewis (2009) and Langton and Lewis (1998), and then consider (in a necessarily limited fashion) claims from the 1832, Lehre vom Sein in Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik, which we consult in the edition of Hegel (2008). The primary aim of this paper is to offer a clear model of the modal error which Hegel purports to identify, and to show its application to Langton's work.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 32 , Special Issue 1-2: Special Issue on Kant and Hegel , 2011 , pp. 100 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2011

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Footnotes

1

This article is a lightly revised version of a paper presented at the 2010 joint conference of the Hegel Society of Great Britain and the UK Kant Society. I am grateful to the audience at that conference for their many useful suggestions, only a fraction of which I have been able to incorporate here. Thanks are also due to Dennis Schulting, who graciously repeated much of the material on Hegel's Faith and Knowledge-era theory of judgement until I began to understand it, and Stefan Pliquett, who patiently denied that I had uncovered an adequate account of Hegel?s derivation of Other long enough for me finally to do so, whenever he wasn't busy answering questions about how to translate untranslatable bits of German. I am unsure whether they would accept the accounts as presently written, but if anyone does, it is quite a bit to their credit.

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