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Synthesis and Being
Essays on Kant and Hegel

work in progress (all in draft form)

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I had planned to write a new book with the title Synthesis and Being. From Kant to Hegel, which was to be based on material that I had written between 2018 and 2023 and which hadn't found its way in either Apperception and Self-Consciousness in Kant and German Idealism (2021) or The Bounds of Transcendental Logic (2022). Some of it is material that concerns discussion of work of others (e.g. a review essay on Caimi's 2014 book on the Deduction), replies to critique of my own work, and a discussion of both Houlgate's and Pippin's reading of Hegel. Some of it concerns more substantial reflections, and expansions, on topics from my first monograph Kant's Deduction From Apperception (2012, 2019). The plan was to refashion all of this in such a way that a decent publishable monograph would result, where the themes and discussions could be fleshed out some more, and the particularities of the context in which some of the discussion had taken place could be trimmed. But personal circumstances no longer permit me to dedicate the time needed to such a project.

Instead, I have collated the existing material as a compilation of essays, but still as chapters in some way constituting a book with an introduction (still to be written). Chapter 5 is not yet finished, but will be added later. Chapters 7 and 8 are based on the essays that appeared on my Substack, but they have been expanded with newer material that resulted from my reading of Stephen Houlgate's latest two-volume tome Hegel on Being. Chapter 9 is a planned commentary on the first two chapters of the Being Logic, based on the lecture notes from my MA classes on Hegel's Logic which I gave in Amsterdam between 2009 and 2011. Whether this will happen depends on whether I can find the time to finally sort all the notes. 
 
Below is the Table of Contents with links to the most current versions in PDF of the chapters provided.  

Note that this is very much a work in progress, which might at some point, in some alternate form, be published as a proper book after all. 

Beware that all of this material is copyrighted, so you still need to cite and/or quote in the proper way.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

1. Prolegomena to Any Future Possible Reading of Kant and Hegel

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PART I: KANT

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2. Apperception and Object. On A Central Line of Argumentation in the B-Deduction 

   [published version in: Revista de Estudios Kantianos 2022]

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3. Intuition, Objectivity and Objective Validity

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4. Synthesis, Schmimagination and Regress

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5. The Identity Thesis and Judgement. On the Leitfaden Once Again

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PART II: HEGEL

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6. Logic and Content: The Metaphysical Deduction Revisited

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7. The Difference Between the Houlgatian and Pippinian Interpretations of Hegel

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8. Sheer Being and Thought

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9. Commentary on the Being Logic, Chapters 'Sein' & 'Dasein'

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Bibliography

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    "Die Beschäftigung mit geistigen Dingen ist mittlerweile selber 'praktisch', zu einem Geschäft mit strenger Arbeitsteilung, mit Branchen und numerus clausus geworden. Der materiell Unabhängige, der sie aus Widerwillen gegen die Schmach des Geldverdienens wählt, wird nicht geneigt sein, das anzuerkennen. Dafür wird er bestraft. Er ist kein 'professional', rangiert in der Hierarchie der Konkurrenten als Dilettant, gleichgültig wieviel er sachlich versteht, und muß, wenn er Karriere machen will, den stursten Fachmann an entschlossener Borniertheit womöglich noch übertrümpfen.... Die Departementalisierung des Geistes ist ein Mittel, diesen dort abzuschaffen, wo er nicht ex officio, im Auftrag betrieben wird."

    —Theodor Adorno, MINIMA MORALIA

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