THE LIMITS OF NATURALISM AND THE METAPHYSICS OF GERMAN IDEALISM

Abstract

One issue above all forces itself on anyone attempting to make sense of the development of German idealism out of Kant. Is German idealism, in the full sense of the term, metaphysical? The wealth of new anglophone, chiefly North American, writing on German idealism, particularly on Hegel – characterized by remarkable depth, rigour, and creativity – has put the perennial question of German idealism’s metaphysicality back under the spotlight, and in much of this new scholarship a negative answer is returned to the question. Recent interpretation of German idealism owes much to the broader philosophical environment in which it has proceeded. Over recent decades analytic philosophy has enlarged its view of the discipline’s scope and relaxed its conception of the methods appropriate to philosophical enquiry, and in parallel to this development analytically trained philosophers have returned to the history of philosophy, the study of which is now regarded by many as a legitimate and important (perhaps even necessary) form of philosophical enquiry. At the same time, it remains the case that the kinds of philosophical positions most intensively worked on and argued about in non-historical, systematic analytic philosophy are predominantly naturalistic – and thus, on the face of it, not in any immediate and obvious sense receptive to the central ideas of German idealism. A primary impulse in recent work on German idealism has been, however, to indicate the consonance, unobvious though it may be, between German idealism, or portions thereof, and some of the leading strands in major systematic positions explored and defended within analytic philosophy. Characteristic of