Hegel: Call for Graduate Papers

There is a call for papers out for the 2007 HSGB Annual Conference. Details reprinted below.
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CALL FOR GRADUATE PAPERS

There will be a graduate session at the annual conference of the Hegel Society of Great Britain in 2007. The theme of the conference will be Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and it will be held on 10-12 September 2007, at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. The graduate session will involve two half-hour papers, and a half hour discussion.

To submit a paper for consideration, please send FOUR printed copies to:

Prof Robert Stern
Department of Philosophy
University of Sheffield
Sheffield S10 2TN
UK

by THURSDAY 1ST MARCH 2007.

To be eligible, you must be registered as an MA or PhD student at the time of the conference. The paper can be on any topic related to the Phenomenology.

Other speakers at the conference will include Frederick Besier, Stephen Houlgate, James Kreines, Robert Pippin, Catherine Sembou, Ken Westphal.

For further information on the HSGB see:
http://www.hsgb.group.shef.ac.uk/index.html

Fichte on NDPR

Read Christian Lotz's review of (TPN contributors) Günter Zöller & Dan Breazeale's translation of Fichte's, A System of Ethics here.

Haddock on McDowell

[*Update: The password protection has now been removed. Enjoy.]

Adrian Haddock came to Essex yesterday to give a really interesting paper, "McDowell and Transcendental Idealism". In it he argued that the transcendental and the naturalist elements in McDowell's philosophy are in tension. The transcendental part is the contention that there is no tract of reality beyond the conceptual sphere, that no aspect of the world is unthinkable. The naturalistic part is the claim the the thinking subject is (essentially) an embodied presence in the world.

The tension appears when we notice that the very fact of our embodiment may place limits on what we can think, such that a gap opens up between what is thinkable per se and what is thinkable by us (embodied subjects). To motivate this thought, consider Nagel's suggestion that we can conceive of 'higher beings' that are to us as we are to nine year olds. Such higher beings may be able to think thoughts that for us, due to our embodied nature, unthinkable. Or, we can entertain the thought that there might be objects about which we can never entertain de re thoughts, because we cannot come into the appropriate causal relationships with them.

But given the naturalistic element of McDowell's philosophy, there is to be no gap between what is thinkable per se and what is thinkable by us. It seems that something has to go, either the transcendental claim that no aspect of the world is unthinkable, or the naturalistic claim that the subject of experience is necessarily embodied.

I'll mention a couple of quesitons that arose in discussion.

(1) Surely the move from being embodied to there being limitations on what is thinkable by us is rather quick. Might it not be that an adequate account of embodiment would block the argument. After all, McDowell says precious little about exactly how he conceives the subject's essential embodiment.

(2) Doesn't Nagel's thought experiment beg the question against McDowell? For in order to support the contention that there are possibly some thoughts that are unthinkable by all possible embodied thinking subjects, the 'higher beings' must be disembodied. But this just flatly contradicts McDowell's claim that all thinking subjects are essentially embodied. To the extent that we have independent reason to accept McDowell's naturalism, we shouldn't be moved by Nagel's 'higher beings'.