Transcendental Versus Linguistic Idealism
Transcendental Versus Linguistic Idealism
This chapter explores Hegel’s broad and unusual definition of idealism. Owing to the long history and varied subtypes of idealism furnished by preceding philosophers, much of Hegel’s energies are focused on contextualizing these various forms. Thus this chapter begins with a broad sketch of that project, showing how Hegel disentangled and crystallized various strains of thought on this subject. However, when it comes to the idealism of Hegel’s own time, his project is the opposite; he tries to run together approaches that are, even on the surface, not only different but opposed to one another. At its conclusion this chapter contemplates Hegel’s emphasis on the importance of linguistics in shaping cognition. This view—linguistic idealism—redirects philosophy’s search for origins away from transcendental faculties and toward the history not of what we can know but of what we can say: toward the evolution of our basic words.
Keywords: linguistic idealism, Kant, Hegel, Berkley, Jakob Friedrich Fries, idealism
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