2018/02/07 by Joshua Wretzel
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Critical Theory and Philosophy #Philosophical Ethics and Theory #Philosophy, Science, and History
paper · doi:10.1111/ejop.12328
openalex publication_date 2018/02/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Abstract This paper concerns Hegel's early treatment of the productive imagination in his 1803–1804 Faith and Knowledge . I show how he articulates that activity in terms of a pair of speculative unities, which solve lingering problems of self‐knowledge and self‐constitution from Kant's B‐deduction. On the one hand, I argue that the familiar unity of spontaneity and receptivity makes possible knowledge of the moment of self‐positing. On the other hand, I contend that Hegel's talk of imagination as both an “organic idea” and an “intuitive intellect” refers to a self‐constituting capacity that intellects like ours possess. I show that self‐constitution is possible, for Hegel, only in so far as intellects like ours possess a capacity to unify possibility and actuality in thought, or to think themselves into being.