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UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Kant, Hegel, and The UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Kant, Hegel, and the Transcendental Unity of Apperception DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Philosophy by Kourosh Christian Alizadeh Dissertation Committee: Associate Professor Jeremy Heis, Chair Assistant Professor Marcello Oreste Fiocco Professor Karl Schafer 2019 © 2019 Kourosh Christian Alizadeh DEDICATION To small things ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v CURRICULUM VITAE vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION viii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: Kant’s Transcendental Unity of Apperception 7 Kant’s Primary Goals in the Critique 7 Kant’s Conception of Experience 12 The Transcendental Unity of Apperception 22 Kant’s Answer to Metaphysical Skepticism 35 Understanding and Reason 40 CHAPTER 2: Hegel’s Criticism of Kant 53 The Transcendental Unity of Apperception in German Idealism 55 The Restriction of the Transcendental Unity of Apperception 63 Three Other Hegelian Objections 77 Responses and Alternative Readings 96 Conclusion - The History of Philosophy 106 CHAPTER 3: Hegel’s Thought and the Transcendental Unity of Apperception 109 Criticisms of Kant 110 Hegel’s Solution - Thought 114 The Hegelian Dialectic 132 Thought as the Successor to the Transcendental Unity of Apperception 148 Alternative Interpretation 160 CONCLUSION 175 BIBLIOGRAPHY 178 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express the deepest appreciation and gratitude to my central advisor, Associate Professor Jeremy Heis, who was my committee chair. He was my guide throughout the dissertation process from its tiny beginning as a comparison of Hegel and Wittgenstein to this, its culmination. His constant encouragement and well-articulated feedback were what made this dissertation possible, and I felt every day how lucky I was to have him as my mentor through this. I would also like to thank my committee members, Professor Karl Schafer and Associate Professor Marcello Oreste Fiocco. Karl was an invaluable aid in navigating the secondary literature, and his eye for detail and gentle manner helped me through many a conceptual tangle. I had been taking classes with Mark before I even officially enrolled at UCI, and while my dissertation ultimately went in a different direction, his approach to philosophy and focus on clean and clear writing were enormous positive influences on me. My work with him at the TH!NK program also opened my eyes to new perspectives on what philosophy is and how to share it with the world, and I thank him for that opportunity. In addition, I want to be sure to thank Professor Ermanno Bencivenga, whose writing on Kant and Hegel was crucial to my thinking on them, and whose reading group was a constant source of intellectual stimulation. Last, I want to thank all the people who supported me in non-academic ways, without whose help I would not have been able to even start this project, much less finish it: my father, who raised us all with philosophy from birth; my mother, whose unconditional love gave me the iv strength to carry through; my brother and sister, who were always cheering me on; my aunt Sharareh, who was a constant emotional support to me through all the difficult periods when I felt like giving up; the rest of my family, whose love of learning and care for one another inspired me and kept me going through the whole process; my partner Ashley, who made the jizzertation fun; my cohort-mates Adam Sanders, Dylan Popowicz, and Jacob Heim, who went through it all with me; Professor Candice Shelby at the University of Colorado, who encouraged my first steps into philosophy and made me feel I could actually do it; Sean Sanders, without whose late night conversations I don’t think I would have survived; Suz Michelle, who always supported my work and gave me the best advice; my UCI Libraries coworkers, with whom I worked through my entire graduate career, and who showed me that there was a world outside of academia; the Meme Chat crew, who showed me the only form of ethical consumption under capitalism; and all my magical friends - Bishop Bliss, Stephen Bretall, Nathan Puchalski, Tom Crowther, Denis McGovern, Daniel Wright, Chris Tolar, Ryan Borashan, Warren Doller, Kevin Kiang, Kevin Celinder, Mike Chung, Carter Barsh, Travis Young, Dylan Feeman, & Nicolas Johnson, among so many more. Finally, thank you also to the fish in the sea (and the sea itself) for being so stunningly beautiful at all times. v CURRICULUM VITAE Kourosh Christian Alizadeh 2012 B.A. summa cum laude in Philosophy, University of Colorado, Denver ​ ​ 2014-19 Graduate Student Assistant, UCI Libraries Department of Development 2015 Graduate Student Research Assistant, UCI Humanities Commons 2015-19 Teaching Assistant, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Irvine 2015-19 TH!NK Program Facilitator and Coordinator 2016 Graduate Student Research Assistant, UCI Humanities Commons 2016 M.A. in Philosophy, University of California, Irvine 2017 Humanities Out There Public Fellow, Santa Ana Public Libraries 2017-19 Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, California State University, Long Beach FIELD OF STUDY Kant, Hegel, German Idealism, Chinese and Japanese Philosophy vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Kant, Hegel, and the Transcendental Unity of Apperception By Kourosh Christian Alizadeh Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy University of California, Irvine, 2019 Associate Professor Jeremy Heis, Chair This dissertation focuses on the transcendental unity of apperception in the work of two major German philosophers: Kant and Hegel. The transcendental unity of apperception was first described by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, where he gave it pride of place in his system of ​ ​ transcendental idealism. There, it was posited as a condition on the subject’s representations, such that they must form a necessary unity in order to constitute experience of an object. While Hegel does not make the phrase ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ a central one his work, he and other post-Kantian German idealists can be read as transforming this central Kantian insight. Specifically, as I argue in my second chapter, Hegel criticizes Kant’s construal of the unity of apperception as a condition among representations alone, and several commonly distinguished Hegelian criticisms of Kant can be understood as consequences of this central objection. Hegel’s criticism of Kant on this point also creates a valuable point of entry into his own sometimes-obscure positive philosophical claims. In the third chapter, I make use of this by identifying Hegel’s conception of Thought as the successor concept to the transcendental unity of apperception in Kant. By reading Thought as a transformation of the unity of apperception - a transformation that takes it from a condition on representations to a condition on reality as a vii whole - I am able to provide a reading of Hegel that does justice to his more metaphysically-loaded texts as well as to his claims to be doing properly post-Kantian metaphysics. viii 5/28/2019 Numbered Section - Google Docs INTRODUCTION “Kant and Hegel disagree on their answer to the question: what is the unity of apperception?”1 - Béatrice Longuenesse The aim of this dissertation is simple: to describe the transformation of an idea. More specifically, that idea is the transcendental unity of apperception originally put forward by Kant. My aim is to study how Hegel takes this idea and transforms it from a condition on the subject’s representations to a condition on reality as a whole.2 That Kant and Hegel are philosophers worthy of study is a claim that needs no defense; both could legitimately claim to among the most influential thinkers in history. Kant’s ideas, in particular, continue to be of importance 200 years after his death in fields as disparate as computer science, philosophy of perception, and metaethics. And while Hegel’s influence is perhaps less explicit, his ideas have impacted the vast majority of philosophers in the continental tradition, and the analytic tradition, too, was in part born out of Russell and Moore’s reaction to Hegel’s British disciples. And that is to say nothing of his student, Karl Marx, whose ideas have literally shaped the world in a quite tangible way. Perhaps more important, then, is the question: why the transcendental unity of apperception? This esoteric phrase disguises, with its obscure terminology, one of the most important concepts in Kant’s philosophy.3 Indeed, Kant himself describes it as “the supreme principle of all use of the understanding.”4 Yet it is less clear that the concept has anything to do with Hegel. To be sure, Hegel does describe it as “one of the most profound principles for 1 Longuenesse, Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics, 187. 2 There is, in the second chapter, a brief consideration of other German Idealists and their approaches to the transcendental unity of apperception, but for the most part I focus entirely on these two philosophers. 3 The reader will, I hope, forgive me for not explaining what exactly this concept is just yet - that will be made more clear in the first chapter. At this point it is sufficient to simply note that it is explicitly one of Kant’s central concepts. The aim of this dissertation is to make clear the central role it plays in Hegel’s thought as well. 4 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B136. 1 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PcVNX8zUYtlzMDaDon5LvoVEYUBcF_qrZ2AAljtTi2A/edit 1/182 5/28/2019 Numbered Section - Google Docs speculative development,” while at the same time claiming that Kant’s “further development, however, did not live up to this beginning.”5 But that in itself does not demonstrate that a study of the transcendental unity of apperception could have any bearing on Hegel’s positive philosophy. That such a connection does exist is something that I aim to demonstrate in the course of this dissertation.
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