Date of Award
2018
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
Philosophy
Sub-Department
College of Arts and Sciences
First Advisor
Konstantin Pollok
Abstract
In this dissertation, I argue that the point of transition between Kant and the Idealists is most aptly identified and comprehended when we bring into view a careful understanding of Kant’s principle of the free lawfulness of the Imagination. I argue that for Hegel, it was this principle that constituted Kant’s “greatest service to philosophy.” I contend that we are right to agree with Hegel that this principle is fundamental to Kant’s critical Idealism and is an important theoretical principle in its own right. More than this, though, Hegel adopts, modifies, and expands this notion and thereby turns it into the bedrock of his own system program. In defense of this thesis, I show that Hegel employs Kant’s principle of the free lawfulness of the imagination explicitly and implicitly as the bedrock of the method of reason developed most clearly in The Science of Logic, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, as well as in his Berlin lectures on Aesthetics and Philosophy of Right. The result is that I defend a theoretical notion of reason in Hegel that brings him interpretively much closer to Kant’s critical Idealism than is typically held, and more originally still, I defend an interpretation of Kant that not only solves many of the interpretive challenges of the third Critique’s unity and significance but also shows that Kant’s critical philosophy is more suggestive of central developments in Hegel’s absolute idealism than many Kantians may be comfortable admitting.
Rights
© 2018, Gerad Gentry
Recommended Citation
Gentry, G.(2018). The Imagination in Reason: Reframing the Systematic Core of Idealism in Kant and Hegel. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/4794