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Kant's History of Ethics
Wood, Allen W.
Wood, Allen W.
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Many readers of Kant, especially those under the influence of Hegel, claim that it is a flaw in Kant’s philosophy that it is “ahistorical”. Sometimes the claim takes the form that Kant did not conceive of reason historically (something that Hegel, by contrast, is—to his credit—supposed to have done). I have long thought that this sort of charge is doubly mistaken. On the one hand, it exaggerates the historicism of Hegel’s philosophy, whose foundation lies in the “thought-determinations” of speculative logic, which Hegel conceives non-historically, as having timeless validity for both thinking and being. This is not a reproach—or at least Hegel would not regard it as such. To him it would mean only that philosophy deals with what is in the highest sense true—with God or the absolute—rather than with what is merely transitory and contingent.[1] On the other hand, to contrast Hegel with Kant in this way also ignores the ways in which Kant’s philosophy is historical in its self-conception, ways in which Kant actually anticipates many of the very features of Hegel’s philosophy that lead people to describe Hegel as having a “historical” conception of philosophy.
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2005
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With permission of the license/copyright holder