| My dissertation, The Idealism of Life: Hegel and Kant on the Ontology of Living Individuals, investigates the significance of the concept of life for Kant's and Hegel's respective forms of idealism. In Chapter 1, I argue that Kant's account of the subjective origin of the a priori forms of cognition requires that when we judge something to be a living individual, we only suppose it to be so (or, in other words, that these judgments do not determine anything in the object being judged). In the remaining chapters, I argue that Hegel's account of life as objectively real (i.e. rather than a supposition we make) depends on his development of the concept of the individual as self-determining self. I trace this development in the Science of Logic through three stages. In Chapter 2, I argue that any minimal notion of self depends on Hegel's logic of the Infinite as described in the Doctrine of Being. In Chapter 3, I argue that this minimal account of selfhood is possible only if that self is immanently, rather than externally, determined---that is, that a self cannot be defined from without---by tracing Hegel's account of 'Determining Reflection'. In Chapter 4, I show how, for Hegel, the logic of self-determination gives us the resources to describe the concept of individuality, which Hegel develops as the 'Concept'. In Chapter 5, I conclude that Hegel's account of life depends on the claim that the ideal relations immanent to it (relations between, e.g., self and other, or organism and organ) both constitute and are constituted by the material determinations of the living thing. This, in turn, suggests that any idealism that attributes ideal forms and material determinations to distinct sources will be unable to describe life as objectively real. |
