Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant

One of Kant's most challenging innovations is the idea that some features of humanity are at once both internal to human reasoning and also groundless. Here lies a parting of the ways. On one hand, Hegel, uncomfortable with the very idea of groundlessness as internal to human reasoning, seeks a stronger conception of human reason, trusting in itself alone, and sufficient for its own explication. On the other hand, Schelling and Heidegger embrace the radical bruteness of forms of intelligibility, which philosophy cannot deduce but must interpret. Thus the question raised by Bruno, still vital today, ultimately concerns the very nature of philosophy: should it aspire to the self-sufficiency of the science of reason, or interpret the radically contingent conditions of human life? This brilliant book presents these options in a lucid and compelling manner.

Auteur
G. Anthony Bruno is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Royal Holloway University of London and Co-Director of the London Post-Kantian Seminar. Recently, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Alumni Fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin, an Alexander von Humboldt Alumni Fellow at the University of Tübingen, and an Experienced Research Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Analytic German Idealism at the University of Leipzig. He is the editor of Schelling's Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom: A Critical Guide (forthcoming), co-editor of Transformation and the History of Philosophy, editor of Schelling's Philosophy: Freedom, Nature, and Systematicity, and co-editor of Skepticism: Historical and Contemporary Inquiries.

Résumé
Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant is the first history of the concept of facticity. G. Anthony Bruno argues that this concepts coining, transmission, and repurposing by post-Kantian thinkers leaves a lasting divide concerning the question of whether a science of intelligibility can tolerate brute facts. In the phenomenological tradition, 'facticity' denotes undeducibly brute conditions of intelligibility such as sociality, mortality, and temporality. This suggests an affirmative answer to the post-Kantian question. However, the term's original use in the German idealist tradition is associated with a negative answer: a science of intelligibility must eliminate bruteness in order to be systematic, as Fichte says, or presuppositionless, as Hegel says. Moreover, eliminating bruteness requires a new logic for deducing conditions of intelligibility from reason's self-contradictions, a dialectical logic that Fichte invents and Hegel develops. In response to the German idealists, Heidegger argues that dialectic ineluctably presupposes brute facts of lived experience, whose interpretation requires a hermeneutics of facticity. The untold history of the concept of facticity thus contains the deepest parting of the ways after Kant, one in which reason is fated to transform from the hand that holds the world to the thrown activity of being-in-the-world. Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant explores this transformation while confronting our inheritance of the still-pressing post-Kantian question.