G. Anthony Bruno
I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Royal Holloway University of London. My research focuses on metaphysics and epistemology in early modern, Kantian, and post-Kantian philosophy.
My first book, Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. I've begun work on my second book, Nihilism and the Enigma of Subjectivity, which will provide a history of the origin, transformation, and continuing relevance of the concept of nihilism.
I am the co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Schelling (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), editor of Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), co-editor of Transformation and the History of Philosophy (Routledge, 2023), editor of Schelling’s Philosophy: Freedom, Nature, and Systematicity (Oxford University Press, 2020), and co-editor of Skepticism: Historical and Contemporary Inquiries (Routledge, 2018). I have published articles on Kant, German idealism, German romanticism, neo-Kantianism, and phenomenology in British Journal for the History of Philosophy, European Journal of Philosophy, Fichte-Studien, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Philosophy Compass, and elsewhere.
I am a member of Royal Holloway's Centre for Continental Philosophy. I co-direct the London Post-Kantian Seminar, an AHRC-funded workshop series showcasing new work in post-Kantian thought across universities in London. Recently, I was an Alexander von Humboldt Alumni Fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Tübingen and an Experienced Research Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Analytic German Idealism at the University of Leipzig. I am a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Association.
Previously, I was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McGill University, a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Bonn. I completed my PhD in Philosophy at the University of Toronto, my MA in Philosophy at Queen's University, and my Honours BA in Philosophy and History at the University of Toronto.
My first book, Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. I've begun work on my second book, Nihilism and the Enigma of Subjectivity, which will provide a history of the origin, transformation, and continuing relevance of the concept of nihilism.
I am the co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Schelling (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), editor of Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), co-editor of Transformation and the History of Philosophy (Routledge, 2023), editor of Schelling’s Philosophy: Freedom, Nature, and Systematicity (Oxford University Press, 2020), and co-editor of Skepticism: Historical and Contemporary Inquiries (Routledge, 2018). I have published articles on Kant, German idealism, German romanticism, neo-Kantianism, and phenomenology in British Journal for the History of Philosophy, European Journal of Philosophy, Fichte-Studien, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Philosophy Compass, and elsewhere.
I am a member of Royal Holloway's Centre for Continental Philosophy. I co-direct the London Post-Kantian Seminar, an AHRC-funded workshop series showcasing new work in post-Kantian thought across universities in London. Recently, I was an Alexander von Humboldt Alumni Fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Tübingen and an Experienced Research Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Analytic German Idealism at the University of Leipzig. I am a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Association.
Previously, I was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McGill University, a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Bonn. I completed my PhD in Philosophy at the University of Toronto, my MA in Philosophy at Queen's University, and my Honours BA in Philosophy and History at the University of Toronto.
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Monographs by G. Anthony Bruno
Edited Volumes by G. Anthony Bruno
- Philosophy as Transformative: Ancient China, Greece, India, and Rome
- Transformation Between the Human and the Divine: Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy
- Transformation After the Copernican Revolution: Post-Kantian Philosophy
- Treatises, Pregnancies, Psychedelics, and Epiphanies: Twentieth-Century Philosophy.
Each of these sections begins with an introduction by the editors. Transformation and the History of Philosophy is essential reading for students and researchers in the history of western and non-western philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics. It will also be extremely useful for those in related disciplines such as religion, sociology, and the history of ideas.
Edited Journal Issues by G. Anthony Bruno
Issue link: https://jhaponline.org/jhap/issue/view/451
Issue link: https://www.iih-hermeneutics.org/volume-5
Journal Articles by G. Anthony Bruno
In “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism” (1795/6), Schelling charges Spinozism and idealism with the task of deriving the unity of the a priori conditions of experience from an unconditioned condition or first principle (Schelling 1980, 327). Their common goal is to realize their respective principles as systems of such conditions at play in judgment, i.e., to cognize the unity of a first principle and the totality of judgeable phenomena. The phenomenon posing the deepest obstacle to this unity is the corpse: now dead and once living, its feet lie in two different worlds for which derivational completeness demands a common ground. In light of this problem, it becomes crucial to see that German idealism constitutes what I call immortalism, the view that a systematic conception of purposiveness or life serves as the unconditioned condition of the possibility of experience. By construing the self-organization of the I (Fichte), the self-generation of the Absolute (middle Schelling) or the self-development of the Concept (Hegel) as experience’s unconditioned condition or transcendental ground, idealism aims to deduce derivative conditions of experience, including its cessation. A vindication of this view entails that death is unconditionally conditioned by life thus construed and so has no explanatory role to play in accounting for the possibility of experience. But the opposite results if idealism cannot overcome the problem of the corpse, for then death is not grounded on life, but rather puts the normative enterprise of experience into question. If so, idealism faces the prospect that what I call mortalism is true, that is, that a systematic conception of mortality or death serves as the unconditioned condition of the possibility of experience.
We would expect a post-idealist like Heidegger to invert the Socratic view that philosophy prepares us for death. But, against standard accounts of German idealism, particularly of the grounding role it assigns to life, I argue that, in both his early and later phases, Schelling precedes Heidegger by holding that a systematic conception of death prepares us for philosophy. On Schelling’s mortalist view, the idea of death represents the ideal of a philosophical system’s complete derivation, our striving for which individuates and unifies our finite rational activity. Only striving for this ideal endlessly—as a regulative ideal—can sustain critical philosophy. Thus, while German idealism under Fichte, Hegel and, for a brief period, Schelling himself absolutely privileges life, it is as an internal critic of this tradition that Schelling challenges its master concept. His critique of Fichte’s Jena Wissenschaftslehre—the seed for this challenge—initiates an account of how death puts us into question, that is, how what he calls ‘annihilation’ and ‘transition to not-being’ grounds experience. I reconstruct the development of Schelling’s mortalist argument for the unlivability of a system’s complete derivation, its desirability notwithstanding, by drawing on the “Letters” in §§1-2, the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809) in §3 and the Berlin lectures (1841/2) in §4. Anticipating my reconstruction, I note the claim he voices through the priest in Clara, or On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World (1810) that no system can overcome the problem of the corpse: “[p]hilosophers may very well say: there is no death, nothing in itself fades away; here they assume an arbitrary explanation of death and dying. However, what we others call it still remains, nevertheless, and words can no more explain this than they can explain it away” (Schelling 2002, 30). Death is not to be explained by a philosophical system, but is to be conceived as the very ground of systematizing. We will see that, for Schelling, this means philosophy is never without its mortal presupposition.
I will argue that we cannot grasp Schelling’s critique unless we trace it—earlier than scholars do—to the “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism” of 1795/96. Written at the outset of his career, this text marks the beginning of Schelling’s engagement with the problem of systematicity, namely, that our power of judgment makes the task of deriving a system of conditions from a first principle necessary while that capacity’s finitude makes this task impossible. Save for Schelling’s identity philosophy, a phase that tempts scholars to peg him as an absolute idealist, his life-long critique of idealism seeks to articulate the intractability of this problem. My conceptual aim is to reconstruct this critique from Schelling’s objection in the “Letters” to Fichte’s view that the system of idealism or ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ is unrivalled by Spinozism. I will interpret his objection as charging Fichte with misrepresenting what it is to live a system of philosophy, viz., what it is for one’s system to be commensurate with one’s finitude. In offering this interpretation, my historical aim will be to provide the context for understanding Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom of 1809, widely—though falsely—thought to constitute his initial attack on the idealist project.
In §1, I unpack the seed of Schelling’s critique of Fichte from the “Anti-critique”, a piece published at the time of the “Letters” in which he suggests the Wissenschaftslehre is incapable of refuting Spinozism. In §2, I reconstruct Schelling’s argument for this from the “Letters”, showing why he thinks the Wissenschaftslehre cannot exclude Spinozism. My reconstruction relies on the form of systematicity, my term for Schelling’s criterion that the power of judgment must posit a first principle from which it must then derive a system. Under this criterion, judgment seeks what it cannot secure since it is a finite power—hence, the problem of systematicity. The form of systematicity, then, is a problematic form: it assigns a task we cannot complete. Schelling’s insight is that a system’s liveability depends on its incompleteness. A system can only be its susceptibility to the limitations of our finitude. In §3, I show this insight drives Schelling’s claim in the Freiheitsschrift that a system’s ground is contingent because it is human. My interpretation gives a more complex reading of Schelling than those that cast him as simply brazen or skeptical, presenting him as an internal critic of German idealism who is committed, despite vacillations, to systematicity within the bounds of human finitude.
- Philosophy as Transformative: Ancient China, Greece, India, and Rome
- Transformation Between the Human and the Divine: Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy
- Transformation After the Copernican Revolution: Post-Kantian Philosophy
- Treatises, Pregnancies, Psychedelics, and Epiphanies: Twentieth-Century Philosophy.
Each of these sections begins with an introduction by the editors. Transformation and the History of Philosophy is essential reading for students and researchers in the history of western and non-western philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics. It will also be extremely useful for those in related disciplines such as religion, sociology, and the history of ideas.
Issue link: https://jhaponline.org/jhap/issue/view/451
Issue link: https://www.iih-hermeneutics.org/volume-5
In “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism” (1795/6), Schelling charges Spinozism and idealism with the task of deriving the unity of the a priori conditions of experience from an unconditioned condition or first principle (Schelling 1980, 327). Their common goal is to realize their respective principles as systems of such conditions at play in judgment, i.e., to cognize the unity of a first principle and the totality of judgeable phenomena. The phenomenon posing the deepest obstacle to this unity is the corpse: now dead and once living, its feet lie in two different worlds for which derivational completeness demands a common ground. In light of this problem, it becomes crucial to see that German idealism constitutes what I call immortalism, the view that a systematic conception of purposiveness or life serves as the unconditioned condition of the possibility of experience. By construing the self-organization of the I (Fichte), the self-generation of the Absolute (middle Schelling) or the self-development of the Concept (Hegel) as experience’s unconditioned condition or transcendental ground, idealism aims to deduce derivative conditions of experience, including its cessation. A vindication of this view entails that death is unconditionally conditioned by life thus construed and so has no explanatory role to play in accounting for the possibility of experience. But the opposite results if idealism cannot overcome the problem of the corpse, for then death is not grounded on life, but rather puts the normative enterprise of experience into question. If so, idealism faces the prospect that what I call mortalism is true, that is, that a systematic conception of mortality or death serves as the unconditioned condition of the possibility of experience.
We would expect a post-idealist like Heidegger to invert the Socratic view that philosophy prepares us for death. But, against standard accounts of German idealism, particularly of the grounding role it assigns to life, I argue that, in both his early and later phases, Schelling precedes Heidegger by holding that a systematic conception of death prepares us for philosophy. On Schelling’s mortalist view, the idea of death represents the ideal of a philosophical system’s complete derivation, our striving for which individuates and unifies our finite rational activity. Only striving for this ideal endlessly—as a regulative ideal—can sustain critical philosophy. Thus, while German idealism under Fichte, Hegel and, for a brief period, Schelling himself absolutely privileges life, it is as an internal critic of this tradition that Schelling challenges its master concept. His critique of Fichte’s Jena Wissenschaftslehre—the seed for this challenge—initiates an account of how death puts us into question, that is, how what he calls ‘annihilation’ and ‘transition to not-being’ grounds experience. I reconstruct the development of Schelling’s mortalist argument for the unlivability of a system’s complete derivation, its desirability notwithstanding, by drawing on the “Letters” in §§1-2, the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809) in §3 and the Berlin lectures (1841/2) in §4. Anticipating my reconstruction, I note the claim he voices through the priest in Clara, or On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World (1810) that no system can overcome the problem of the corpse: “[p]hilosophers may very well say: there is no death, nothing in itself fades away; here they assume an arbitrary explanation of death and dying. However, what we others call it still remains, nevertheless, and words can no more explain this than they can explain it away” (Schelling 2002, 30). Death is not to be explained by a philosophical system, but is to be conceived as the very ground of systematizing. We will see that, for Schelling, this means philosophy is never without its mortal presupposition.
I will argue that we cannot grasp Schelling’s critique unless we trace it—earlier than scholars do—to the “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism” of 1795/96. Written at the outset of his career, this text marks the beginning of Schelling’s engagement with the problem of systematicity, namely, that our power of judgment makes the task of deriving a system of conditions from a first principle necessary while that capacity’s finitude makes this task impossible. Save for Schelling’s identity philosophy, a phase that tempts scholars to peg him as an absolute idealist, his life-long critique of idealism seeks to articulate the intractability of this problem. My conceptual aim is to reconstruct this critique from Schelling’s objection in the “Letters” to Fichte’s view that the system of idealism or ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ is unrivalled by Spinozism. I will interpret his objection as charging Fichte with misrepresenting what it is to live a system of philosophy, viz., what it is for one’s system to be commensurate with one’s finitude. In offering this interpretation, my historical aim will be to provide the context for understanding Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom of 1809, widely—though falsely—thought to constitute his initial attack on the idealist project.
In §1, I unpack the seed of Schelling’s critique of Fichte from the “Anti-critique”, a piece published at the time of the “Letters” in which he suggests the Wissenschaftslehre is incapable of refuting Spinozism. In §2, I reconstruct Schelling’s argument for this from the “Letters”, showing why he thinks the Wissenschaftslehre cannot exclude Spinozism. My reconstruction relies on the form of systematicity, my term for Schelling’s criterion that the power of judgment must posit a first principle from which it must then derive a system. Under this criterion, judgment seeks what it cannot secure since it is a finite power—hence, the problem of systematicity. The form of systematicity, then, is a problematic form: it assigns a task we cannot complete. Schelling’s insight is that a system’s liveability depends on its incompleteness. A system can only be its susceptibility to the limitations of our finitude. In §3, I show this insight drives Schelling’s claim in the Freiheitsschrift that a system’s ground is contingent because it is human. My interpretation gives a more complex reading of Schelling than those that cast him as simply brazen or skeptical, presenting him as an internal critic of German idealism who is committed, despite vacillations, to systematicity within the bounds of human finitude.
For those seeking to widen these circles, see through this eclipse and elucidate these formulations, a deeper internal challenge is to make sense of the appearance and disappearance of intellectual intuition in Schelling’s work. The term’s apotheosis is often attributed to the height of German idealism and especially to Schelling’s identity philosophy, outside which he subjects the term to a radical critique. The identity philosophy aims to cognize the absolute ground of the system of knowledge and the system of nature, for which cognition Schelling enlists intellectual intuition. While the identity philosophy falls between a Fichtean debut and a late attack on Hegel, it is difficult to determine its exact parameter. I propose that a necessary condition for doing so is to clarify the explanatory role of intellectual intuition—that is, the specific problem to which it is the intended solution—on which the identity philosophy depends. To this end, I will trace a nexus of problems that Schelling’s use of intellectual intuition is meant to solve. Doing so will not only help to delineate the identity philosophy, but show it to be continuous with Schelling’s earlier and later periods.
In §1, I account for the nexus of the problems of grounding, freedom and meaning. These problems demand, respectively, a principle by which cognition forms a system rather than an aggregate, a principle by which a system of cognition is compatible with freedom rather than incompatible and a principle by which a system of freedom can show why there is meaning rather than none. In §2, I reconstruct Schelling’s argument in the identity philosophy for why intellectual intuition can resolve this nexus of problems and, in §3, his arguments during other periods of his thought for why it cannot. I conclude in §4 by suggesting why the identity philosophy is continuous with these periods. Beyond fulfilling the interpretive task of making sense of intellectual intuition in Schelling’s sprawling corpus, my aim is thus to contribute to a unified reading of the latter.
Notice the idea of sheer existence, of matter unconstituted by a rational principle, somehow revives Kant’s notion of the thing in itself as that which outstrips our forms of understanding. Schelling does call for a “return to Kant”, not tout court, though to aspects of Kant’s thought that would explain the salience of sheer existence. So why do we hear this call from a German idealist? Why return for a student of Fichte who originally sought to grow past Kant? An answer, I think, lies in locating the Critical and skeptical thrusts behind Schelling’s late philosophy.
Schelling recovers a reciprocal relation one finds in Kant. Since assuming either the first principle or the fact of existence confronts us with an incomprehensible ought or an absurdity, their relation must be one of infinite reciprocity. The precedent for this is what I call Kant’s epistemic reciprocity, which, first, holds between the categories that constitute cognition and the experiences that prove their applicability and, second, adheres to a threefold criterion of proof. Tracing this precedent will clarify the nature of Schelling’s return to Kant while keeping in view the sense in which he is a post-Kantian. What motivates his return, I suggest, is the threat posed by Maimonian skepticism.
Writing in Germany in the 1790s, Maimon argues that epistemic reciprocity is a non-starter because it is dubious whether science actually applies the categories and so whether the categories are not simply empty forms, a doubt he extends to German idealism’s first principle. This threatens the objective reality of our forms of thought and, with them, our cognitive life. I suggest Schelling’s early stated sensitivity to Maimonian skepticism accounts for his later insight that the reciprocal relation between the principle and existence is infinite and that for him this reflects an existential rather than a merely academic problem for idealism in particular and philosophy in general.