Royal Institute of Philosophy

Review: [untitled]
Author(s): Gerd Buchdahl
Reviewed work(s):
Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object by Robert Stern
Source: Philosophy, Vol. 66, No. 255 (Jan., 1991), pp. 129-131
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of Philosophy
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3751152
Accessed: 28/04/2010 09:51

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Cambridge University Press and Royal Institute of Philosophy are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,
preserve and extend access to Philosophy.

http://www.jstor.org
 New Books

matter or the mind-body problem . .. Attractively written biographical

entries which give an account of each philosopher's thought ... Illuminating
entries on many less well-known philosophers . . .'.
It seems to me that two opposed policies have been operative in the making
of the book, and that the blurb blurs that duality.
The first policy: to divide the materialinto many short entries; for example,
in addition to the shortish entry on Communismthere are separate headings
relating to its exponents (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky).
The second policy: to write quite long entries each of which incorporates
references to a range of topics or sub-topics; for example, there is a long entry
headed Psycho-analysis, but no separate entry for Freud.
My opinion is that the Dictionary would have been improved if there had
been more but shorter entries; in other words I think the first policy is best for
a reference book. And especially for this reference book, because it has no
Index.
It is obviously very difficult to construct a short dictionary on any 'special
subject'. What is one to leave out? What principles of inclusion and exclusion
should one adopt?
In their Foreword Vesey and Foulkes give an indication of their principles of
selection: 'Where so much remains controversial one should not hide one's
own point of view. What our leanings are will be clear enough .. .'
I do not know whether oddity is a vice-sometimes it might be a virtue, and
I do not know whether being old-fashioned is a vice either-it might be a virtue
sometimes. Be that as it may, some of the 'leanings' in this book strike me as a
bit odd and a bit old-fashioned. It was odd to treat Einstein, Watson and
Camus as philosophers, odd to devote a whole page to Geulincx, and odd, or
perhaps absent-minded, to omit such important thinkers as Burke, Cicero,
Foucault, MacTaggart, Peano, Ramsey. Lesser men ought to have been
removed to make room for these. It was rather odd, or rather absent minded,
to have no entries for jurisprudence, just war, liberty, necessity, possibility,
ontology, time, or the will. It was old-fashioned to make no reference any-
where to the work of Anscombe, de Beauvoir, Rand, Stebbing, Weil or
Wollstonecraft. It was old-fashioned, and also odd, to have no entries on
holism, functionalism, collectivism, individualism, libertarianism,grue, Get-
tier, Kuhn, Nozick.
The Foreword invites those who disagree with the leanings of the authors to
'rehearse their own reasons for taking another view.' This gives a hint about
how best to review a Dictionary, a hint which I have taken.
Jenny Teichman

Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object

By Robert Stern
(Routledge: London and New York, 1990), 169 pp., £30.00
In his very clear account of two such complex philosophers as Kant and Hegel
Robert Stern distinguishes between three distinct models in terms of which
the structure of the object has been construed in the history of recent philos-

129
New Books

ophy, labelled by the author as the 'substratum model', the 'bundle model',
and finally, the 'substance-kind'model; the latter being the exemplification of
a substance-universal, implying a realist position with respect to universals.
The first of these visualizes the object in terms of a set of propertiesthat inhere
in an underlying substratum-a sort of Humean 'I know not what'. By
contrast, the second model, on the author's account represented especially by
Kant, pictures the object as no more than a collection of properties or
attributes-in the case of Kant: a 'bundle' of atomisticallyviewed 'intuitions';
with the ground or source of their unity, representing the 'object' as such,
being construed in terms of an act of synthesis on the part of the cognitive
subject. The unity of the object, as Stern explains, is thus here derived from
the unity of the subject (p. 3); a unity which is in turn rooted in the unity of
apperception.
The third model (the 'substance-kind' model), representing Hegel's pos-
ition, by contrast with the preceding two, avoids treating subject or object as a
plurality of attributes, either as inhering in a substratum or combined via a
synthetic process, and instead views the object as an 'irreduciblewhole' whose
status is not that of a construction out of its properties, but instead must be
viewed as an individual possessing 'ontological primacy' (p. 4). So the unity
which we find in experience is not the result of a construction on the part of a
subject; instead, says Hegel, objects exist as manifestations of indivisible and
irreducible substance-universals; involving of course a 'realist and essentialist
account of universality' (p. 59).
Apart from statements of their respective positions, not much argument is
advanced by our author on behalf of either Hegel or Kant. Thus, the epis-
temological grounds for the latter's position are scarcely alluded to, as for
instance Kant's motive for making synthesis the focus of his approach, which
was to provide an a priori foundation for concepts like substance, or for the law
of causation. Again, Kant's use of 'synthesis' is given too 'procedural' an
interpretation, whereas in fact it has more of an 'analytical' position in his
philosophy: experience is analysed into certain components, such as categ-
ories, spatio-temporal forms, sensations; and their logical status is used to
define Kant's position. But these components have no existentialist positions,
unlike the atoms and molecules of a physical model.
As for the author's certainly very clear account of Hegel's position, we get a
considerable, and indeed very useful, number of passages from his major
writings, though the result is again frequently only a reproductionof Hegelian
language, inviting the reader to 'feel' himself into that philosopher's linguistic
way of 'seeing' things. Thus, the author rightly directs attention to one of
Hegel's central distinctions between the universal qua accidental quality, and
the universal as a substance-kind, i.e. as 'an irreducible substance-universal'
(p. 60), contrasting this with the substratum as well as the Kantian 'bundle'
models. But a mere report on this contrast is not the same as to supply a
defence of the nature of the kind of Hegel's realist position here involved-a
discussion that one might have expected against the background of present-
day philosophy. Thus, to report (e.g. pp. 60ff.) that for Hegel the individual
object is not a mere combination of properties that require synthesis by a
subject but instead is the manifestation of a universal substance form, or

130
 New Books

'substance-universal', expressing an essential unity given ab initio and not

requiring any subjective synthesis-such statements so far merely summarize
a confrontation between two metaphysical positions without further
discussion.
The book incidentally mentions some interesting similarities between
Hegel's metaphysics and some modern Kuhnian approachesto science (cf. p.
73), and it involves interesting discussions of Hegel's attempts to overcome the
anti-atomistic consequences of his philosophy in the light of the atomistic
paradigm reigning in the physics and chemistry of his day. (Cf. Ch. 4 which
involves a thorough discussion of Hegel's Philosophyof Nature.)
Altogether, despite our small complaint above concerning a certain lack of
critique of Hegel's metaphysical presuppositions, the sharpness and accuracy
of the author'saccount of Hegel's philosophy, and its detailed referencesto the
texts, all collected within a mere 120 pp., make this an admirableintroductory
text to its subject. The volume will certainly be an essential compendium for
anyone interested in Kant-Hegel scholarship.
Gerd Buchdahl

131