All or Nothing

Paul W. Franks is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and the University of Notre Dame.

A notable feature in recent Anglo-American professional philosophy is the mounting return of attention to the post-Kantian development of German Idealism—that development, or outburst, of philosophical activity that became largely off limits in the analytical pedagogy adopted in virtually all of the dominant English-speaking departments of philosophy over most of the twentieth century. The unfailing historical sophistication and the persistent illumination of philosophical questioning that characterize Paul Franks’s All or Nothing, as well as its narrative scope, make it an early culmination of this revived attention. Franks’s presentation demonstrates that a massively influential era and register of Western philosophical heritage need no longer remain strange to those who have not yet found their way to it—or, to put the matter positively, and more accurately, that this register may now become pertinently strange, in a way such that it itself, as Franks insists, recognizes its own unavoidable strangeness. It is part of the pedagogical generosity of his book that Franks includes references and quotations marking various moments from that tradition which help, in their differences as well as their similarities, in articulating the progress of the tradition he has remarkably set in motion.

• Introduction 1. Kantian Dualism 2. Post-Kantian Monism 3. Post-Kantian Skepticism 4. Post-Kantian Transcendental Arguments 5. the Fact of Reason and the Standpoint of German Idealism 6. Intuition, Negation, and the Possibility of Evil Conclusion Bibliography Notes Index