Blogging is at a bit of a standstill at the min due to me being caught in various philosophical problems in the areas of transcendental idealism and phenomenology (Hegelian phenomenology). What I'm finding particularly interesting at the minute is the different modes that reason takes in the Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (though not the discussion of reason but the actual movement of reason as it proceeds throughout the work). For Kant there appears to be a certain compulsion, or need, of reason to drive itself forward; as it reaches a contradiction in the antinomies Kant is able to overcome them by being a transcendental idealist. On the other hand Hegel's reason is driven by certain logical steps through which what is implicit in one moment is rendered explicit, being sublated in the overall movement that occurs. Kant = joyous, Hegel = somber. The joy of Kant's reason as it drives towards attempting to discover what it can never know is contrasted by the seriousness of Hegel's phenomenological method whereby the phenomenologist must attend to logical moves and the negation of various moments. What it eventually comes down to, for me, is whether I'd rather be a transcendental idealist or a phenomenologist.

Anyway, that's the basic of it... I'm reading Plato at the minute as a starting point but until about half way through next year this will be all that I am doing so don't expect anything particularly exciting from me (unless, like me, you find that exciting). I may write something in my blog about it, if I get hold of a scanner I can scan in my pictures of reason, but I stand by what I said when I argued that Kant and Hegel don't easily lend themselves to blogging.

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