Author Description

"Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant is the first history of the concept of facticity. G. Anthony Bruno argues that this concept's coining, transmission, and repurposing by major thinkers after Kant leaves a deep and lasting divide concerning the post-Kantian question of whether a science of intelligibility can tolerate brute facts. "Facticity" is associated with phenomenology, for which the concept denotes undeducibly brute conditions of intelligibility like sociality, mortality, and temporality. While this suggests an affirmative answer to the post-Kantian question, "facticity" originates with German idealism, whose proponents give a negative answer. Fichte coins "facticity" to denote the intolerable bruteness, radical contingency, or groundlessness of conditions putatively presupposed by, and hence limitations on, reason. A science of intelligibility must eliminate bruteness 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 Fichte invents and Hegel develops. German idealism's logical revolution provokes Heidegger's phenomenological objection that dialectic ineluctably presupposes factical conditions of lived experience, which must be interpreted hermeneutically. The untold history of "facticity" thus contains the deepest parting of the ways after Kant. On the one hand, Hegel eliminates vestigial facticity in Fichte's system by pursuing a presuppositionless science of intelligibility, although Schelling charges Hegel with presupposing that science's value and the existence it renders intelligible. On the other hand, Lask's otherwise misleading neo-Kantian reading of Fichte's neologism inspires Heidegger to reject presuppositionlessness for a hermeneutics of facticity. The trajectory from German idealism to phenomenology is accordingly one in which facticity initially impedes the science