Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant

Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant is the first history of the concept of facticity. G. Anthony Bruno argues that the coining, transmission, and repurposing of this concept by major thinkers has produced a deep and lasting divide between theorists who have, following Kant, addressed the question of whether a science of intelligibility can tolerate brute facts. In the phenomenological tradition, ''facticity'' is associated with the undeducibly brute conditions of intelligibility such as sociality, mortality, and temporality. This suggests an affirmative answer to the post-Kantian question. In contrast, however, the original use of the term in the German idealist tradition was associated with a negative answer: 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. In response to this, Heidegger came to reject presuppositionlessness in favour of a hermeneutics of facticity. The trajectory from German idealism to phenomenology is accordingly one in which facticity is initially an obstacle to the science of intelligibility, but comes ultimately to characterize the situation in which this science is possible. The untold history of facticity thus contains the deepest parting of the ways after Kant. Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant explores this divisive history, one we inherit in the form of this still-pressing post-Kantian question.