ABSTRACT
Dialetheism is the view that some contradictions are true. The history of Western philosophy has, however, produced a few thinkers who stood up against the orthodoxy, the most notable of these being Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel explicitly claims that reality may be contradictory. In his Wissenschaftslehre, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, like Hegel, started from Immanmuel Kant and, like Hegel, criticised the Kantian postulation of the thing-in-itself. In Hegel’s hands, Fichte’s dialectic morphs into something much grander. At the prompting of Schlegel in his Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy, the transcendental ego becomes Geist, a sort of cosmic mind. For Kant, phenomena are, essentially, those things that are perceivable via the senses. Each Transcendental Idea brings in its wake a family of arguments, which Kant calls, respectively: the Paralogisms, the Antinomies, and the Ideal. Kant’s resolution of the contradiction, then, depends crucially on the distinction between phenomena and noumena and on the fact that the Categories apply only to the former.
