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ROCKMORE, Tom. German Idealism as Constructivism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. x + 203 pp. Cloth, $45.00-The jacket copy bills this volume as Tom Rockmore's "definitive statement on the debate about German idealism between proponents of representationalism and those of constructivism." It marks the culmination of Rockmore's efforts over the years (till now little credited in the literature) to persuade students of German idealism that "the philosophical tradition that includes iconic thinkers such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel" is a tradition "best understood as a constructivist project." More than of merely historical significance, this project is, in Rockmore's view, the enduring "legacy of German idealism," which "lives on through cognitive constructivism" in widely diffuse forms across a variety of disciplines.
Constructivism is Rockmore's term of art-"not a theory but a cognitive approach"-which he takes to "refer only to the problem of cognition (das Erkenntnisproblem, from erkennen)." His special concern is thus cognitive constructivism, something he defines in the present work and in earlier books as the idea "that we 'construct' what we know," or (presumably) correlatively, "that we only know what we in some sense construct." Among the exponents of constructivism so conceived, Rockmore at different times has included Hobbes, Vico, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Peirce, Dilthey, Cassirer, Dewey, Rescher, and even Husserl. If Jean Piaget is "perhaps the most distinguished...