I offer a new reconstruction of Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s idealism. Kant held that we impose categorial form on experience, while sensation provides its matter. Hegel argues that the matter we receive cannot guide our imposition of form on it. Contra recent interpretations, Hegel’s argument does not depend on a conceptualist account of perception or a view of the categories as empirically conditioned. His objection is that given Kant’s dualistic metaphysics, the categories cannot have material conditions for correct application. This (...) leads to subjectivism in the content of experience: the subject is given an implausibly strong role in determining what is the case. Hegel’s own absolute idealism solves this problem. (shrink)

Several recent interpretations see Hegel's theory of the Concept as a form of conceptual realism, according to which finite reality is articulated by objectively existing concepts. More precisely, this theory has been interpreted as a version of natural kind essentialism, and it has been proposed that its function is to account for the possibility of genuine explanations. This suggests a promising way to reconstruct the argument that Hegel's theory of objective concepts is based on—an argument that shows that the possibility (...) of explanation rests on metaphysical preconditions and that natural kind essentialism gives the only adequate account of those preconditions. But in order for such a reconstruction to be successful, one needs to spell out the metaphysical features in virtue of which Hegelian natural kinds can account for the possibility of explanation. The article takes up this challenge. It offers the first detailed analysis of the modal fine-structure of Hegel's natural kind essentialism and shows how Hegel's position, thus understood, provides the details needed to complete the explanation-based argument. (shrink)

Indigenous cultural possessions constitute a diverse global issue. This issue includes some culturally important, intangible tribal objects. This is evident in the Australian copyright cases viewed in this study, which provide examples of disputes over traditional Indigenous visual art. A proposal for the legal recognition of Indigenous cultural possessions in Australia is also reviewed, in terms of a new category of law. When such cultural objects are in an artistic form they constitute the tribe's self-presentation and its mechanism of cultural (...) continuity. Philosophical arguments for the legal recognition of Indigenous intellectual `property' tend to assume that the value of Indigenous intellectual property is determinable on external criteria. (shrink)

I undertake here the challenges of clarifying and defending Hegel’s mechanism argument, and showing how it throws some much-needed light on the nature and philosophical appeal of the Logic project. I will argue that the key to all this is Hegel’s focus on a philosophical problem concerning explanation itself. Unfortunately, this problem can easily be obscured from us by contemporary tastes and assumptions. In particular, where Hegel discusses mechanism and teleology, we must not read him as if he meant to (...) distinguish and examine something like two distinct but compatible ways of describing or classifying the world so as to address our different pragmatic or subjective interests. This reading would seriously constrain our understanding of Hegel’s complaint about mechanism: the point would have to be that mechanism inaccurately, incompletely, or unhelpfully describes the world. Such a complaint would have to draw upon premises about the actual world and its contents, and it is hard to see how these could be compelling except as empirical claims. (shrink)

Kant addressed the distinction between the two domains of phenomena and the thing-in-itself by considering time and space as two conditions of cognition. The result of such a distinction, which is the basis of his transcendental idealism school, was limiting cognition to the domain of phenomena and the impossibility of cognition of reality and the thing-in-itself. As the greatest philosopher of the modern period, and by adopting such an approach, Kant left unanswered the acute duality which he had inherited from (...) his predecessors and left his successors to encounter this problem; the most important of these successors was Hegel. Hegel, who considered duality to be the source of the need for philosophy and his school to be comprehensive of the previous philosophies, holds the establishment of such a comprehensive philosophy to requisite prevalence over dichotomies where the central point of such shortcomings was that very duality that was present within them. By establishing the school of absolute idealism and through the belief in the essential foundation in which the mind and external reality are unified, he saw both the underlying duality in Aristotelian and Platonic thought to be an obstacle for the actualization of his absolute ideal, as well as Kant’s thing-in-itself. Therefore, he denied the thing-in-itself by acknowledging its contradictoriness; however, he was then faced with the challenges that arose from omitting it. These challenges include deducing nature from logic as well as the issue of the existing probabilities in nature; in the first instance, we are faced with the problem of how particular nature can be deduced from general absolute thought and in the second with the problem that Hegel does not provide a rational solution for the existing probabilities in nature. These very challenges move us towards a fresh look at the thing-in-itself according to David Bohm as one of the greatest physicists of Quantum Physics. He studies the thing-in-itself by distinguishing between the two views of ontology and epistemology, the result of which was the distinction between the whole and things. Through this distinction, in the ontological approach, he considers the essence of the whole to transcend the mind and matter and thus, unknowable and denies the possibility actualization of Hegel’s absolute idealism; the result of this is acceptance of Kant’s thing-in-itself. In the epistemological approach too, despite being aligned with Hegel, he considers holomovement to consist of a dynamic movement. However, he departs from Hegel’s view and chooses Kant’s by distinguishing between two types of dynamics. The results of such a study include the following: a) the possibility of addressing some metaphysical issues in the new age and evaluating them through scientific-philosophical criteria; b) strengthening Kant’s stance regarding the thing-in-itself; 3) the overlap of the relationship between physics and philosophy in the study of existence and reality as a common matter that is discussable in both domains and d) the limitation of human thought in the cognition of the true foundation of the universe. (shrink)

The aim of this research is to reconstruct a metaphysical interpretation of the philosophy of history with regard to the spirit of historical thinking. The spirit of historical thinking is to emphasize the relation between what happened in the past and historical thinking about the past in the present. However, current philosophies of history, which are largely epistemologically oriented, have not adequately explored this relation. In order to investigate the relation between past and present, I refer to an Aristotelian philosophy (...) of practice and politics, and adapt it to the domain of the philosophy of history, and argue the case for a metaphysical science of history. A metaphysical science of history contains two primary parts. They are the part on physis and the part on technê/phronēsis. With regard to physis that metaphysically investigates the natural generating progress of entities, I argue that the existence of historical events can be understood as a natural developing progress in which the events are ordered in a chronological sequence. Such chronological sequence is essentially the physis of history in the metaphysical sense. For the part on technê/phronēsis, I demonstrate that Aristotelian knowing is for itself an action of knowing, which is located beyond a given temporal position in the past to both the past and the thinking present, and indicates the fundamental Beingness of history. Finally I conclude that the historical eudaimonia, namely the pursuing of the completeness of historical knowledge, is the final presentation of actualizing Geschehenszeit, as it bridges the past and the present in accordance to the spirit of historical thinking. (shrink)