In this article I develop an interpretation of the opening passages of Hegel's essay ‘With what must the beginning of science be made?’ I suggest firstly that Hegel is engaging there with a distinctive problem, the overcoming of which he understands to be necessary in order to guarantee the scientific character of the derivation of the fundamental categories of thought which he undertakes in the Science of Logic. I refer to this as ‘the problem of beginning’. I proceed to clarify (...) the nature of the problem, which I understand to be motivated by a concern to avoid arbitrariness, and then to detail the nature of Hegel's proposed solution, which turns on understanding how the concept of ‘pure being’, understood in a specific sense to be both mediated and immediate, avoids the concerns about arbitrariness which accompany attempts to begin merely with something mediated, or merely with something immediate. On this basis, I offer a number of criticisms of alternative approaches to the beginning of Hegel's Logic. (shrink)

Traditional epistemological interpretations have portrayed Hegel as offering a coherentist solution to the problem of the criterion in the introduction to The Phenomenology of Spirit. In this paper, I criticize the coherentist interpretation and present an alternative reading that emphasizes the central role of conscious experience in Hegel's argument. In the first part of the paper, I show how the passages commonly used to support the coherentist interpretation ultimately fail to do so and argue that coherence by itself cannot be (...) the lynchpin for an adequate solution to the problem of the criterion. In the second part, I then develop a novel interpretation of Hegel's argument by drawing attention to the fact that Hegel formulates both the problem of the criterion and his solution to it in terms of consciousness. (shrink)

I begin by identifying an ambiguity in the post-Hegelian literature on Immanent Critique, distinguishing two possible definitions: judging an object against its ‘internal’ norms; and accounting for one’s own standpoint with reference to the object. I then claim that both definitions are represented in Hegel’s Phenomenology, and develop extended interpretations of material from the Introduction in order to clarify and substantiate this thesis. This yields revisionist readings of the famous ‘internal criteria’ and ‘self examination’ tropes. My discussion builds towards elucidating (...) the relation between the two definitions of Immanent Critique I have distinguished, as it is developed in the Phenomenology. (shrink)