740 page life in letters, including all Hegel's available letters at time of publication by Indiana University Press in 1984 tied together by a running commentary by Clark Butler. The volume is in a searchable PDF format. Publication was supported by a Major Grant by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH).

Our reception of Hegel’s theory of action faces a fundamental difficulty: on the one hand, that theory is quite clearly embedded in a social theory of modern life, but on the other hand most of the features of the society that gave that embedding its specific content have become almost inscrutably strange to us (e.g., the estates and the monarchy). Thus we find ourselves in the awkward position of stressing the theory’s sociality even as we scramble backwards to distance (...) ourselves from the particular social institutions that gave conceptualized form to such sociality in Hegel’s own opinion. My attempt in this article is to make our position less awkward by giving us at least one social-ontological leg to stand on. Specifically, I want to defend a principled and conceptual pluralism as forming the heart of Hegel’s theory of action. If this view can be made out, then we will have a social-ontological structure that might be filled out in different ways in Hegel’s time and our own while simultaneously giving real teeth to the notion that Hegel’s theory of action is essentially social. (shrink)

In this paper, I contest increasingly common "realist" interpretations of Hegel's theory of "the concept" (der Begriff), offering instead a "isomorphic" conception of the relation of concepts and the world. The isomorphism recommended, however, is metaphysically deflationary, for I show how Hegel's conception of conceptual form creates a conceptually internal standard for the adequacy of concepts. No "sideways-on" theory of the concept-world relationship is envisioned. This standard of conceptual adequacy is also "graduated" in that it allows for a (...) lack of fit between concept and world. The possibility for a "maximally isomorphic" fit between concept and world obtains through the teleological realization of concepts, which marks especially the "artificial" world of human culture (law, art, religion, etc.). Some of the most seemingly exaggerated claims Hegel makes about the concept, I contend, can be understood when we consider the significance Hegel ascribes to human making, which is provided for in his conceptual theory. But my framework provides an interpretive key for the way Hegel sees concepts imperfectly realized in the natural world as well. (shrink)

The core argument of this article is that Adorno adopts the distinction between an abstract and a concrete universal from Hegel and criticizes Hegel, on that basis, as abstract. The first two parts of the article outline that both thinkers take the abstract universal to be the form of a false type of knowledge and society, and the concrete universal to be a positive aim. However, as the third part argues, Adorno rejects how the concrete universal is understood (...) in Hegel’s philosophy and formulates a different conception of it. The fourth part questions if Adorno manages to overcome the problems he identifies in Hegel or whether they are inherent to the programme of dialectics both endorse. (shrink)

Hegel’s Science of Logic is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest works of European philosophy. However, its contribution to arguably the most important philosophical problem, Pyrrhonian scepticism, has never been examined in any detail. Pyrrhonian Scepticism and Hegel's Theory of Judgement fills a great lacuna in Hegel scholarship by convincingly proving that the dialectic of the judgement in Hegel’s Science of Logic successfully refutes this kind of scepticism. Although Ioannis Trisokkas has written the book primarily (...) for those students of philosophy who already have an interest in Hegel’s epistemology and philosophy of language and/or his Science of Logic, it will also appeal to those who investigate the problem of scepticism independently of the Hegel corpus. (shrink)

A primary fault line in the analytic philosophy of action is the debate between causal/Davidsonian and interpretivist/Anscombian theories of action. The fundamental problem of the former is producing a criterion for distinguishing intentional from non-intentional causal chains; the fundamental problem of the latter is producing an account of the relation between reasons and actions that is represented by the ‘because’ in the claim that the agent acted because she had the reason. It is argued that Hegel’s conception of teleology (...) can be used to develop the interpretivist position by solving both its and the causal theory’s fundamental problems. (shrink)

In this article I intend to show the strict relation between the notions of “second nature” and “recognition”. To do so I begin with a problem (circularity) proper to the theory of Hegelian and post- Hegelian Anerkennung. The solution strategy I propose is signifi cant also in terms of bringing into focus the problems connected with a notion of “space of reasons” that stems from the Hegelian concept of “Spirit”. I thus broach the notion of “second nature” as a bridgeconcept (...) that can play a key role both for a renewal of the theory of Anerkennung and for a rethinking of the “space of reasons” within the debate between Robert Brandom and John McDowell. Against this background I illustrate the novelties introduced by the dialectical conception of the relation between fi rst and second nature developed by Hegel and the contribution this idea can make to a revisited theory of recognition as a phenomenon articulated on two levels. I then return to the question of the space of reasons to show the contribution the renewed conception of recognition as second nature makes to the definition of its intrinsic sociality as something that is not in principle opposed to a sense of naturalness. (shrink)

Hegel for the most part insists we support existing practices: they have endured, have socialized us, are our home. At times Hegel seems to demand conformity, to leave no room for dissent or disobedience. Hegel gives great weight to the authority of the state and of custom. But Hegel does not leave the individual confronted with an unjust state powerless. To Hegel, we are obligated to obey the law if we are at home in the (...) state, if its practices, institutions and laws are rational, if the free will "comes into existence" in it. But on Hegel's view, if the practices, institutions and laws of the state are not rational, we are not obligated to comply with their demands. Few recognize that Hegel even allows for justified disobedience, let alone that he can tell us anything about the conditions under which disobedience is justified. This is partly attributable to the fact that important texts concerning Hegel's views have only recently been discovered and published. For example, in a passage from one of these texts, a set of notes of Hegel's lectures on political philosophy, Hegel declares that if my free will does not come into existence in the state, I have no corresponding duty to the state. My purpose is to articulate a distinctive Hegelian theory of justified disobedience, show how it differs both from the traditional understandings of Hegel's views and from contemporary approaches to the problem of justified disobedience, and briefly to point to some difficulties with Hegel's position that need to be worked out if it is to be a satisfactory alternative. (shrink)

Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie is metaphysical, to be sure; but it is also political. To help show this I will make sense, and show the plausibility and relevance, of what appears to be one of the most metaphysical (and bizarre) claims to be found in Hegel's political philosophy: his justification of hereditary monarchy. While among Hegel scholars Hegel's theory of constitutional monarchy has been a focus of heated debate over whether Hegel is a liberal or a conservative; (...) and has recently become a focus in the debate over whether Hegel accommodated himself to the Prussian government out of fear of censorship by publishing an exoteric view endorsing hereditary monarchy that belies his �genuine�, more democratic view, to the nonspecialist Hegel's argument will seem to be of little relevance -- hereditary monarchy is not a live option for us in the 1990s. My intention in giving it serious consideration is not to have us entertain hereditary monarchy as an undeservedly neglected possibility, but rather to put the brakes on a tendency to dismiss Hegel as too much the idealist to dirty his hands with politics. (shrink)

This paper lays out two recent accounts of Hegel’s practical philosophy in order to present a challenge. According to Robert Stern and Mark Alznauer, Hegel attempts to ground our ethical practices in ontological norms. I argue that we cannot ground our ethical practices in this way. However, I also contend that Stern’s and Alznauer’s conception of reality as both conceptual and normative can still play a useful role in practical philosophy, namely, to help defuse a sceptical worry about (...) a threat to ethics. (shrink)

Hegel's interpretation of Sophocles' play Antigone is central to an understanding of woman's role in the Hegelian system. Hegel is fascinated by this play and uses it in both the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right to demonstrate that familial ethical life is woman's unique responsibility. Antigone is revealed as the paradigmatic figure of womanhood and family life in both the ancient and modern worlds, although there are fundamental differences between these two worlds for Hegel. Through an (...) immanent critique of both the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right which focuses on the role of woman as presented by Hegel in the figure of Antigone, my analysis reveals the limitations of Hegel’s dialectical theory. (shrink)

In the Phenomenology Hegel insists there are no presupposed standards of truth: standards are internal. "Consciousness provides its own criterion from within itself, so that the investigation becomes a comparison of consciousness with itself"(PhdG 84). We need only contemplate "the matter in hand as it is in and for itself"(PhdG 84). The Phenomenology is a characterisation of consciousness taking on increasingly adequate forms, testing its own internal standards against experience. The Philosophy of Right is a search for right, not, (...) as in the Phenomenology, for the reality of cognition; but one of the methods Hegel adopts and which helps make sense of the structure of Philosophy of Right is the method he uses in the Phenomenology. This paper offers an alternative, though not necessarily conflicting, interpretation to that given in recent accounts of Philosophy of Right that emphasize its "logical spirit." While the phenomenological account is not necessarily incompatible with these others, it will point to a nonfoundational interpretation of Hegel's phenomenological method that is. (shrink)

Can Hegel, a philosopher who claims that philosophy lsquo;has no other object but God and so is essentially rational theologyrsquo;, ever be taken as anything emother than/em a religious philosopher with little to say to any philosophical project that identifies itself as emsecular/em?nbsp; If the valuable substantive insights found in the detail of Hegelrsquo;s philosophy are to be rescued for a secular philosophy, then, it is commonly presupposed, some type of global reinterpretation of the enframing idealistic framework is required. (...) In this essay, this assumption is challenged. br /br /Kantrsquo;s interpretation of space and time as a response to Newtonrsquo;s theologically based spatio-temporal emrealism/em is taken as a model of what it is to be a Kantian emidealist/em about God and the self. In turn, Hegelrsquo;s philosophy is taken as a development of this approach that overcomes the limitations of Kantrsquo;s formal approach. Hegelrsquo;s major contribution to Kantrsquo;s revolutionary transformation of the task of philosophy is, it is argued, his recognitive conception of lsquo;spiritrsquo;. While this has been widely appreciated with regard to the relations between lsquo;subjectiversquo; and lsquo;objectiversquo; spirit, it is suggested that a fuller understanding of the nature of Hegelrsquo;s emabsolute/em idealism requires a proper understanding of how this approach also applies to the domain of lsquo;absolute spiritrsquo;. br /br /. (shrink)

An interpretation of Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit showing its continued relevance to contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schlegel developed an influential theory of irony that anticipated some of the central concerns of postmodernity. His most vocal contemporary critic, the philosopher Hegel, sought to demonstrate that Schlegel’s theory of irony tacitly relied on certain problematic aspects of Fichte’s philosophy. While Schlegel’s theory of irony has generated seemingly endless commentary in recent critical discourse, Hegel’s critique of Schlegelian irony has gone neglected. This essay’s primary aim is to defend (...) class='Hi'>Hegel’s critique of Schlegel by isolating irony’s underlying Fichtean epistemology. Drawing on Søren Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony in the final section of this essay, I argue that Hegel’s critique of irony can motivate a dialectical hermeneutics that offers a powerful alternative both to Paul de Man’s poststructuralist hermeneutics and to recent cultural-studies-oriented criticism that tends to reduce literary texts to sociohistorical epiphenomena. (shrink)

This article explores critical theory's relations to German idealism by clarifying how Adorno's thought relates to Hegel's. Adorno's apparently mixed responses to Hegel centre on the dialectic and actually form a coherent whole. In his Logic, Hegel outlines the dialectical process by which categories – fundamental forms of thought and reality – necessarily follow one another in three stages: abstraction, dialectic proper, and the speculative . Adorno's allegiance to Hegel's dialectic emerges when he traces the dialectical (...) process whereby enlightenment reverts to myth and human domination over nature reverts into our domination by nature. However, Adorno criticizes Hegel's dialectic as the ultimate form of ‘identity thinking’, subsuming unique, material objects under universal concepts by using dialectical reason to expand those concepts to cover objects utterly. These two responses cohere because Adorno shares Hegel's view that dialectical contradict.. (shrink)

Panentheism has recently become a widely accepted and appreciated concept among scholars in the science-theology dialogue, and its theological repercussions have been discussed to great extent. Yet, there remains to be studied in more detail the notion of the philosophical foundations of the term. A prominent gap in our understanding of these foundations is the potential similarity between the metaphysics of Hegel and Whitehead, their understanding of the transcendence and immanence of God, and their respective versions of panentheism. In (...) this article, I present a critical reflection on the possible resemblance between process thought and Hegelian metaphysics and philosophy of God. In the last section I refer to those who use panentheism within the science-theology dialogue. I try to specify which of the two versions of panentheism, that of Hegel or Whitehead, is more popular among those scholars. (shrink)

I propose a new reading of Hegel’s discussion of modality in the ‘Actuality’ chapter of the Science of Logic. On this reading, the main purpose of the chapter is a critical engagement with Spinoza’s modal metaphysics. Hegel first reconstructs a rationalist line of thought — corresponding to the cosmological argument for the existence of God — that ultimately leads to Spinozist necessitarianism. He then presents a reductio argument against necessitarianism, contending that as a consequence of necessitarianism, no adequate (...) explanatory accounts of facts about finite reality can be given. (shrink)

In this paper I sketch some arguments that underlie Hegel's chapter on judgment, and I attempt to place them within a broad tradition in the history of logic. Focusing on his analysis of simple predicative assertions or ‘positive judgments’, I first argue that Hegel supplies an instructive alternative to the classical technique of existential quantification. The main advantage of his theory lies in his treatment of the ontological implications of judgments, implications that are inadequately captured by quantification. The (...) second concern of this paper is the manner in which Hegel makes logic not only dependent on ontology generally, but also variant in regard to domains of objects. In other words, he offers a domain-specific logical theory, according to which the form of judgment or inference is specific to the subject of judgment. My third concern lies with the metaphilosophical consequences of this theory, and this includes some more familiar Hegelian themes. It is well known that Hegel frequently questioned the adequacy of the sentential form for expressing higher order truths. My reading of his theory of predication explains and contextualizes this tendency by demystifying notions like the so-called speculative proposition. (shrink)

This paper examines Hegel’s claim that philosophy “has no other object than God‘ as a claim about the essentiality of the idea of God to philosophy. On this idealist interpretation, even atheistic philosophies would presuppose rationally evaluable ideas of God, despite denials of the existence of anything corresponding to those ideas. This interpretation is then applied to Hegel’s version of idealism in relation to those of two predecessors, Leibniz and Kant. Hegel criticizes the idea of the Christian (...) God present within his predecessors in terms of his own heterodox reading of the Trinity in order to resolve a paradox affecting them -- the “paradox of perspectivism‘. (shrink)

Does Hegel have anything to contribute to moral philosophy? If moral philosophy presupposes the soundness of what he calls the 'standpoint of morality [Moralität]' (PR §137), then Hegel's contribution is likely to be negative. As is well known, he argues that morality fails to provide us with substantive answers to questions about what is good or morally required and tends to gives us a distorted, subject-centred view of our practical lives; moral concerns are best addressed from the 'standpoint (...) of ethical life [Sittlichkeit]' (ibid.). Hegel's criticism of morality has had a decisive influence in the reception of his thought. By general acknowledgement, while his writings support a broadly neo-Aristotelian ethics of self-actualization, his views on moral philosophy are exhausted by his criticisms of Kant, whom he treats as paradigmatic exponent of the standpoint of morality. My aim in this essay is to correct this received view and show that Hegel offers a positive argument about the nature of moral willing. (shrink)

When I was first studying Hegel I encountered quite divergent readings of his views on religion. The teacher who first presented Hegel to me was a Jesuit, Quentin Lauer at Fordham University, who read Hegel as a Christian theologian providing a better metaphysical system for understanding the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. When I studied at Yale, Kenley Dove read Hegel as the first thoroughly atheistic philosopher, who presented the conditions of thought without reference to (...) any foundational absolute being. Meanwhile, also at Yale, John Findlay read us a deeply Neo-Platonic Hegel who taught about absolute forms held in a cosmic mind. In giving my own reading I want to talk about the ways Hegel redefines both metaphysics and religion. I would like to approach these issues by way of the medieval controversy over double truth, which was a previous conflict between religion and science. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders certain of Kierkegaard's criticisms of Hegel's theoretical philosophy in the light of recent interpretations of the latter. The paper seeks to show how these criticisms, far from being merely parochial or rhetorical, turn on central issues concerning the nature of thought and what it is to think. I begin by introducing Hegel's conception of "pure thought" as this is distinguished by his commitment to certain general requirements on a properly philosophical form of inquiry. I then (...) outline Hegel's strategy for resolving a crucial problem he takes himself to face. For his account of the nature of thought depends upon the idea of a form of inquiry in which nothing whatsoever is presupposed; but this idea appears basically paradoxical inasmuch as the mere act of beginning to inquire in a certain way embodies an assumption about how it is appropriate to begin. Turning to Kierkegaard, I consider a key objection to the effect that Hegel's strategy for resolving this paradox depends on the incoherent idea of a purely reflexive act of thinking. Finally, I draw out some central features of the alternative account of "situated" thought and inquiry which Kierkegaard presents as distinctively Socratic. (shrink)

This paper criticizes the assumptions behind Robert Brandom’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, contending that Hegel’s concern with the rational structure of experience, his valorization of reflection over ordinary experience and his idea of the necessit y of progress in knowledge cannot be accommodated within the framework of semantic pragmatism. The central contentions are that Brandom’s pragmatism never comes to terms with Hegel’s idea of truth as a result, leading to a historicist distortion, and also that Brandom’s failure (...) to deal with Hegel’s distinction between natural consciousness and the phenomenological observer collapses Hegel’s phenomenology into a philosophy restricted to the level of natural consciousness. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Hegel thought that systematicity was both a necessary condition for a body of thought to be recognized as philosophy and a normative principle by which progress in the history of philosophy can be evaluated. I argue that Hegel’s idiosyncrasies in the interpretation of thinkers who he considers to be philosophers can be explained by referring to the structure of his own philosophical system. I also argue that Hegel’s conception of philosophy as (...) being essentially systematic leads him to claim that traditions that do not have systematic philosophy do not have philosophy at all and this leads to their marginalization. Finally, I identify the role of Hegel’s assumptions in shaping the self-understanding of philosophers through the shaping of the philosophical canon. By way of an example, I examine Hegel's influence on Cassirer's historical writings on Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophy. I also examine Hegel's wider influence on cultural history by tracing Hegelian motifs in Erwin Panofsky's work on medieval architecture and scholasticism. (shrink)

The initial one-third of the paper is devoted to exposing the first chapter (“Sense-Certainty”) of Hegel’s PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT as a thesis about reference, viz., that singular demonstrative reference is impossible. In the remainder I basically argue that such a view commits one to radically undermining our conceptions of space, time, and substance (concrete individuality), and rests on the central mistake of construing <this> on the model of a predicable (or property).

The paper proposes a reconstruction of some fragments of Hegel’s Jena manuscripts concerning the natural genesis of recognitive spiritual consciousness. On this basis it will be argued that recognition has a foothold in nature. As a consequence, recognition should not be understood as a bootstrapping process, that is, as a self-positing and self-justifying normative social phenomenon, intelligible within itself and independently of anything external to it.

In this analysis of one of the most difficult and neglected topics in Hegelian studies, Songsuk Susan Hahn tackles the status of contradiction in Hegel's ...

When Hegel first addresses moral responsibility in the Philosophy of Right, he presupposes that agents are only responsible for what they intended to do, but appears to offer little, if any, justification for this assumption. In this essay, I claim that the first part of the Philosophy of Right, “Abstract Right”, contains an implicit argument that legal or external responsibility (blame for what we have done) is conceptually dependent on moral responsibility proper (blame for what we have intended). This (...) overlooked argument satisfies the first half of a thesis Hegel applies to action in the Encyclopaedia Logic, namely, that the outer must be inner, and thus provides a necessary complement for his more explicit treatment of the second half of that thesis, that the inner must be outer. The claim that agents are only responsible for what they intended to do might appear, at first, to risk conflating legal and moral responsibility and to lack the necessary means to deal with the phenomenon of moral luck, but I argue that if it is properly situated within the whole of Hegel's philosophy of action it can be saved from both of these consequences and so take its place as an essential component of Hegel's full theory of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Although typical arguments for knitting are that it is useful, therapeutic or the latest trend, I argue that knitting can play a life-changing part in the creation of a person’s self. Knitting can be a genuinely powerful activity, one worthy of respect and admiration.

Rather than approaching the question of the constructive or therapeutic character of Hegel’s Logic through a global consideration of its argument and its relation to the rest of Hegel’s system, I want to come at the question by considering a specific thread that runs through the argument of the Logic, namely the question of the proper understanding of power or control. What I want to try to show is that there is a close connection between therapeutic and constructive (...) elements in Hegel’s treatment of power. To do so I will make use of two deep criticisms of Hegel’s treatment from Michael Theunissen. First comes Theunissen’s claim that in Hegel’s logical scheme, reality is necessarily dominated by the concept rather than truly reciprocally related to it. Then I will consider Theunissen’s structurally analogous claim that for Hegel, the power of the concept is the management of the suppression of the other. Both of these claims are essentially claims about the way in which elements of the logic of reflection are modified and yet continue to play a role in the logic of the concept. (shrink)

This essay considers the critical response to Hegel's view of Socrates we find in Kierkegaard's dissertation, The Concept of Irony. I argue that this dispute turns on the question whether or not the examination of particular thinkers enters into Socrates’ most basic aims and interests. I go on to show how Kierkegaard's account, which relies on an affirmative answer to this question, enables him to provide a cogent defence of Socrates' philosophical practice against Hegel's criticisms.

Early in the Logic of Essence, the second main part of Hegelian Logic, Hegel identifies a logical structure, seeming (Schein), with “the phenomenon of scepticism.” The present paper has two aims: first, to flesh this identification out by describing the argument that leads up to it; and, second, to argue that it is mistaken. I will proceed as follows. Section 1 deciphers the opening statement of the Logic of Essence, “the truth of being is essence,” by specifying the meaning (...) of each of its composing terms. The discussion opens the way for deliberation on the meaning of the notion of seeming, since seeming proves to be what remains of being in the structure of essence. This is done in section 2. It is also shown therein that seeming takes two logical forms, dualistic seeming and monistic seeming. Section 3 argues that Hegel identifies scepticism only with dualistic seeming, and that the scepticism he has in mind is what one may call “subjective scepticism,” namely a scepticism grounded in the subject of cognition. The section concludes that Hegel, judged by his own standards, is mistaken in this identification. Finally, section 4 considers Robert Pippin’s objection to the above conclusion and offers a rejoinder. (shrink)

Paper given at the 20th Biennial Meeting of the Hegel Society of America, University of South Carolina, October 24-26, 2008 -/- The local problem of the soul-body relation can be grasped only against the global background of the relation between Nature and Spirit. This relates to Hegel's naturalism: the idea that there is one single reality - living reality - and different levels of description of it. This implies, moreover, that it is possible to ascribe some form of (...) naturality also to the social body of institutionalized ethical life. Hegel’s position can thus be characterised as a kind of aristotelian social naturalism: this, at bottom, is the combined meaning of the Hegelian theses that soul is the substance of Spirit, and habit its universal form. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende señalar aquellos puntos de la Fenomenología del espíritu en los que Hegel transforma el concepto moderno de identidad y lo abre al tiempo, al proceso y al desarrollo, dando paso a la identificación como nuevo fundamento del fenómeno identitario. Se ha señalado muchas veces que, por el hecho mencionado, Hegel está en la base de Freud, pero pocas veces se ha hecho una lectura cercana de ciertos pasajes y términos de la Fenomenología como formulaciones del (...) fenómeno de la identificación. La identificación aparece así, entre otras cosas, como un dejar atrás el sujeto protegido de la modernidad y un tomar la diferencia, la otridad, como el único camino para que el sí-mismo avance. (shrink)

It is fair to say that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy of mathematics and his interpretation of the calculus in particular have not been popular topics of conversation since the early part of the twentieth century. Changes in mathematics in the late nineteenth century, the new set-theoretical approach to understanding its foundations, and the rise of a sympathetic philosophical logic have all conspired to give prior philosophies of mathematics (including Hegel's) the untimely appearance of naïveté. The common view (...) was expressed by Bertrand Russell: -/- The great [mathematicians] of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were so much impressed by the results of their new methods that they did not trouble to examine their foundations. Although their arguments were fallacious, a special Providence saw to it that their conclusions were more or less true. Hegel fastened upon the obscurities in the foundations of mathematics, turned them into dialectical contradictions, and resolved them by nonsensical syntheses. . . .The resulting puzzles [of mathematics] were all cleared up during the nineteenth century, not by heroic philosophical doctrines such as that of Kant or that of Hegel, but by patient attention to detail (1956, 368–69). (shrink)

While Hegel’s political philosophy has been attacked on the left by republican democrats and on the right by feudalist reactionaries, his apologists see him as a liberal reformer, a moderate who theorized about the development of a free-market society within the bounds of a stabilizing constitutional state. This centrist view has gained ascendancy since the end of the Second World War, enshrining Hegel within the liberal tradition. In this book, Renato Cristi argues that, like the Prussian liberal reformers (...) of his time, Hegel was committed to expand the scope of a free economy and concurrently to ensure that the social practice of subjective freedom did not endanger political stability and order. Aware that a system of mutual advantage failed to integrate the members of civil society and that profound social disharmonies were ineradicable, Hegel adopted the views of the French liberal _doctrinaires_, who sought to realize the principles of the French Revolution by supporting Louis XVIII’s sovereign assertion of the monarchical principle. Not surprisingly, Hegel hailed the French _Charte_ of June 1814 as a beacon of freedom. Endorsement of the monarchical principle was meant to prevent the atomized individuals of civil society from gaining control of the state through appeals to popular sovereignty. This challenges most conventional interpretations of Hegel’s theory of the state and draws it closer to the conservative-authoritarian end of the political spectrum than is usual. (shrink)

Philosophy of history is the conceptual and technical study of the relation which exists between philosophy and history. This paper tries to analyze and examine the nature of philosophy of history, its methodology and ideal development. In this I have tried to set the limits of knowledge to know the special account of Hegel’s idealistic view about philosophy of history. In this paper I have also used the philosophical methodology and philosophy inquiry, quest and hypothesis to discuss the (...) class='Hi'>Hegel’s idealistic concept of philosophy of history. It also examines and demonstrates the views of other idealist philosophers like, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. It also shows the how history of mathematics is a complementary of idealism as most of philosophers who were idealists are also great mathematicians. In this paper we are investigation the epistemological approach, logical and metaphysical approach to study the nature of history, meaning of history and structure of history. (shrink)

Coleridge rarely mentions Hegel in his philosophical writings and seems to have read very little of Hegel's work. Yet I argue that Coleridge's criticisms of Schelling's philosophy—as recorded in letters and marginalia—betray remarkable intellectual affinities with his nearly exact contemporary Hegel, particularly in their shared doubts about Schelling's foundationalist intuitionism. With this background in place, I seek to demonstrate that volume one of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria is a radically self-undermining text: its philosophical argument, far from slavishly recapitulating (...) Schelling's philosophy, remains haunted by a quasi-Hegelian skepticism toward intuition even as it advances intuition as the foundation of its theoretical edifice. (shrink)

For a variety of reasons, Hegel's theory of the estates remains an unexpected and unappreciated feature of his practical philosophy. In fact, it is the key element of his social philosophy, which grounds his more properly political philosophy. Most fundamentally, it plays this role because the estates provide the forms of visibility required by Hegel's distinctive theory of self-determination, and so the estates constitute conditions for the possibility of human agency as such. With respect to political agency in (...) particular, this ramifies into the view that the estates are social preconditions for legal and political practices, forms of political participation in their own right, and conditions of possibility of moderate government (three functions also attributed to the estates by Montesquieu). (shrink)

In the popular press and the halls of politics, controversies over evolution are increasingly strident these days. Hegel is relevant in this connection, even though he rejected the theories of evolution he knew about, because he wanted rational understanding but without claims to intelligent design. He is reported to have said that nature has no history, but a closer examination will show that his ideaqs are more nuanced and that there is more room for darwinian ideas than one might (...) expect, though not enough to allow the full Darwinian contingency of form. (shrink)

A comparison of the ways in which Hegel and Heidegger critique modernity.

want to question this idea of a pure presuppositionless self-developing sequence of logical categories. This is part of a larger investigation of the inherence of Hegel's thought in historical language. Concerning the necessary self-development of thought, I have three objections to propose. The first concerns the difficulty of recognizing a uniquely correct sequence of categories, when the various versions all express positive insights. The second concerns the very idea of a unified sequence. The third concerns the goal of pure (...) self-development. (shrink)