In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Betrayal of Substance: Death, Literature, and Sexual Difference in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” by Mary C. RawlinsonShannon Hoff (bio)Mary C. Rawlinson, The Betrayal of Substance: Death, Literature, and Sexual Difference in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” New York: University Press, 2021, 215 pp. ISBN 978-0-231-19905-6Mary rawlinson shows that to be genuinely receptive to a philosophical text one must be creative, and she brings the Phenomenology of Spirit to (...) life with her reading. It speaks of and to experience, and she makes it resound as such, matching its aptitude with her own rich descriptions of the character of experience. The reader is bound to learn a lot from her careful and vivid analyses of consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit, where she displays her power to digest a text that is almost impossibly unwieldy. Both students and scholars of Hegel’s philosophy will find satisfaction here: her book will spark understanding and excitement in inexperienced readers and hone approaches to complex issues of interpretation in experienced ones.Rawlinson opens The Betrayal of Substance with the provocative thesis that Hegel “writes with both hands” (xv). On the one hand, he affirms the abundance of difference in life by insisting on the material realization of the abstract concept, on the life of the singleton (her translation of das Einzelne) as the site of this realization, and on the difference intrinsic to identities (xiii). On the other hand, she says, he aims at a science of logic beyond phenomenology, where singularity has been erased and difference comprehended, such that “nothing is other to it”; this is “an unrelenting insistence on an absolute [End Page 225] detachment from life” (53). Rawlinson tracks this severance of concept and life throughout the Phenomenology: in the abandonment of sensuousness in sense-certainty; in the thing’s dissolution in perception; in “the ‘loss of reality’ of the play of forces”; in the struggle to the death, where self-consciousness “risks life absolutely” (66); in stoicism and skepticism, which “install an absolute difference between life and thought” (47). The life of the singleton is severed from the concept by the production (on the part of the unhappy consciousness) of “ethics, culture, morality, and religion as institutional infrastructures sustaining the self-transcendence of the singleton in the ‘we’ of a community” (66); by reason’s erasure of singularity in its accomplishment of a universal consciousness (68); by perpetual reference to the Bacchanalian revel, that “frenzy of the group that survives [the singleton’s] collapse” (xxx). (Indeed, one of the book’s contributions is its illumination of the prevalence of the image of the revel in Hegel’s text.)In response, Rawlinson asserts the need for a double reading of this double writing: (1) to affirm the capacious narrative that dislodges “ready-made abstractions” and engages the “thick richness of life,” because that is where the truth lies (xxix–xxx); and (2) to oppose Hegel’s “completion” of the phenomenological project and the departure from it to logic, and with it the erasure of the singleton. The book reflects the style of this double reading at each turn, in turns rebellious and appreciative, at ease with its own ambiguity toward Hegel. Rawlinson produces three central pieces of evidence for her critique, three “dangling threads [that] refuse to be woven into the completed fabric of absolute knowing[:] sexual difference, the mortality of the singleton,... and the differences of style in art and literature” (xv). Her critique of Hegel’s abandonment of life sets in relief the critical centrality of Hegel’s identification of maternal love as “the most dangerous force with which the state must contend” (68): this love is a clear instance of affirmation of the singleton over the “we” in which it is submerged. Finally, Rawlinson opposes the idea that truth is “the fully realized series of shapes of knowing and figures of truth” in which “science will have been the truth of phenomenology” with the hypothesis instead that “phenomenology will prove to have been the truth of science” (xliv).Itself beginning several times, The Betrayal of Substance thematizes Hegel’s multiple beginnings and the insight ref lected thereby... (shrink)

The paper demonstrates that a detailed analysis of Hegel’s criticism of rationalist metaphysics in the “Vorbegriff” (Preliminary Conception) chapter of the Encyclopedia Logic can shed light on the following critical features of Hegel’s metaphysics: (1) advancing semantic holism as an alternative to semantic atomism; (2) renouncing the projection of a substance-attribute formal structure onto actuality; (3) dismissing sense perception as the source of conceptual content; and (4) rejecting dualist ontology.

This study interprets the movement of Heidegger's famous "turn" through an analysis of his critique of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel in the period spanning roughly 1925 to 1936. Heidegger's "turn" sought to overcome the traditional metaphysical conception of being that had come to absolute expression through Hegel's method of dialectical reflection. Heidegger was successful to the extent that he provided the final "con-text" of being as a discourse that both frames the historical "text" of being and permeates it, (...) allowing the coherence of that text to appear in a new light. Heidegger's interpretation of the original sense of time as temporality opposed the latent dogmatism in Kant's critique of reason by shifting the locus of unity in experience away from the spontaneity of the self toward an intuitional transcending of the self as "being-in-the-world." This pointed Heidegger toward a novel revelatory conception of freedom as "letting being be," which he posed as an alternative to the absolutizing of subjectivity that took place in German idealism. Heidegger used Schellings anti-Hegelian conception of the origination of freedom from nature to clarify the meaning of Hegel's key metaphysical notion of reflection. In so doing he developed an alternative interpretation of the "nothing," in contrast to Hegel's method of double negation, that set the meaning of negation into a greater contextual perspective. Heidegger's goal of uncovering the meaning and possibility of reflection as the original possibility of evil led him to a qualified retrieval of his early Roman Catholic orientation to thinking. Transforming these paradigms into a new deconstructive discourse, Heidegger advanced beyond Schellings critique of Hegel, allowing him to establish a hermeneutical relationship with Hegel's system that simultaneously confronts and preserves it. Heidegger's early phenomenological interpretation of Pauline eschatology and Augustinian original sin thus, finally situates his interpretation of the "nothing" as the abyss of being retrieved from the primal Greek conception of nature . Heidegger thereby provides the ultimate "con-text" of metaphysics in its necessary and reciprocal relation to Hegel's conception of presence as an all-encompassing, "self-absolving" system. (shrink)

This paper (in English) highlights a hitherto neglected feature of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit: its critique of the content of our basic categorial concepts. It focusses on Hegel’s semantics of cognitive reference in ‘Sense Certainty’ and his use of this semantics also in ‘Perception’ and ‘Force and Understanding’. Explicating these points enables us to understand how Hegel criticizes Pyrrhonian Scepticism on internal grounds.

Reading The Phenomenology of Spirit through a linguistic lens, Jeffrey Reid provides an original commentary on Hegel's most famous work. Beginning with a close analysis of the preface, where Hegel himself addresses the book's difficulty and explains his tortured language in terms of what he calls the “speculative proposition”, Reid demonstrates how every form of consciousness discussed in The Phenomenology involves and reveals itself as a form of language. Elucidating Hegel's speculative proposition, which consists of the reversal of (...) the roles of the subject and predicate in such a way that the copula of the proposition becomes the lively arena of dialogical ambiguity and hermeneutical openness, this book offers new onto-grammatical readings of every chapter of The Phenomenology. Not only does this bring a new understanding to Hegel's foundational text, but the linguistic approach further allows Reid to unpack its complexity by relating it to contemporary contexts that share the same language structures that we discover in Hegel. Amongst many others, this includes Hegel's account of sense-certainty and the critique of the immediacy of consumer culture today. There's a YouTube interview on the book, under Professor Jeffrey Reid. (shrink)

Hegel’s theory of dialectic has long been a source of both endless confusion and bitter debate. It has, for instance, been oversimplified and characterized as the mechanical movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. In a similar vein, some philosophers in the analytic tradition have reproached Hegel’s notion of dialectic, claiming that it amounts to an outright and absurd denial of the law of contradiction. The dialectic has, moreover, been co-opted and developed by some of Hegel’s most impassioned critics (...) such as Marx and Kierkegaard. One of the most controversial aspects of Hegel’s theory of dialectic has been his perplexing doctrine of determinate negation, which has proven to be difficult for even the most sympathetic interpreters to make sense of. Determinate negation is Hegel’s way of referring to the positive aspect of the dialectic which makes the conceptual movement a constructive one and not a purely destructive or negative one. Although Hegel discusses his notion of determinate negation at some length in the Phenomenology, interpreters have traditionally gone to the Science of Logic in order to illustrate this doctrine. In this essay by contrast, I would like to discuss this difficult and disputed concept of determinate negation by means of an example drawn from the “Consciousness” chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. At the transition from “Sense-Certainty” to “Perception,” the first two sections of that chapter, Hegel describes explicitly the aspect of determinate negation that the dialectic evinces at that point, and it is this transition and this uncharacteristic passage that I wish to examine in some detail. In the first section of this essay, I will discuss Hegel’s notion of dialectic generally in order to pinpoint the role of determinate negation in relation to the dialectic’s other aspects. Then in the second section, I will proceed to analyze his account of determinate negation specifically, drawing on various passages throughout the Hegelian corpus. I will give a brief account of “Sense-Certainty” in my third section in order to set the context for the transition to “Perception.” Finally, in the fourth section, I will analyze this transition to “Perception” in terms of the doctrine of determinate negation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cognition: An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of SpiritJohn RussonTom Rockmore. Cognition: An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Pp vii + 247. Cloth, $40.00.Rockmore's book is an argument that Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is a rigorous and systematic argument about epistemology (2) and it is a commentary designed to introduce students to the details of Hegel's text (1). (...) The epistemological thesis is stated most concisely in Chapter 9. Chapters 1 through 8 comment on the Phenomenology at something close to a paragraph-by-paragraph level, (in the form of Findlay's appendix to the Miller translation of the Phenomenology).Rockmore's thesis is that Hegel's epistemology is an "anti-foundationalism without [End Page 131] scepticism" (215), or a "tertiary empiricism," (197): following Kant, Hegel holds that all knowledge begins with, but does not arise from, experience, but, against Kant, Hegel maintains that knowledge does not relate to anything beyond experience, but is itself the ultimate or absolute object (3). The "Consciousness" section of the Phenomenology establishes this basic position in three stages: "Sense-Certainty" refutes sense-data empiricism; "Perception" shows that knowing what an object is requires the mind's mediation; "Understanding" shows that no successful theory of the unity of the cognitive object can be accomplished in an epistemology that maintains the independence of the object of cognition, (a "thing-in-itself"), and that epistemology must thus shift its focus from object to subject. The "Self-Consciousness" chapter demonstrates that the subject of knowledge must be self-conscious and free, and therefore social and historical. Hegel's great contribution to epistemology is thus to replace the "minimalist" subject of Early Modern epistemology with the "thick" subjectivity of "social human being" (4, 201, 208). The analysis of this "thick" subject is carried out through the "Reason" chapter, (which shows that abstract reason cannot account for the whole of the human subject), and especially the "Spirit" chapter, (though this latter is "perhaps also the most defective part of the Phenomenology" [204]). The "Religion" chapter shows human religious history to be faulty epistemology, that is, an attempt to know that fails because of religion's non-conceptual formulation of its own significance. "Absolute Knowing" rectifies this problem by putting religion's (Christianity's) own ultimate truth—that God is Spirit—into conceptual form in the recognition that human social experience is the absolute. While Rockmore's overall thesis is reasonable, there is much to argue with in the specifics.Kant's philosophy is indisputably a central concern in the Phenomenology, but Rockmore sees Kant in every central move of the book. In his treatment of the "Introduction" and "Consciousness" this is more misleading than helpful (37-8). In discussing the "Introduction," Rockmore helpfully shows that consciousness is a self-comparison, but is weak in discussing the "in-itself." The discussion of "Consciousness" is likewise weak in its treatment of textual specifics, but does assert a reasonable interpretation of this section as a refutation of immediate knowledge that demonstrates the problems of reconciling unity and diversity in objects of experience, and the need for a science of subjectivity.Rockmore portrays the "Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness" as establishing that freedom is to be found in equal recognition, a social situation that is not yet established (70-2). "The Freedom of Self-Consciousness" shows the inadequacy of abstract, individualistic conceptions of freedom (76, 202). Here again, Rockmore's claims are more overlain on the text than derived from it. The treatment of the "Freedom of Self-Consciousness" is disappointing in failing to recognize a systematic character to Hegel's study. Indeed, while claiming to defend Hegel against charges of non-rigorous, non-systematic idiosyncracy (195), Rockmore is surprisingly inattentive to the systematic shape of Hegel's argument.In discussing "Reason," Rockmore again treats Kant as Hegel's major antagonist. His introduction to the "Reason" chapter is helpful, but his treatment of "Observing Reason" suffers from lack of attention to Schelling's philosophy of nature, and lack of historical precision in the discussion of Early Modern science and philosophy. The [End Page 132] discussions of the later... (shrink)

This chapter argues that Hegel is a major (albeit unrecognized) epistemologist: Hegel’s Introduction provides the key to his phenomenological method by showing that the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion refutes traditional coherentist and foundationalist theories of justification. Hegel then solves this Dilemma by analyzing the possibility of constructive self- and mutual criticism. ‘Sense Certainty’ provides a sound internal critique of ‘knowledge by acquaintance’, thus undermining a key tenet of Concept Empiricism, a view Hegel further undermines by showing (...) that a series of non-logical a priori concepts must be used to identify any particular object of experience. Most importantly, Hegel justifies a semantics of singular cognitive reference with important anti-skeptical implications. ‘Perception’ extends Hegel’s criticism Concept Empiricism by exposing the inadequacy of Modern theories of perception (and also sense data theories) which lack a tenable concept of the identity of perceptible things. Hegel demonstrates that this concept is a priori and integrates two counterposed sub-concepts, ‘unity’ and ‘plurality’. Hegel’s examination of this concept reveals his clear awareness of what is now called the ‘binding problem’ in neurophysiology of perception, a problem only very recently noticed by epistemologists. ‘Force and Understanding’ exposes a fatal equivocation in the traditional concept of substance which thwarts our understanding of force and causal interaction. Hegel’s disambiguation of that concept enables us to comprehend how relations can be essential to physical particulars. Hegel contends that Newtonian universal gravitation shows that gravitational relations are essential to physical particulars, and he criticizes a series of attempts—including the infamous ‘inverted world’—to avoid this conclusion. Hegel’s cognitive semantics supports Newton’s Fourth Rule of philosophizing, which rejects mere logical possibilities as counter-examples to empirical hypotheses. This is an important anti-Cartesian, also anti-empiricist, insight. Finally, Hegel’s cognitive semantics reveals a previously unnoticed link between Pyrrhonian and Cartesian skepticism and empiricist anti-realism about causality within philosophy of science: all three appeal to premises, hypotheses, or counter-examples which, as mere logical possibilities, lack in principle fully determinate, cognitively legitimate meaning. ‘Consciousness’ thus establishes basic principles and features of human cognition to which Hegel returns throughout the Phenomenology. The chapter concludes by summarizing Hegel’s over-arching epistemological analysis in the Phenomenology. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to challenge Fred Beiser’s interpretation of Hegel’s meta-aesthetical position on the future of art. According to Beiser, Hegel’s comments about the ‘pastness’ of art commit Hegel to viewing postromantic art as merely a form of individual self-expression. I both defend and extend to other territory Robert Pippin’s interpretation of Hegel as a proto-modernist, where such modernism involves (i) his rejection of both classicism and Kantian aesthetics, and (ii) his espousal of what one may call (...) reflective aesthetics. By ‘reflective aesthetics’, I mean an aesthetic framework which sees art as a form of enquiry, one whose aim is to not merely excite the imagination but to principally focus attention on social and cultural norms. The meta-aesthetical consequences of reflective aesthetics and their Hegelian heritage have both an interpretive and philosophic value: under my account, Beiser’s reading of Hegel is challenged, and my interpretation of how Hegel envisaged the future of art offers a new and engaging way of understanding one of the most notorious claims in the philosophy of art, namely that art has ended. (shrink)

The author of this article challenges a central thesis of Robert Pippin's book, "Hegel's Idealism": namely, that Hegel's idealism is a "completion" or "extension" of an insight first discovered but inadequately developed and appreciated by Kant. It is argued that Pippin does not establish his claim that implicit in the very idea of the transcendental unity of a perception as it is presented in the Transcendental Deduction of the "Critique of Pure Reason" is the key (...) to a form of idealism which resolves the contradictions and dualisms of the Critical philosophy. (shrink)

In The Paradox of Self-Consciousness, Jose Luis Bermúdez presents an abductive argument for what he calls ‘the Symmetry Thesis’ about self-ascription: in order to have the ability to self-ascribe psychological predicates to oneself, one must be able to ascribe psychological predicates to other subjects like oneself. Bermúdez discusses joint engagement as a key phenomenon that underwrites his abductive argument for the Symmetry Thesis. He argues that the ability to self-ascribe is “constituted” by the intersubjective relations that are realized (...) in joint engagement. I will argue in §1 that although Bermúdez may be correct that these phenomena support the idea that pre-linguistic infants and non-linguistic animals possess primitive forms of self-consciousness, for conceptual reasons, his account of joint engagement cannot be used to argue for the Symmetry thesis. I will argue in §2 that while Bermúdez is correct that joint engagement is significant for the constitution of self-ascription, his description of that phenomenon is too robust, because it requires that the infant have a mental representation of the other as a psychological subject of perceptions. I argue that Bermúdez’s description requires an iteration of representations each of which requires a form of self-reference, which goes against Bermudez’s aim of avoiding the paradox of self-consciousness. In presenting his argument for the Symmetry thesis and his account of joint engagement, Bermúdez critiques P. F. Strawson’s argument for the Symmetry Thesis. In §3 of the paper, I turn to the positive project of presenting a constructive argument for the Symmetry thesis. In a variety of sources, P. F. Strawson and Gareth Evans present a transcendental argument for the Symmetry thesis. I suggest that an argument for the Symmetry thesis is available in Strawson’s notion of the primitiveness of the person. In §4, this leads to a corresponding account of joint engagement. Instead of the robust account of joint engagement presented by Bermúdez, I suggest that the infant perceives the mother’s acknowledgement of the infant without the capacity for self-reference that the Bermúdez’s iteration requires. I reconstruct an account of other-ascription in terms of what I call “person perception,” relying on a recent discussion of Strawson’s view by Axel Seemann (2008). On the Strawsonian account that I provide, an adult summons a child to recognize and acknowledge a form of life in which it participates as a person. In closing, I consider how my account of other-ascription differs from two classic accounts— the theory-theory and the simulation theory— and discuss how my account provides a genuine third alternative: the Persons theory. I would argue that the Persons theory offers a new approach to key issues in philosophy and psychology concerning self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. (shrink)

The fundamental aim of this study will be to offer a precise account of the meaning of Hegel's concept of recognition as it is found in the early Jena-Schriften and the Phenomenology of Spirit . However, in locating the origins of the concept in Greek tragedy, we will also be led beyond the meaning of the concept to its significance. Its significance is established most clearly insofar as the concept can be used to form the basis of an overall (...) interpretation of the PhG as resembling a tragedy. The contemporary influence and relevance of the concept is presented in the Introduction. ;Part I traces the emergence of the concept of recognition out of the concept of love in the Frankfurt-Schriften; it then treats the subsequent development of the concept in the early systematic efforts of the Jena era. Part II focuses upon the distinctive and detailed treatment of the concept as it is portrayed in the PhG. Part III locates the origins of Hegel's concept in Greek tragedy, i.e., tragic recognition, and moves on to consider recognition within the structure of the wholes in the PhG and Greek tragedy. ;The concept of recognition has been seen as Hegel's attempt to come to terms with the individual's lack of integration in modern society. It is employed as a critique of social contract theory in the sense that recognition demands more from individuals in a society than the "merely external bonding" of a contract. The self-knowledge sense of recognition, as opposed to the social and interpersonal senses, has not been given sufficient attention. This can be explained somewhat by the fact that this sense is not featured in the early Jena-Schriften. The relation between knowledge and recognition becomes a pressing issue in the PhG. The self-knowledge sense does not supplant the other senses; rather, it supplements them and thus enriches the concept. The self-knowledge sense of recognition, and even the relation between the different senses is best explicated by reference to tragic recognition. (shrink)

According to the received view, Kant and Hegel espouse diametrically opposed views of moral motivation. Kant holds that to act morally is to act out of reflective recognition that a proposed intention ought to be made into a universal law. Action of true moral worth can never be motivated by an immediate inclination. Hegel, in contrast, holds that the natural inclination of an agent, who has been successfully acculturated within a just society, is moral action. The received interpretation is right, (...) but it misses a critical part of Hegel's view and it is to this idea that the entire dissertation is devoted. Hegel does not reject Kant's claim that a necessary condition of morality is autonomous action, which is not determined immediately by natural inclinations or acquired habits. He thinks that precisely such action is the origin of any actual, shared form of ethical life. It is in his idea of a founding act of ethical life that Hegel claims Kant's inheritance. ;The founding act of ethical life does not, however, meet Kant's criterion of moral action. Modeled, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, on Antigone's tragedy, the founding agent acts without being conscious of the universal ethical significance of the act; nor does the community the act transforms acknowledge its significance. The lawmaker and the community are necessarily blind to each other. This tragic, mutual blindness is a condition of the most extreme violence. ;Are there, in reality, any such acts? Modern political life has its founding moment, according to Hegel, in the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars. The old world and its political structures and institutions has collapsed, leaving action doomed to go unacknowledged. The violence of the Revolution and its aftermath is the condition of the foundation of a new shape of life. Though to be condemned absolutely, it is the necessary condition of the foundation of modern states. The concluding claim of the Philosophy of Right is that war, more generally, is the collapse of the actual life of states and the call to found a new shape of ethical life. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the largely ignored ethical dimension in the first section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Sense-certainty, which tends to be understood exclusively as an epistemological critique of sense-data empiricism. I approach the ethical aspect of the chapter through Hegel’s analysis of language, there, as unable to refer to individual things. I then show that the position Hegel analyses is akin to the one presented by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, as well as (...) in his De Corpore, and which serves to ground his naturalistic ethics. The linguistic juxtaposition consequently allows me to relate the ethics of sense-certainty to Hobbes, not only to his “shallow” empiricism, as Hegel puts it, but to the ethical vision Hobbes presents in his state of nature. (shrink)

Given the importance of imagination for Kant, Fichte and Schelling, it is significant that the word only comes up once in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and that it is not a chapter heading alongside "Sense-Certainty," "Perception," "Understanding" and "Reason." ;Part I. "Imagination in Theory" looks at the development in Hegel's theory of imagination from the Differenzschrift and Faith and Knowledge, through three different versions of the Philosophy of Spirit . Part II. "Imagination in Practice," focuses (...) on the final moment of the imagination according to the 1830 Philosophy of Spirit--Sign-making Phantasie. I discuss two examples--the artist's activity as described in the Aesthetics, and the 'religion of imagination'--Hinduism as Hegel understood it in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Part III synthesizes the two previous parts, showing that the Phenomenology of Spirit is the culmination of the imagination's theoretical and practical activity: while in theory imagination is the middle moment of Vorstellen, practically it is at the heart of Aufhebung and thus of Spirit's inception and development. The Phenomenology is the story of consciousness' progress through its self-presentations. Imagination is therefore present throughout the entire book. I do not engage the moments of the Phenomenology, but focus instead on the single appearance of the word imagination in the Preface, and on how Hegel reinterprets Fichte's wavering imagination as a moment within the reflection--the "medium" of this 'Science of Experience.' ;Between 1801-1807 language becomes an increasingly important moment of imagination; by 1830 the externalizing of representations in communication is a moment of imagination. Hegel's psychology of the genesis of imagination and its moments reveals Spirit to be the community of interpreters. In the thesis Hegel's imagination is thought through to the Phenomenology, however, it is in the final transition of the Phenomenology--from Religion to Absolute Knowing, from picture thinking to knowing according to the Concept--that Hegel thinks the imagination through to its end. My Epilogue briefly discusses that transition, and the end of imagination in Absolute Knowing. (shrink)

Professor Franklin is correct to say that there are significant areas of agreement between his account of formal science (Franklin, 1994) and my critique of his account. We both agree that the domain-independence exhibited by the formal sciences is ontologically and epistemically interesting, and that the concept of ‘structure’ must be central in any analysis of domain-independence. We also agree that knowledge of the structural, relational properties of physical systems should count as empirical knowledge, and that it makes (...) class='Hi'>sense to talk about an empirical ‘science’ of structure. Where we disagree is over the frequency of occasions where ‘practical certainty’ is actually attained: Franklin argues that practical certainty is not uncommon in the formal sciences, while I argue that there are barriers to practical certainty that Franklin fails to appreciate. In Franklin’s response, he briefly presents and offers criticisms of my two main arguments against his central thesis. Franklin asserts that the flaw in my first argument is that it does not appreciate that modern mathematical models exhibit structural stability, and thus that many of their predictions are robust under small variations in input or parameter values (and hence, insensitive to the inevitable gaps between estimates and actual values). Nevertheless, what I had in mind in using the term ‘realistic modelling situations’ were models of fairly complex natural systems, such as the dripping faucet, spruce budworm and ecosystem ecology examples. My objection is not that mathematical models of such systems cannot legitimately and accurately describe structural properties that are genuinely predicable of real-world systems, but simply that for.. (shrink)

The most valuable political theoretical contribution made by Marx's idea of socialism is towards the resolution of the seeming opposition of mass democracy and rational government. Marx follows Hegel's redefinition of political rationalization as the actualization of the nascent self?consciousness of the existing ethical world when he uses socialism as a statement of those tendencies of bourgeois society that will create the perspectives of social awareness that allow mass democracy. This thesis is made against aspects of the interpretation (...) of Marx's relation to Hegel in Bolshevik political theory. I claim that the Bolshevik idea of socialism as the militant political intervention of the dictatorship of the proletariat develops, through Engels, a position taken with respect to Hegel's philosophy of right in Marx's Rhenish Journal articles. This idea is, however, pre?Hegelian in the sense that it is open to a democratic criticism based on the philosophy of right understood in an alternative fashion. In his writings after leaving the Rhenish Journal and up to the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx makes this alternative available, and the notion of socialism he arrives at here turns on an awareness of the contradictions which make the militant political imposition of freedom impossible. Whereas for Bolshevism socialism is to be imposed on existing society, for Marx it is more the development within that society that makes possible mass democratic freedom. (shrink)

How can a subjective experience claim universal validity? This question, posed by Kant in his Critique of Judgment, is also at the heart of Hegel's aesthetic project as I understand it. This article seeks to corroborate this proposition by analyzing how works of art transmit knowledge according to Hegel. I argue that one of the things that works of art can show according to Hegel are the apparently private subjective mental states that accompany our experience of worldly objects. (...) Thus, art has the capacity to make structures of the mind that we usually understand as internal to subjectivity and, as such, only accessible to the activity of reflection, accessible objects external to and capable of being perceived. In my view, this thesis is closely linked to the social character of Hegel's theory of mind. By making subjective mental states visible, artworks have, according to Hegel, the capacity to exert an influence on how viewers will perceive the world after encountering such works. Thus, artworks are also crucial sites for understanding how rational minds construct their perceptual world together. I first develop this interpretation abstractly, then apply it to the specific fields of poetry and architecture, before discussing the question of the poetics of architecture in the work of contemporary author Renee Gladman. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Hegel's Introduction Sense Certainty Perception Force and Understanding Hegel's Epistemological Analysis in the Phenomenology of Spirit Conclusion References Further Reading.

I am calling attention at the outset to Hegel’s procedure in interpreting the thought of others not to suggest that he simply failed to represent their views, but rather to indicate that he invariably sets them down in the midst of his own systematic idealism and judges them in accordance with the adequacy of their response to questions posed by his own position. One consequence of this approach is that Hegel views a philosophical position not primarily in terms of its (...) own unifying intention, but from the standpoint of the Idea and his own logic of the Notion plus the assumption that this logic is working itself out through the history of thought. If we apply this principle to his treatment of Kant, it becomes clear that the central point of Hegel’s critique must be that Kant failed to hold fast to the actuality of reason and the force of the Idea because he opted for the primacy of the understanding and its knowledge of finite reality over all speculative thought. In short, Kant was attacked for subordinating what Hegel made paramount. In this sense the ultimate validity of Hegel’s critique of Kant is made to depend on the viability of Hegel’s own system. (shrink)

This article reconstructs Hegel’s chapter “Sense Certainty” (Phenomenology of Spirit, chap. 1) in detail in its historical and philosophical context. Hegel’s chapter develops a sound internal critique of naive realism that shows that sensation is necessary but not sufficient for knowledge of sensed particulars. Cognitive reference to particulars also requires using a priori conceptions of space, spaces, time, times, self, and individuation. Several standard objections to and misinterpretations of Hegel’s chapter are rebutted. Hegel’s protosemantics is shown to (...) accord in important regards with Gareth Evans’ view in “Identity and Predication.”. (shrink)

Hegel's relationship to the Greek ideal of his day is well known: early in his career he saw the Greeks as an alternative to modernity, but by 1805 he had retreated from the Greek ideal, although he still admired the Greeks. Despite agreement that the Greeks played a central role in Hegel's thought, only a few commentators have offered an interpretation of Hegel's account of Greek ethical life. This dissertation presents just such an interpretation. ;I begin by (...) situating Hegel's early conception of Greece in the context of 18th- and 19th-century Romantic Hellenism. What emerges is a picture of Hegel as a thinker who appropriated the Romantic fascination with Greece for his own concerns, recasting the Hellenic ideal as an intersubjective one rather than an individualistic one. In recasting it, however, Hegel had to come to terms with a tension internal to the ideal understood intersubjectively; his famous retreat from Greece consequently occurred in part because his early conception of Greece was untenable. His mature works show the result of this transition on his conception of Greek ethical life: it is still an intersubjective ideal, but it has been refrained in order to emphasize the close relationship between subject and community which Hegel calls "beautiful individuality." I thus offer an interpretation of Hegel's account of Greece in which a weak form of subjectivity plays a central role. I then identify four forms of immediacy which Hegel criticized in Greek ethical life. He contends that they made Greek political life both normatively deficient and internally unstable, because they prevented Greek life from providing a context for the exercise of subjective particularity and subjective freedom. The penultimate chapter of the dissertation shows how Hegel thought these institutions developed in the history of Europe and how he thought the institutions of the modern state provide an adequate institutional sphere for the exercise of particularity. I close the dissertation by situating Hegel's critique of Greek ethical life within contemporary debates about particularity, arguing that a Hegelian politics preserves the laudable features of liberalism while answering some criticisms leveled against it. (shrink)

Chapter 1 reconstructs Gadamer's fundamental philosophical task. The task is the problem of certainty, which is the problem of responding in some way or another to reasons that seem to show that we need, but cannot complete, the justificationalist project. Justificationalism is the view that we need a special philosophical of all human knowledge all at once. Chapter 2 argues that Hegel and Heidegger both try to solve the problem of certainty by transforming the realist conception of truth (...) on which it depends. Chapters 3 and 4 argue that Gadamer provides the resources for a different response. By exploiting similarities between Gadamer's account of understanding and externalism in analytic epistemology, I argue that there is a possible position, hermeneutic externalism, which is based on Gadamer's concept of authority. Chapter 5 tries to show how hermeneutic externalism finally provides an answer to the problem of certainty. The conclusion that I would like to draw from the whole of this work is that Gadamer is a realist and an externalist, in the sense that those views represent what he should think. He should embrace externalism and realism because they best represent his genuine insights and they best address the philosophical task as he conceives it. (shrink)

The following dissertation is a study of the "ontological proof' for God's existence, specifically of the controversy concerning this proof from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. As the title indicates, the primary theme is Hegel's defense and reformulation of the proof. I argue for a metaphysical interpretation of Hegel's Science of Logic, by showing that one of Hegel's chief goals in the Logic is to provide a demonstration for the thesis that "necessary existence belongs to (...) God's nature." I conclude that while Hegel offers a coherent and informative account of this thesis, his analysis does not overcome one of the principal shortcomings of the ontological proof, namely, that the argument involves an appeal to intuition. The ontological proof is thus, if in some sense valid, not persuasive. -/- The discussion of Hegel is preceded by a detailed analysis of Descartes' formulation of the proof. I argue that Descartes consistently defends his argument by appealing to metaphysical and epistemological doctrines as premises, so that the proof represents a conclusion of his entire philosophical system. I also provide a lengthy treatment of Kant's objections to the proof, and I conclude (1) that most of his arguments are repetitions of older objections and (2) that even his best arguments are question-begging. I show that Hegel sides with Descartes, and against Kant, on every relevant issue, and that Hegel's metaphysical system brings Descartes' assumptions to their ultimate consequences. -/- In the concluding chapters I examine some of the problems that underlie the theoretical philosophies of Kant and Hegel. I argue that Hegel fails to show that Kant's philosophy is self-refuting, and that Kant's critique of the ontological argument is consistent with the basic principles of his philosophy. The shortcoming of Kant's view is merely that he fails to justify some of those principles. In the final chapter I argue that any transcendental critique of the ontological argument, or of metaphysics in general, is doomed to failure. (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)

Many of Hegel’s characteristic ideas came from the Enlightenment. We ought therefore to find much instruction from his own critique of that movement. Would such a critique of his be self-defeating? Only in the most superficial sense. Rather, it would be entirely consistent with his notion of self-consciousness : namely, that the self becomes what it is in self-awareness. Hegel’s fulfillment of his indebtedness to the Enlightenment would thus necessarily entail his thoroughgoing and self-conscious critique of (...) it. (shrink)

This paper aims to make better sense of Hegel’s Philosophy of Objective Spirit and defend it against the charge of political conservatism and optimism. I will argue for the left Hegelian position in the theological-philosophical respect, thereby leaving the left-right divide in the social-political respect largely open. I will explain that Hegel’s commitment to the inherent rationality of the state and the course of human history as the progress of freedom does not imply blind optimism, since his thesis (...) is not to be taken as a factual description. Hegel’s point is rather a conceptual one: to comprehend the human world means to comprehend it as a holistically rational entity and process, which is the essential nature of comprehending in the context of the humanities. I will further clarify Hegel’s point by introducing relevant ideas from contemporary philosophy of mind and language, comparing it in particular with Davidson’s principle of charity. (shrink)

This philosophical investigation interrogates the relationship between G.W.F. Hegel’s concept of the master-slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit and the critique and reformulation of it by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. As a means of contextualization and expansion of Hegel’s original textual account, I consider Susan Buck-Morss’ seminal defense through grounding the dialectic in Hegel’s possible historical knowledge of the Haitian Revolution. I maintain that despite a compelling picture, Buck-Morss’ insights are unable to fully vindicate Hegel (...) from the rebukes of Fanon, and as a result, Hegel’s phenomenology necessitates a concrete analysis of the actual conscious experiences of the racialized and colonized subject in order to realize its aims. In pursuit of this critical methodology, I develop the upshot and positive movement of Fanon’s critique through what I describe as a “phenomenology of flesh” in conversation with Maurice Merleau Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible. (shrink)

This paper walks through four different approaches to Hegel's notion of Consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Through taking four different approaches our aim is to explore the multifaceted nature of the phenomenological movement of consciousness. The first part provides an overview of the three chapters of the section on Consciousness, namely Sense-Certainty, Perception and Force and the Understanding, attempting to unearth the implicit logic that undergirds Consciousness’ experience. The second part focuses specifically on the shape (...) of Sense-Certainty, providing an analysis of the movement from Sense-Certainty to Perception from a neuroscientific view. Thirdly, we consider an inferentialist reading of the chapters on Consciousness which has been made popular by Robert Brandom. We think that while this view elucidates the connection that Hegel draws between meaning and use, it fails to account for the vital place of immediacy in each of the shapes. Finally, the fourth part suggests that Hegel’s notion of Consciousness improves the reading of tragedy he develops in chapters 5 and 7 of the Phenomenology. While many critics have noted that Hegel fails to do justice to tragic experience, Consciousness contains an epistemology that develops analogously to the heroes of ancient tragedy. Each approach in this paper comes at Hegel’s description of the journey of Consciousness from a different angle, and together they paint a multi-layered picture of a highly important part of Hegel’s corpus. (shrink)

In this chapter, I expound Hegel’s critique of Kant, which he first and most elaborately presented in his early essay Faith and Knowledge (1802), by focusing on the criticism that Hegel levelled against Kant’s (supposedly) arbitrary subjectivism about the categories. This relates to the restriction thesis of Kant’s transcendental idealism: categorially governed empirical knowledge only applies to appearances, not to things in themselves, and so does not reach objective reality, according to Hegel. Hegel claims that this restriction of (...) knowledge to appearances is unwarranted merely on the basis of Kant’s own principle of transcendental apperception, and just stems from Kant’s empiricist bias. He argues that Kant’s principle of apperception as the foundational principle of knowledge is in fact incompatible with his empiricism. Hegel rightly appraises the centrality of transcendental apperception for the constitution of objectivity. But he is wrong about its incompatibility with Kant’s empirical realism. By virtue of a misapprehension of the formal distinction between the accompanying ‘I think’, i.e. the analytical principle of apperception, and what Hegel calls “the true ‘I’” of the original-synthetic unity of apperception, Hegel unjustifiably prises apart the productive imagination, which is supposedly this “true ‘I’”, and the understanding, which is supposedly just a derivative, subjective form of the productive imagination; the latter, according to Hegel, is Reason or Being itself, and is the truly objective. This deflationary reading of the understanding, which hypostatises the imagination as the supreme principle, rests on a distortion of key elements of Kant’s theory of apperception. In this chapter, I show that Hegel’s charge of inconsistency against Kant, namely, Hegel’s claim that the principle of apperception as the highest principle of cognition does not comport with Kant’s restriction thesis, is the direct consequence of a psychological misreading of Kant’s subjectivism. (shrink)

A revival of interest in Hegel is long overdue. Both the Analytic movement and the post-World War II access of interest in Existentialism resulted from a reaction against Hegelian idealism, but disagreement with a philosopher’s theories is no good reason for neglecting to study them - in fact, to disagree without knowledge is to risk serious error, and to criticize without understanding is merely to reveal lack of scholarship. It is therefore all to the good that attention should be drawn (...) to Hegel’s writings, and Prof. Weiss has chosen an interesting way of doing this by writing a brief commentary on Hegel’s treatment, in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, of Aristotle’s De Anima. This portion of Hegel’s writing is especially crucial for the understanding of his philosophy, for not only is he strongly influenced by Aristotle’s thought and, in a sense, himself the Aristotle of post-renaissance philosophy, but the conception of Mind or Spirit is the key notion of Hegel’s system, as ‘Ousia’ is that of Aristotle’s. Aristotle identifies this ultimately with pure activity, the realization of all potentiality, which is pure form without matter, the activity of God and of active reason in man; and this may be likened to Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. (shrink)

This thesis is a critique of Hegel from a Heideggerian standpoint focusing on the role of action in community. It argues, first, that Heidegger has a more highly developed account of the present of action than does Hegel on account of his theory of temporality. On the basis of a discussion of the nature of action and it's site, I examine the way in which action functions in community in both Hegel and Heidegger. For Hegel, action is essential (...) to community and intersubjective relations and mutual recognition depends upon it. For Heidegger it is precisely the non-acting moment, the moment of vision, which forms the basis for community. Community, for Heidegger would thus be prior to action, issuing from a place proper to Dasein which precedes all action in the world. I argue that the existence of a moment, the moment of vision, which would initially seem to refuse community in Heidegger actually provides a rich sense of the intersubjective because it allows for the experience of that which is totally Other. On the basis of this experience, Dasein would thus be capable of recognizing the essential alienness of the everyday communal world to it. It would thus be able to recognize its difference and thus the difference of others from how their actions are taken up in the communal sphere. Action would thus not be the basis for community. For Hegel, action is essential to the mutual recognition which is the fabric of community. The radical otherness that is found in Heidegger when he articulates the authentic moment is dismissed as an affront to the possibility of community. For Hegel, we are what we do and we are recognized exclusively on the basis of our actions. Consequently, I argue that Heidegger has a deeper and more radical sense of community than Hegel. (shrink)

This article critiques Husserl’s idea of grounding through an exploration of his notion of the lifeworld. First, it sketches different senses of the lifeworld in the Crisis and explains in what sense it is taken to be a universal foundation of all sense-formation. Second, it criticizes Husserl’s idea of grounding and shows that it fails because the alleged foundation—namely, the lifeworld as a perceptual world, or rather lifeworldly experience as perception—is inadequately determined. Perception cannot function as (...) a universal foundation because it is always already interpretation. “The groundlessness of sense” means that the process of sense-formation can in no way rest upon an ultimate ground because contingent presuppositions and historical circumstances influence it from the very beginning. The paper concludes by discussing the consequence of this view for the relation between philosophy and sciences. (shrink)

Without doubt already ‘higher’ animals which as such have phenomenal perception possess an animalic soul. The contrasting comparison of animal and robot proves to be revealing: What does the animal have that the robot does not? A key role here plays Hegel’s interpretation, which can be addressed as a phenomenology of the ‘animalic soul’. His dictum ‘Only what is living feels a lack’ refers to the principle of self-preservation which governs everything organic. Concerning higher animals this too appears as (...) the basis of the soul: Everything, which the animal perceives thus has existential sense, self-preservation-sense. At the same time it becomes clear that robot perception is not capable of a constitution of sense, but is characterized by dementia of sense. Concretely systemtheoretically regarded, the relatedness to sense of the animal subject is here interpreted as an emergence phenomenon of the system constituted by the cooperative of perception, valuation and behavior (perc-val-act-system). In this emergentist perspective, there is, as it were, the dualism of solely-physical being and of immaterial-mental being, which at the same time is a monism with regard to the physical basis alltogether. (shrink)

The Opening Chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, called "Sense Certainty," is brief: 283 lines or about seven and a half pages in the critical edition of Hegel's works . Just over half the text is devoted to a series of thought experiments1 that focus on "the Here" and "the Now" as the two basic forms of immediate sensuous particularity Hegel calls "the This." The chapter's main goal is to demonstrate that, in truth, the object of (...) sense certainty is precisely the opposite of what it purports to be: "the This" is mediated abstract universality. However, not just the truth of Hegel's claim but its very meaning has been the subject of dispute from early on.2 A currently influential interpretive . (shrink)

Reid maintained that the perceptions that we obtain from the senses of smell, taste, hearing, and touch are ‘suggested’ by corresponding sensations. However, he made an exception for the sense of vision. According to Reid, our perceptions of the real figure, position, and magnitude of bodies are suggested by their visible appearances, which are not sensations but objects of perception in their own right. These visible appearances have figure, position, and magnitude, as well as ‘colour,’ and the standard (...) view among Reid scholars has been that Reid maintained that our perceptions of visible figure, position, and magnitude are also not suggested by any sensation. They are instead suggested by the material impression on the retina. Gideon Yaffe challenges the standard interpretation. According to Yaffe, Reid believed that our perceptions of visible figure are suggested by corresponding sensations, by sensations of colour. We defend the standard interpretation of Reid. According to Reid, there is no “local sign” in our sensations of colour. The same colour sensation can be associated with different positions on the visual field, and different colour sensations can be associated to the same position on the visual field. According to Reid, we only have evidence for a correlation between the image on the retina and the perception of visible figure. (shrink)

Commentators on the Phenomenology of Spirit have offered careful but conflicting accounts of Hegel’s chapter on sense-certainty, either defending his starting point and analysis or challenging it on its own terms for presupposing too much. Much of the disagreement regarding both the subject matter and success of Hegel’s chapter on sense-certainty can be traced to misunderstandings regarding the nature and role of certainty itself in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Specifically, such confusions can be traced to (...) a failure to appreciate the connection between sense-certainty as a particular way of approaching and knowing the world, and the assumptions regarding the nature of the world it comes to know that Hegel attributes to sense-certainty. The “certainty” of sense-certainty is not so much an explicit attitude or conception it adopts but is rather something implicit in its practice of knowing through immediate or direct sensation. (shrink)

Berkeley's idealism started a revolution in philosophy. As one of the great empiricist thinkers he not only influenced British philosophers from Hume to Russell and the logical positivists in the twentieth century, he also set the scene for the continental idealism of Hegel and even the philosophy of Marx. -/- There has never been such a radical critique of common sense and perception as that given in Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). His views were met with (...) disfavour, and his response to his critics was the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. -/- This edition of Berkeley's two key works has an introduction which examines and in part defends his arguments for idealism, as well as offering a detailed analytical contents list, extensive philosophical notes and an index. (shrink)

The concept of the thing in itself in Kant's philosophy is the element which deprives us of knowing the thing as it is in itself. Hegel, who believed that knowledge is limited by nothing but itself, had to eliminate the thing in itself in his Absolute Idealism and in this way make his concept of Knowledge absolute. Many scholars believe that he did so in the first part of his Phenomenology of Spirit, titled 'Consciousness'. In this paper, in contrast to (...) other studies which are concerned with Hegel's external critique of this concept and what he has said about it here or there in his System of philosophy, we'll examine his internal encounter with the Thing in Itself as it is occurred in the first chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In doing so, we will try to show why he believed that, if we pursue the process of sublating the shapes of consciousness into one another, there won't be anything like the Thing in Itself. Then We will attempt to explain why his efforts are futile and why, even in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the thing in itself exists exactly in the sense that Kant meant by the term. (shrink)

In contrast to the discussion of theater in the tradition of Western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle through Rousseau and Diderot to Artaud and Brecht, who either devalued or valorized theatricality, Hegel adopts an intermediate point of view between these two extremes. He neither devalues nor valorizes theatricality, but rather maintains that it constitutes an essential dimension of poetic drama through which it presents its ideal and fictive reality to sense perception. While in pre-modernity dramatic poetry was able (...) to represent and reconcile the conflicts between ethical substantiality and individual subjectivity, it is a completely different matter in moder-nity. In the course of the progressing ethical de-substantialization of individual subjectivity, modern drama tends towards pure theatricality and loses its ability to reconcile ethical conflicts spiritually. (shrink)

In this article, we present for the first time Schelling’s early critique of absolute idealism within his middle metaphysics (1804–1820), which has great relevance and influence on the subsequent course of German philosophy, and, more broadly considered, on later systematic thinking about the categories of unity and duality. We aim to show how Schelling defends a form of metaphysical duality, from 1804 onwards, without relapsing into a stronger Kantian dualism. In this sense, our author rejects both the dualism (...) between nature and spirit, necessity and freedom, as well as the monist-immanent metaphysical stance later associated with Hegelian panlogism. Against Hegel, Schelling increasingly vindicates the reality of the finite and degrades the infinite to mere ideality in a movement that resembles later existentialism. Furthermore, we defend Schelling against the accusation of irrationalism that sections of Hegelianism formulated against him and present the concept of infinity without the notion of totality, which he thinks of, much like Fichte, in the light of the concept of an ‘infinite task’. Schelling’s later criticisms of Hegel are shown to be influenced by his early idealist critique of the period at hand. (shrink)

The late Schelling offers an important philosophical critique of Hegel. In this paper, I consider the critique, and options for Hegelian reply. But I do not consider this in the spirit of a zero-sum contest. The point is rather that it is worth exploring both sides of the conflict in ways that, together, support the philosophical importance of this period of philosophy. Here I take as a partner the explanation and defense of Schelling's critique in Dews' _Schelling's (...) Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel_. I offer the Schellingian some different options, for how to pursue and develop the philosophical problem for Hegel; and I suggest and defend Hegelian replies to each. (shrink)

It is often claimed that Hegel's philosophy cannot accept that something would remain beyond the grasp of conceptual language, and that his thought therefore systematically represses the possibility that something cannot be said. By analysing Hegel's account of the ineffable in the ‘Sense-Certainty’ chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, this article argues that Hegel does not repress, but firmly confronts the problem of what cannot be said. With the help of Giorgio Agamben's linguistic interpretation, it is (...) shown that Hegel's conception of the ineffable must be understood from the perspective of his dialectical understanding of language. What appears to be ineffable is only the constitutive result of the dialectical negation that conceptual discourse enacts. Consequently, the ineffable in Hegel's thought cannot be said to remain external to and independent from conceptual language. (shrink)

Among philosophers in the period of change between the late 18th and early 19th centuries it was a widespread conviction that, because the status of a demonstrative theory made up of axioms and proofs was neither available nor desirable for philosophy, philosophical critique would also not be external to the business of philosophy. Rather it was to belong to the essence of philosophy itself. Against this background Hegel occupied himself almost from the beginning of his philosophical thinking with the (...) question of how a critique that is also able to convince an adherent of a theory differing from one’s own should proceed. Initially it must provide him with a description of his standpoint that he himself can accept. Moreover, the critique must tie up with a method of examination that is part of this standpoint itself, because its adherent would not otherwise have to agree to the procedure. Hegel is interested in this matter not only as a description of the hermeneutic situation in which the adherents of two particular, opposing positions find themselves. Rather, he asks himself whether an idea for the procedure of philosophical critique that commits itself to such considerations can also be generalized. This would require giving a minimalist description of the starting point in a way that allows as large a spectrum as possible of positions that are to be the object of the critique to recognize themselves within it. And the procedure of the critique must be able to be developed from this description itself. (shrink)

In the so-called ‘irony debate,’ one of the most infamous polemics of modern intellectual history, G.W.F. Hegel accuses his German romantic contemporaries of being ‘nicht im Ernst’—not in earnest—with respect to irony. Given how this complaint is lodged alongside other, highly charged accusations (e.g. ‘hypocrisy,’ ‘absolute sophistry’ and ‘evil’), the unsurprising consensus among scholars today is that Hegel’s critique does injustice to the philosophically rich account of romantic irony. Acknowledging this vindication of romantic irony, however, I want to revisit (...) and revise this criticism in a way that makes sense of the seemingly paradoxical claim that earnestness, rather than being the opposite of irony, is the very condition of it. Having clarified both the robust normativity of romantic irony as well as the specific shortcomings of Hegel’s critique in the first part of this paper, I then articulate what I call the ‘earnestness condition,’ or EC, according to which irony is in earnest when (a) it has substance, and (b) is grounded in its substance. Developing this account both advances a largely stalled scholarly discussion of the irony debate and develops a conceptual language useful for distinguishing between thick and thin kinds of irony in use today. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that an agent's particular commitments are an integral and necessary part of his autonomy. I refer to Hegel's Philosophy of Right to argue that the autonomous self is in fact a committed self. According to Hegel, freedom is only possible when the agent inhabits roles within a family, civil society, and the greater community of the state. These roles make up the agent's practical identity, or the set of commitments and characteristics around which he orients his (...) actions. His practical identity provides him with norms: he has specific obligations as, for instance, a parent, police officer, or judge. ;Chapter One critiques Christine Korsgaard's Kantian account of practical identity, arguing that it is inadequate because of its insistence on an ontologically divided self. Chapter Two argues that practical identity according to Hegel must include consideration of an agent's contingent circumstances. Chapter Three claims that Hegel's agent knows himself and other humans to possess universal rights and to be sources of moral certainty. Chapter Four discusses social institutions and the norms they generate. When the agent freely embraces roles in these institutions, he embraces the obligations that accompany those roles. He gives himself these obligations and is autonomous through them. ;Chapter Five argues that Hegel's definition of conscience crucially depends on his theory of practical identity. Hegel's conscience is not a source of arbitrary, unimpeachable conclusions but refers to the norms of rational institutions. It does not neglect an agent's particular commitments within those institutions such as commitments to particular causes, family members, or political organizations. It rather explains the freedom of his actions through those commitments. So defined, conscience allows for both inner certainty and external sanction. Chapter Six argues that a wide range of professions describe their ethical experience in terms of conscience, and that Hegel's definition of conscience makes sense of this experience. By referring to roles, Hegel's conscience also requires the agent to be involved in the evaluation and reformation of institutions. As such, his theory is of great relevance to contemporary ethical life. (shrink)

This paper argues that Wittgenstein, both early and late, rejects the idea that the logically simpler and more fundamental case is that of "the mere sign" and that what a meaningful symbol is can be explained through the elaboration of an appropriately supplemented conception of the sign: the sign plus something. Rather the sign, in the logically fundamental case of its mode of occurrence, is an internal aspect of the symbol. The Tractatus puts this point as follows: “The sign is (...) that in the symbol which is perceptible by the senses.” Conversely, this means that it is essential to a symbol – to what a symbol is – that it have an essentially perceptible aspect. For Wittgenstein there is no privileged direction of explanatory priority between symbol and sign here: without signs there are no symbols and without some sort of relation to symbols there are no signs. (shrink)

Though philosophical antipodes, Hegel and Russell were profound philosophical revolutionaries. They both subjected contemporaneous philosophy to searching critique, and they addressed many important issues about the character of philosophy itself. Examining their disagreements is enormously fruitful. Here I focus on one central issue raised in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: the tenability of the foundationalist model of rational justification. I consider both the general question of the tenability of the foundationalist model itself, and the specific question of the tenability of (...) Russell’s preferred foundations of empirical knowledge, namely sense data. The stage is set by briefly considering Russell’s philosophical revolt (§2). I examine Russell’s neglect of the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion (§3), and then consider Russell’s appeal to “knowledge by acquaintance”—the very view Hegel criticized under the banner of “Sense Certainty” (§4). I argue that Hegel’s internal critique of “Sense Certainty” refutes Russell’s “knowledge by acquaintance” and undermines Russell’s ahistorical approach to philosophy. (This article supercedes ‘“Sense Certainty”, or Why Russell had no “Knowledge by Acquaintance”’. The Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 45/46 (2002):110–23.). (shrink)