There are two main aspects of the problem of higher knowledge in Hegel's philosophy. Firstly, how exactly does Hegel appropriate Kant's conception of higher knowledge in the shape of intellectual intuition and intuitive understanding? Secondly, how does Hegel envision the connection of higher knowledge to empirical reality? Recent attempts at answering these questions pull in opposite directions. According to Eckart Förster, Hegel claims knowledge of a supersensible reality, while others, such as James Kreines and Sally Sedgwick, deny this, focusing rather on Hegel's claims to knowledge of nature. I suggest an interpretation where Hegel makes a modest claim to supersensible knowledge but at the same time is unable to provide a satisfactory account of the connection of higher knowledge to empirical reality.1

The apparent implications of the latest findings of the life sciences for our freedom and autonomy are both exciting and controversial: They undermine a common view of human freedom: a fundamentally Cartesian view. A superior account of our freedom was developed by Kant and Hegel. Key features of Hegel's account show that we can expect from the life sciences further insights into the biological basis of our freedom and autonomy, but not their repudiation. I begin with basic features of Cartesian self-transparency (II) and then review three findings of contemporary life sciences (III). I then detail key features of Hegel's anti-Cartesianism (IV), in order to formulate the basic question about our freedom posed by the claim that biology explains away human freedom (V). I criticize this biological determinism by drawing upon Hegel's account of human freedom as autonomy (VI), and comment briefly on biologism in moral theory (VII).

Whether freedom and causal necessity can coexist in the same world remains a contested question. In this article, I seek to show that Hegel's analysis of the category of causality, which concludes in the transition from the logic of essence to the logic of the concept, can help to elucidate this question itself. Starting with a short characterization of the positions in Kant's account of the ‘antinomy of freedom’ in his Critique of Pure Reason, I reconstruct the main sections of Hegel's account of causality in his Science of Logic. Holding the two accounts together shows that both proponent and opponent in the ‘antinomy of freedom’ are misled in that there are not two different kinds of causality at issue but rather two intrinsically connected moments of causality as such.