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.

In order to understand Hegel's gnomic oracle according to which the ‘I’ is a ‘We’, the notion of a personal subject is explained by its competence to perform personal roles in a pre-given partition of roles. Explicit divisions of labour by contractual promises are special cases that presuppose the general case of an already established social practice. On the other hand, methodological individualism is right to stress that we actualize joint intentions only via corresponding instantiations. In performing our parts, we form a plural subject, a we-group. The result of what each of us does is what we do, and the generic ‘We’ turns into the generic ‘I’.

The aim of this paper is to show how certain distinctive elements of Hegel's theory of action can provide a fresh philosophical perspective on the phenomenon of addiction. What motivates the turn to Hegel is a set of puzzles that arise out of contemporary medical and philosophical discussions of addiction. Starting with questions concerning ongoing attempts to define addiction, the paper examines the resources needed for addiction to be classed as a disorder, as it commonly is. Provisionally settling with the notion of akrasia, the paper turns to Hegel for a theory of agency that fills in the gaps of the account of akrasia used in the contemporary literature on addiction and helps resolve the puzzles that occasioned the paper.

Charles Taylor claims that not only Kant, but also successors of Kant such as Fichte and Hegel, advocate a primitive concept of action, namely, a basic, irreducible, indispensable concept allegedly essential to our self-understanding. This paper shows how philosophers like Robert Brandom agree with Taylor explicitly with regard to Hegel, and attribute to him transcendental non-metaphysical arguments in support of such a concept. It then proceeds to challenge this attribution (both of the concept and the type of argument), offering a brief presentation of an alternative non-transcendental metaphysical approach to the Hegelian idea of giving actuality to a concept (or end) through a productive activity.

In this paper we propose a new interpretation of Hegel's views on action and responsibility, defending it against its most plausible exegetical competitors.1 Any exposition of Hegel will face both terminological and substantive challenges, and so we place, from the outset, some interpretative constraints. The paper divides into two parts. In part one, we point out that Hegel makes a number of distinctions which any sensible account of responsibility should indeed make. Our aim here is to show that Hegel at least has the materials for a sensible and nuanced account, whatever the precise details of how they hang together. Part two then turns to a hard question concerning the relation of two different aspects of our deeds to responsibility. We consider five alternate ways of relieving the tension in Hegel's text, before putting forth our own preferred solution.

This paper offers an alternative perspective to the traditional interpretation of Hegel's philosophical reflection on history, departing from a reinterpretation of Hegel's reading of the tragic action of Antigone in Chapter VI of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The customary interpretation of this text affirms that Hegel shows how the conflict of tragic action finds its truth and its end in the identity of spirit. Tragic conflict is left behind to the same extent that (modern historical) spirit sublates the Greek ethical substance. This way, spirit can guarantee that our historical time is released from the past of the substance, or the spiritual movement of mediation from the immediacy of an ‘in-itself’. My reading, by contrast, finds under the tragic conflict of this text of Hegel's nothing but the ‘no’ of death that negates itself, or a principle that has the form of an original and irreducible conflict. Under this interpretation of Hegelian spirit, it becomes clear that it can neither fail to posit some form of ‘in-itself’ nor sublate its own tragic nature. This way it is shown that Hegel's reflection on the past does not reassure the superiority of the identity of the (modern) present (as the end of history), but rather illuminates its ‘broken’ nature. I thus offer an alternative view on Hegel's comprehension of the relation between present and past and between philosophy and time.

This paper argues that the different ways of facing Hegel's system, as an impossible attempt to harmonize tradition and openness to novelty, respond to an underlying malaise: that provoked by the disturbing question of “the actuality of philosophy” after Hegel. That question insistently arises with respect to different paradigms of contemporary philosophy, and is found in critical theory, in analytical philosophy of action, in Žižek's materialism, and in Derrida's deconstructive reading. Adorno's interpretation introduces the tension between universal concepts and laws, transmitted by the cultural tradition, and particular elements that the subject of the action must always take into account. As a consequence, the subject must include what is not reducible to a concept, which enables the construction of a language of experience that transcends the identifying thinking of the concept and makes negative dialectics possible as a theory of action.