Hegel’s Logic argues in a manner that is supposed to support a systematic philosophy. But it is difficult to explain how such a systematic argument is supposed to work. For answers, I look to the key transition from the Doctrine of Essence to the Doctrine of the Concept. Here we find discussions of both Spinozist and Kantian systems of philosophy: both are supposed to be helpful, and yet also to be lacking in instructive ways. So the initial hope is that these comparisons can help us to understand Hegel’s own systematic argument, and what it means to transition from an objective to a ‘Subjective Logic’. But the comparisons bring additional difficulties. First, to defend a comprehensive system involves refuting rivals, and the discussion of Spinoza demonstrates that refutation is difficult. Second, it is hard to see how any argument for Hegel’s system could be akin to those in Spinoza and Kant given the extent of the differences between them. I argue that the best way to deal with these difficulties is to explain the systematic argument of the Logic as modelled on the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant’s first Critique.

In this paper, I consider the role of perspective in Hegel’s metaphysics, and in particular the role that multiple perspectives play within the ultimate structure in Hegel’s metaphysics, which Hegel calls ‘the idea [die Idee]’. My (somewhat anachronistic) way into this topic will be to inquire about Hegel’s stance on what Adrian Moore has called ‘absolute representations’. I argue for the claim that perspective is maintained, even in the absolute idea, which generates the task of understanding the nature of that perspective and its compatibility with absoluteness. I attempt to accomplish this task by asking what a logical perspective could be, and how it might be related to visual perspective. Then I inquire into the relation that perspectives have to each other, i.e., to the system of perspectives. I construe those relations in reciprocal and dynamic terms, so that absoluteness takes the form of a structured round of perspectives rather than a relation to reality ‘once and for all’.

One prominent feature of analytic metaphysics in the second half of the twentieth century was the revival of metaphysical debate over modality, and in this paper I suggest that a particular position that emerged within this debate, ‘modal actualism’, bears a striking resemblance to the way that Hegel discusses modal notions in the final chapter of Book 2 of the Science of Logic, ‘Wirklichkeit’ or ‘Actuality’. Modal actualists opposed David Lewis’s counter-intuitive claims about the existence of alternate possible worlds, and aimed to reconcile the reality of alternate possibilities with the common-sense idea of the actual world as all there is. Like Hegel in the chapter ‘Actuality’, they thus argue that possible alternatives to the actual world must, somehow, exist within the actual world. Here I approach these issues via the ideas of John N. Findlay who, in the 1950s, had attempted to reintroduce Hegel into an Anglophone philosophical culture, but who also influenced the later development of modal actualism via his influence on the modal logician, Arthur Prior. Like certain actualists, Findlay distinguished between two modes of predication in order to distinguish, but relate, judgements about the actual from those about the possible. This predicative dualism is strikingly similar to the way Hegel distinguishes two types of predication in his treatment of judgement in Book 3 of the Science of Logic. Reading Hegel’s dualistic account of judgement structure against this background enables us to see how it was meant to provide a logical framework for the ‘actualist’ metaphysics he earlier sketched in the chapter, ‘Actuality’.

Critics of Marx of various stripes have rejected the view of historical necessity that he purportedly inherits from Hegel. Marx famously pledges allegiance to Hegelian necessity by arguing, for example, that social antagonisms ‘spring from natural laws’ that work themselves out with ‘iron necessity’; that the bourgeoisie produces its own ‘gravediggers’; that the proletariat’s victory is ‘inevitable’. In response, some commentators have argued that Marx’s allegiance to Hegelian modality has more to do with understanding possibility as indexed to actuality than with claims about the necessary logic and eventual collapse of capital. Iain Macdonald complicates both classic and revisionary accounts by distilling a rare but powerful notion in Marx’s early and middle period: ‘deactualization’ (Entwirklichung). Marx deploys this term to theorize the ‘thwarting’ indeed ‘undoing’ of real possibility within the ‘living process of actuality’. For Macdonald, this is a deeply ‘unHegelian moment’ in Marx’s corpus. In this paper, I provide a reading of Hegel’s treatment of modality in the Doctrine of Essence that shows that Hegelian modality not only makes room for alternate possibilities, but indeed accounts for thwarted possibilities within actuality. Rather than formal or real modality, Hegelian absolute modality is the proper philosophical framework for thinking the coextensive actualization and deactualization distinctive of capitalism.

The first part of this essay develops the idea of logic as the science of thought, articulating, and thus being, the self-consciousness of thought. It explains that logic, so understood, is nothing other than metaphysics, the science of what is in so far as it is. Self-consciousness, then, thought itself, is not empty, but the source of all content. The second part of the essay discusses the opening paragraphs of Hegel’s Science of Logic; it shows how, in these paragraphs, thought is revealed to be the source of its own content in virtue of its original negativity. Thus the second part begins to make concrete the idea of logic provided by the first.

This paper defends Hegel’s positive contribution in the Subjective Logic and argues that it can be understood as presenting a compelling account of the space of reasons as a form of second nature. Taking Hegel’s praise of Kant’s conception of internal purposiveness and its connection to what he calls the Idea as a point of departure, I argue that Hegel’s theory of the Idea that concludes the Logic must be understood in direct reference to Kant’s argument in the third Critique that purposiveness defines the space of judgement’s power. I take up two arguments that help to understand Hegel’s appropriation and transformation of Kant’s purposiveness thesis: first, Hegel’s contention that internal purposiveness must have primacy over external purposiveness when considered in relation to judgement; and second, Hegel’s presentation of a logical concept of life as the immediate form of the Idea.

There has been a tendency in some of the most influential recent interpretations of Hegel to downplay (or simply ignore) the theological characterizations that Hegel gives to the subject-matter of logic, and to emphasize, instead, certain continuities taken to exist between Hegel’s conception of logic and that of Kant. In the work of Robert Pippin and others, this has led to an ‘apperception’-oriented interpretation of Hegel’s logic, according to which Hegel follows Kant in taking logic to be primarily concerned with the nature of human self-conscious subjectivity. Here I put pressure on this interpretation—first, by foregrounding textual and systematic evidence for taking the theological characterizations to accurately convey Hegel’s considered position on logic, as the science of the ‘absolute idea’, and then, secondly, by showing how Hegel’s arguments for the absolute formality and universality of logic point instead to a more fully-fledged rejection of Kant’s conception as too specifically psychological.