This paper examines three puzzles that arise from Hegel's account of the constitution of the self and self-consciousness. The puzzles mirror questions of the respective relation of (a) the self to self-consciousness, (b) self-consciousness to recognition of and by others, and (c) the struggle for recognition to ethical life. The paper argues that Hegel's developmental account of the constitution of the self and self-consciousness provides promising prospects for resolving puzzles about the status of the self before self-consciousness and the status of self-consciousness in the family before the struggle for recognition. However, the paper questions the adequacy of Hegel's account of ethical life, in view of the puzzle that it presents and appears unable to resolve. The paper suggests that Hegel's developmental account is too restrictive, since its move from a quest for mastery to mutual recognition apparently fails to account sufficiently for asymmetrical acts of generosity and sacrifice.

The article examines John McDowell's attempt to rehabilitate the classical idea of the rational animal and Hubert Dreyfus's criticisms of that attempt. After outlining the ‘engaged’ conception of rationality which, in McDowell's view, enables the idea of the rational animal to shake off its intellectualist appearance, the objections posed by Dreyfus are presented that such a conception of rationality is inconsistent with the phenomena of everyday coping, characterised by non-conceptual ‘involvement’, and expertise, characterised by non-conceptual ‘absorption’. Drawing on Michael Fried's reflections on the representation of absorption in Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's film Zidane, and invoking other considerations concerning the ‘mindedness’ of skilful activity, the sharp contrast between conceptuality and rationality on the one side and absorption and skilled coping on the other that frames Dreyfus's position in the debate is questioned. The paper concludes by suggesting that in order to see why Dreyfus is so firmly committed to that contrast, we need to widen the lens so that a broader range of philosophical motivations comes into view. For it is not just that there are phenomena that go missing or are mis-described in McDowell's account, according to Dreyfus; there are ideals and excellences that go missing too.

This article discusses Kant's transcendental idealism in relation to his perplexing use of ‘body’ and related terms in Prolegomena §13. Here Kant admits the existence of bodies external to us, although unknown as what they might be in themselves. It is argued that we need to distinguish between a phenomenal and a noumenal use of ‘body’ to make sense of Kant's argument. The most important recent discussions of this passage, i.e., Prauss (1977), Langton (1998) and Bird (2006), are presented and shown to suffer from both systematic and exegetical shortcomings. The article is a contribution to understanding the nature of Kant's transcendental idealism, defending the view, especially against Prauss and Bird, that Kant is committed to the existence of things in themselves.

This article examines Hegel's use of the distinction between ‘artist’ (Künstler) and ‘artisan’ (Werkmeister) in light of recent discussion about the ‘end’ of art and the distinction betweeen art and craft that, as some have argued, has been central to the concept of the fine arts since the eighteenth century. Hegel does employ an important distinction between artist and artisan, but he does so within a larger account of the continuum of forms of human making that can take into consideration the importance of the artisan's work as well as the artist's. Hegel's account involves two distinctive features not always at issue in the artist/artisan distinction: the stress on the social changes required for new forms of art to emerge and an embrace of the human being as the essentially retrospective and interpretive animal in whom the decisive intersection of content and form finally makes art what it is.

Hegel's philosophy of religion is characterized by what seems to be a deep tension. On the one hand, Hegel claims to be a Christian thinker, viewing religion, and in particular Christianity, as a manifestation of the absolute. On the other hand, however, he seems to view modernity as largely secular, devoid of authoritative claims to transcendence. Modernity is secular in the political sense of requiring the state to be neutral when it comes to matters of religion. However, it is also secular in the sense of there being no recourse to authoritative representations of a transcendent God. Drawing on Charles Taylor's view of secularization, the article focuses on the second strand of his religious thinking, exploring how Hegel can be thought of as a theorist of secularization. It is claimed that his dialectic of religious development describes a process of secularization. Ultimately, Hegel's system offers a view of the absolute as immanent, suggesting that an adequate account of religion will necessarily have to accept secularization as the end-point of spirit's development. This is how the tension between religion and secularization can be resolved.

The essay aims to reveal the priority of the ‘social’ over the ‘political’ in Bosanquet's thought by making more prominent what Bosanquet calls ‘social’. It is the domain of human connectedness and cooperation that occupies the space between the ‘political’, state action, and the personal, narrowly conceived individual. The centrality of the ‘social’ emerges against the backdrop of two rival interpretations of Bosanquet's relationship with British Idealism over state action. The one claims that Green's split into ‘right’ (Bosanquet) and ‘left’ (Ritchie). The other interpretation restores unity, denying that the right-left divide introduces fundamental differences into the Idealist camp. Though not a laissez-faire individualist, Bosanquet's restrictive stance on state action with regard to the poor reveals, I argue, ‘social individualism’. Best expressed in his prioritizing of ‘social cooperative action’ over state action, at the heart of social individualism lies a conceptual-normative nexus between self-maintaining, self-managing, self-governing individuals and social cooperation.