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.

The goal of my essay is to clarify the status of the a priori in Hegel's Science of Logic. My claim is that in order to make possible an appreciation of the originality of Hegel's position we need to map a context of discussion and to dissolve a set of preconceptions about Hegel's idea of philosophy. My argument will be articulated in two parts. In the first part, I will analyse four possible positions regarding the issue of the aprioricity of the Logic, I will defend a fifth position, and I will draw a distinction between apriorism and a priori. In the second part, I will examine three distinct charges of apriorism against Hegel's Logic: the charge of assuming God's point of view of the universe, the charge of vicious circularity between the beginning and the end of the Logic, the charge of self-sufficiency of the Logic. As a result, I hope to show that these charges are unfounded, and to clear the ground for an adequate evaluation of Hegel's own sublation (Aufhebung) of the a priori/a posteriori divide.

The philosophical understanding of nature is a key concern of both Plato and Hegel. Their elaborations of the identity and status of nature within their respective philosophies exhibit significant affinities to which Hegel himself draws attention in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Hegel and Plato, indeed, are fundamentally at one in theorizing nature as both displaying and obscuring the principles of reason which they take as providing the foundations of a coherent explanation of reality. In his lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel takes great pains to emphasize the profundity of Plato's idealism as residing in its identification of the objectively real with the rational. Plato, according to Hegel, is to be revered, above all, for having “… grasped in all its truth Socrates' great principle that ultimate reality lies in consciousness, since according to him the absolute is in thought and all reality is thought.” The Timaeus, for Hegel, articulates how the world of nature is necessarily structured by reason, just as the Republic is seen by Hegel as providing a philosophical explanation of the rationality of the traditional, organic community of the Greek polis. Hegel's recognition of the Platonic foundations of his own version of “absolute” idealism in which the universality of thought assumes an explanatory priority over the material phenomena of nature as well as informing the spiritual activities of human beings has been noted, rightly, by a number of subsequent commentators. Michael Rosen, for instance, in his book, Hegel's Dialectic and Its Criticism, while carefully distinguishing between aspects of Hegel's and Plato's conceptions of nature, intimates the continuity of Hegel's idealism with Plato's by observing how Hegel's language in effecting a transition from the categories of pure thought in the Logic to the material world of nature constitutes an “… echo of Plato's Timaeus.” Certainly, Hegel's cryptic account of the transition from the Absolute Idea, the categorial terminus of the Logic's interrogation of the determinations of pure thought, to the externality and materiality of nature evokes Plato's construal of the construction of the world in the Timaeus, both by the indeterminate character of the God which is invoked, as well as by the clear subordination of material phenomena to a separately articulable order of reason. In the account of the construction of the world developed in the Timaeus, Plato deploys the image of the divine demiurge imparting order to the world by referring to a pre-existing pattern of ideas. Hegel conceives of the Absolute Idea which at the outset of the Philosophy of Nature he likens to God, as, “… freely releasing itself…” into the externality of space and time, in which movement the Idea is seen as suffering neither a transition within nor a deepening of its character such as the mediated categories of the Logic incur in the process of their integration within the Absolute Idea.

In 1970, the Italian feminist Carla Lonzi published her now-classic polemic urging women to “spit on Hegel”. Disregarding her advice, many subsequent feminist theorists and philosophers have engaged substantially with Hegel's thought, and a wide variety of feminist readings of Hegel have sprung up. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of these different feminist criticisms and interpretations of Hegel. In introducing these various interpretations, I will show how they reflect a range of divergent feminist approaches to the history of philosophy as a whole. My aim is not only to describe but also to evaluate these approaches, with respect to their capacity to generate insightful and productive readings of Hegel's philosophy. I shall argue that what I will call the “essentialist” feminist approach to Hegel is the most fruitful, doing most to illuminate the contours of his thought and to open up new and creative ways of reading his works.

To anticipate, in surveying the various feminist interpretations of Hegel, I will classify them as reflecting four different types of feminist approach to the history of philosophy. The first, “extensionist” approach draws upon the history of philosophy for conceptual resources to understand and explain women's social situation. The second approach is more critical, tracing the pervasiveness of “masculinist” assumptions and biases in the history of philosophy. To call views “masculinist” is to say that they uphold systematic and hierarchical contrasts between masculinity and femininity, contrasts which need not be explicit but may be sustained through contrasts between other ostensibly neutral concepts which actually have tacit gender connotations. This critical approach generates an overwhelmingly negative picture of the philosophical tradition. The third, “essentialist” approach complicates this picture, recovering and highlighting the strands within historical texts which revalorise concepts or items that are given feminine connotations. These often overlooked strands oppose the dominant masculinist tendencies in texts by assigning equal importance and value to “symbolically feminine” concepts. However, proponents of the fourth, “deconstructive” approach object that essentialist readings of philosophical texts accept and reinforce patterns of gender symbolism which feminists ought to challenge. Deconstructive feminists seek to expose and exacerbate the instability within these patterns of gender symbolism by tracing how philosophical texts continuously undermine the gender contrasts present within them.

While much has been written in recent years about the significance of Hegel’s Logic for Marx’s method in Capital, less attention has been given to the relevance of Hegel’s method for understanding Marx’s outlook on rights. The dominant view among political theorists across the Anglo-American, Marxist and critical theory traditions is that the revolutionary transformation of capitalism would pave the way for the disappearance of rights in communist society. The aim of this article is to question the orthodoxy concerning the fate of rights in communist society by bringing into relief the relevance of Aufhebung. When applied to Marx’s social theory, this Hegelian concept sheds valuable light on the transformation of rights in communist society and points to an alternative conclusion than the one proposed by leading commentators. A re-Hegelianized reading of Marx’s cumulative reflections on rights shows the possibility of a reconstituted notion of rights in communist society.

While a number of classical pragmatists crafted their philosophies in conjunction with a careful study of Hegel's works, others saw their philosophies emerge in antagonism with proponents of Hegel. In this paper, we offer an instance of the latter case. Namely, we show that the impetus for Charles S. Peirce's early articulation and avowal of realism (the claim that some generals are real) was William Torrey Harris's claim that the formal laws of logic lacked universal validity. According to Harris, the leading representative of Hegelism in the United States, the universal validity of the laws of logic rested on a nominalistic metaphysics that a Hegelian-realism showed to be false. In response to this charge, we articulate how Peirce's attempt to prove the universal validity of the laws of logic resulted in avowing a realism that differed from both nominalism and Harris's Hegelian-realism.

It is often assumed that Hegel's philosophy contains no practical dimension, no doctrine of how human beings should live, but is concerned exclusively with showing that human existence, as the product of reason, is already fully rational. As a consequence, even though Hegel's social and political thought (which is set out mainly in his Philosophy of Right) has been the subject of extensive and detailed study over the years, few commentators have ever tried to develop a Hegelian ethical theory to place alongside those of Aristotle, Kant and Mill. In his book, Hegel's Ethical Thought, Allen Wood has set himself the task of remedying this situation and, in my view, has succeeded in producing one of the most thoughtful, informative and provocative accounts of Hegel's Philosophy of Right to date.

Wood's achievement is extraordinary. He offers a coherent and sophisticated account of virtually all the major elements of Hegelian “objective spirit”, including freedom, happiness, recognition, right, property, punishment, morality, conscience, civil society, poverty, the state and history; and in the process he engages Hegel in a fascinating and highly instructive dialogue with a whole host of thinkers, including Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Fichte, J F Fries and J S Mill, in a way that exceedingly few commentators have succeeded in doing (or have even tried to do). As a result, I believe that Wood has shown conclusively that Hegel is an ethical theorist who is every bit as sophisticated as Aristotle, Kant and Mill, and whose contribution to ethical theory can no longer continue to be disparaged or ignored (as is largely the case) by contemporary students of the subject.

There is a broad consensus in the literature that in the section on ‘The Genus’ in the Science of Logic, Hegel argues that any living being must exist among other instances of its kind, with which it reproduces to create future generations, and out of which it was itself produced. This view is not only hard to motivate philosophically, it also seems to contradict many things Hegel says elsewhere in his system about the details of living nature, especially concerning the reality of spontaneous generation. After an examination of the secondary literature on ‘The Genus’, I offer an alternative view of this section, which I call ‘the Modal Reading’. The Modal Reading sees the language of pluralities in ‘The Genus’ as really Hegel's peculiar way of articulating certain modal features of thoughts about the living: to grasp a living individual as living, we need to distinguish not only between this individual and its environment, but also between the things this individual actually does and other possibilities which it does not actualize. The Modal Reading has a logical motivation insofar as it articulates what is needed to think of a living being as living, but it also avoids saddling Hegel with the problematic entailments he is usually read as taking on in this section. A further upshot of the Modal Reading is that approaching Hegel in this way provides us with a way to see Hegel as defending a non-nominalistic alternative to essentialist accounts of living kinds. Finding a way to read ‘The Genus’ which coheres with Hegel's views elsewhere in his system thus shows Hegel to have been an especially subtle and penetrating thinker, with continuing relevance for the philosophy of biology.

The notion of being-at-home-in-otherness is the distinctive way of thinking of freedom that Hegel develops in his social and political thought. When I am at one with myself in social and political structures (institutions, rights and the state) they are not external powers to which I am subjected but are rather constitutive of my self-relation, that is my self-conception is mediated and expanded through those objective structures. How successfully Hegel may achieve being-at-home-in-otherness with regard to these objective structures of right in the Philosophy of Right is arguable. What is at issue in this paper is however to argue that there is a blind spot in the text with regard to nature. In Ethical Life the rational subject's passions and inclinations are brought into the subject such that she is ‘with herself’ in them; with regard to external nature no such reconciliation is achieved or even attempted. In Abstract Right external nature is effectively dominated by and subsumed into the will and it is never something in which one is with oneself. It remains outside the model of freedom that Hegel develops in the Philosophy of Right. There is something troubling about this formulation, since it excludes nature from freedom, but also something accurate, as it reflects the unresolved attitude of moderns to the natural world.

Natural Kind Essentialism (NKE) is the view that the objects of sciences like physics, chemistry and biology fall into natural kinds, and that such kinds have essences—sets of properties possession of which is necessary and sufficient for kind-membership. Since Putnam and Kripke brought NKE back onto the philosophical agenda, it has found many advocates. But comparatively little attention has been paid to the question of how this view can be positively motivated. After illustrating the current need for an argument for NKE through critical discussions of Putnam’s, Kripke’s and Ellis’s arguments for NKE, this article aims to show that Hegel offers the resources for an original argument for the view. This argument works by deriving metaphysical implications from an account of what it means to understand an explanandum.

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’.

There has been much debate regarding interpretation of the concept of recognition (Anerkennung) in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Among the issues discussed in various commentaries, two that I find particularly interesting and important are: a) the question of the social and historical vs psychological significance of the concept of recognition which appears in Chapter 4 of Hegel's Phenomenology and b) the status of the dialectic of lordship and bondage for understanding the nature of the reconciliation of self-consciousness in the realm of objective spirit. Both of these topics have been widely discussed and I could not pretend to do justice to them in the space of this paper. My particular interest here is to discuss the political significance of Hegel's concept of recognition, specifically by exploring its connection to Hegel's overtly political works, especially the Philosophy of Right with its articulation of the Idea of the state. However, before proceeding directly to that task, I would like to begin with some comments on the two issues I just mentioned, as they are relevant to my topic.

In an essay entitled “Notes on Hegel's ‘Lordship and Bondage’” George Amstrong Kelly cautions the reader of the Phenomenology against oversimplifying Hegel's concept of recognition. There are two oversimplifications in particular that he worries about: (1) reducing the significance of Anerkennung to a social and political reading, and (2) (in Kelly's words) “the master- slave relationship is made an unqualified device for clarifying the progress of human history”, (p 191) The first mistake is avoided by seeing, in addition to the social “angle”, the “pattern of psychological domination and servitude within the individual ego”, (p 195) According to Kelly, “The problem of lordship and bondage is essentially Platonic in foundation, because the primal cleavage in both the history of society and the history of the ego is at stake. The two primordial egos in the struggle that will lead to mastery and slavery are also locked within themselves”, (p 199) The internal aspects of lordship and bondage are found in the struggle for self-awareness between self and other within the Ego, eg., in terms of appetition vs spiritual self-regard, opposed faculties in the ego that once awakened must be brought into harmony. As Kelly puts it in his book Idealism, Politics and History, “man remits the tensions of his being upon the world of fellow beings and is himself changed in the process. This relationship furnishes the bridge between psychology and history”, (p 334)

A detailed and full-scale study of “Hegel and the ‘Gelstesleben’ of Great Britain” is still lacking. What we have, Instead, are either rough sketches for a later painting, or individual pieces for a mosaic, of which plenty of stones have not yet been produced. It has become clear, however, that any full-scale study would Involve at least five major areas:

a) Hegel's interest in and reaction to the political life of Great Britain, from the allusion to Pitt's politics of the 1790s to the Reform Bill article of 1831;

b) Hegel's indebtedness to Scottish political economy and theory of civil society (Ferguson, Hume, Steuart, Smith);

c) Hegel's assessment of British works of art (e.g. Shakespeare, Milton, Scott) and aesthetic theories (Shaftesbury, Kames);

d) Hegel's discussion of British philosophers in the History of Philosophy (Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkely, Hume, Scottish School);

e) Hegel's study of British historians (Gibbon, Hume) and his description of England's role in world history.

For the extent and dates of Hegel's contacts with these British sources, and to compare and identify them with certain passages from Hegel's writings, ths question of his knowledge of English is of considerable importance, rather than being a matter of mere biographical curiosity. However, before raising expectations too high, it must be emphasized that the present article does not provide, nor indeed pretend to provide, an ultimate answer to this question: a watertight proof has not yet come to light. What is hoped to be achieved is, firstly, to bring together the available direct and indirect evidence on the issue. Secondly, to draw some conclusions from the admittedly inconclusive material. These conclusions should be seen as first hypotheses which any scholar can scrutinize on the basis of the evidenoe presented. The greatest reward for the present attempt would be to spark off further research which eventually might result in finding further evidence.

International relations theorists have long complained about the paucity of rigorous political philosophy in their discipline, and especially bemoan the lack of classic texts to guide them. It is suggested that with the exception of Thucydides, there is little exclusively concerned with International Relations, and nothing that international relations theorists have constructed to resemble the received canon comparable with its sister subject of political theory. Yet all of the major political theorists accommodate international relations in some way, and are invoked by contemporary international relations theorists as having something important to say. Contemporary international relations theory, however, is immersed in its own sense of self-importance, seeing the value of everything in utilitarian or practical terms. The desire to change the world, and not merely to understand it, predisposes the discipline to scale the obligatory heights of Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant, Hegel and Marx in order to pillage what is useful, and to ignore the attempts of philosophers more immediately at the root of modern international relations theory who addressed many of the questions currently thought important and which pointed the way to some of the contemporary answers. Hegel's ill-deserved, but not wholly unfounded, reputation as a brutal realist, and the association of Bosanquet and the rest of the British Idealists with German or Prussian philosophy during and between the two world wars in popular and learned journals, newspapers, and the publications of leading philosophers, including Hobhouse, Hobson, Dewey, Santayana, Laski, Delise Burns, Cole and Joad, have served to bury almost without trace a wealth of literature that applied what are now fashionably called communitarian principles to international questions. Even Chris Brown, who relates Hegel, Green and Bosanquet to the communitarian approach to international relations, ignores the fact that British idealists addressed the key issues of the possibility of extending the community to the international sphere and the establishment of supranational institutions.

Ethical motivation represents an important aspect of Kant's practical philosophy, one without which much of Kant's distinctive position would be lost. Not surprisingly, it is also one of those aspects of Kantianism to which Hegelian criticism directs its focus with predilection. Central to Kant's account of moral motivation is the distinction between acting merely in accordance with duty and acting from duty. When he introduces this distinction, in the Groundwork, Kant also points to the epistemic difficulties of properly drawing the distinction. A key concept here is, without any doubt, that of duty, and Kant begins with a preliminary definition: the notion of duty is a notion ‘which contains that of a good will though under certain subjective limitations and hindrances’ (G: 4: 397).

What this definition tells us is that, although beings which are only governed by practical reason without any admixture of inclinations and sensuous drives, that is, purely rational beings, will also have a good will, such beings do not have duties precisely because they lack the ‘subjective limitations and hindrances’ of sensuous motivating forces, such as desires, passions, habitual responses. If a person spontaneously and necessarily acts as duty requires, then it does not make sense to talk about an obligation for this person to act as duty requires. Such a person must be a purely rational person, since only she can always and necessarily act as (practical) reason requires. By contrast, beings with limitations and hindrances, like us, act spontaneously and necessarily as natural laws require and, hence, it does not make sense to talk about our obligation or duty to observe the laws of nature.

That Hegel was a significant influence on the young Georg Lukács' Theory of the Novel is a point few would dispute. Lukács himself insisted that the first part of TN represented his own transition from Kantian to Hegelian theory, and most critics have subsequently affirmed the importance of Hegel to Lukács' pre- (or, depending on one's view, proto-) Marxist argument in TN. Yet the two are in some ways strange to take together in the context of novelistic theory. Despite the profusion of novelistic literature in his own time and his own significant appropriation of it for the limning of essential moments of the development of the world-historical spirit, Hegel's official Aesthetics hardly presents what one could claim to be an especially worked-out theory of the novel. The Aesthetics takes up literature in general primarily under the rubric of providing a theory of the genres of poetry — epic, lyric and dramatic — and what relatively few words Hegel actually devotes to the novel and prose literature in the lectures are tucked in corners: at the end of the discussion of the development of the epic, in the discussion of the historical form of the romantic, and in scattered comments elsewhere. As for TN, despite the strong connections some have drawn between Hegel and Lukács — Peter Demetz said that Lukács was ‘in a certain sense … the last Hegelian in the grand style’ (Demetz 1967: 215) — others have questioned whether Lukács' work should be regarded primarily as making a contribution to the philosophy of literature in the tradition from which Hegel writes.

My aim in this paper is to investigate Hegel's claim that ethical life (Sittlichkeit) does not simply negate but rather incorporates, or preserves, crucial elements of the Enlightenment conception of moral subjectivity that Hegel associates with the standpoint of Morality (Moralität). More specifically, the part of Hegel's view I want to examine here is his claim that individual moral conscience (Gewissen) has its place within the rational social order as depicted in Part III of The Philosophy of Right, “Ethical Life”. There is a widespread perception among Hegel's liberal critics that his vision of the rational social order allows no place for the genuine expression of moral conscience. This is the view expressed, for example, in Ernst Tugendhat's recent charge that Hegel's view excludes the possibility of “adopting a rational perspective” on a society's prevailing norms and practices’: “Hegel does not allow for the possibility of a responsible, critical relation to the … state. Instead he tells us that existing laws have an absolute authority. The independent conscience of the individual must disappear, and trust takes the place of reflection. This is what Hegel means by the Aufhebung of morality into ethical life”.