On the first page of Glas Derrida writes in the left column that “This” is a legend, not a fable. “This” could be that or this pronoun. It could be Hegel's signature, Sa signature referred to a few lines earlier, Hegel's corpus, also referred to earlier, what Derrida is in the course of writing, and much else. Not Hegel's whole corpus, however, but two passages: the religion of flowers and the phallic column of India. On each page there are two columns. The right column has to do especially with Jean Genet, especially with Genet's writing about flowers, especially the flower of the broom, genêt; but genêt is also a common noun for a kind of Spanish horse. In other words, the religion of flowers and its role as an introduction to the religion of animals are in play also in the right column. And just as the right column plays on the possibilities of taking a mark as a proper and a common name, so too does the left column, for example on the chances of hearing the name of the eagle in the name of the philosopher when these names are pronounced à la française. So pronunciation has an important part in this. But reading has an important part in pronunciation, legein in logos. The fable thought of as pure thought without mark, immaculate conception, is at stake in Glas. “Glas” means the voice that speaks, as “fable” is from fari, to speak. So is the reader about to discover in Glas something that sticks in the throat of the Hegelian system, resisting digestion there, a materialism of the idea that resists Aufhebung to absolute knowledge? Or is Derrida lifted thither in the eagle's talons? For does not the dialectic thrive on resistance? Would it not be a bad reading of Hegel's text that failed to comprehend this? But

In the decades around 1800, genealogical imaginaries, or the social, political, economic and cultural meanings of descent and kinship, underwent far-reaching change. Hegel was deeply concerned with these transformations in various respects and in different parts of his philosophy. By engaging with the issues of kinship and family, with the disputes over racial diversity as well as with the scientific debates about life, reproduction and the meaning of sexual difference, Hegel contributed to a philosophical re-articulation of genealogical relations, or to the shaping of a new vocabulary through which the political, social, cultural and epistemic transformations of the period were rendered intelligible in distinctive ways. Although Hegel did not draw explicit connections between his reflections on kinship, race and reproduction, my aim is to explore the semantic interrelations among his reflections on these issues.

It is often claimed that Hegel's philosophy cannot accept that something would remain beyond the grasp of conceptual language, and that his thought therefore systematically represses the possibility that something cannot be said. By analysing Hegel's account of the ineffable in the ‘Sense-Certainty’ chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, this article argues that Hegel does not repress, but firmly confronts the problem of what cannot be said. With the help of Giorgio Agamben's linguistic interpretation, it is shown that Hegel's conception of the ineffable must be understood from the perspective of his dialectical understanding of language. What appears to be ineffable is only the constitutive result of the dialectical negation that conceptual discourse enacts. Consequently, the ineffable in Hegel's thought cannot be said to remain external to and independent from conceptual language.

Rather than model Hegel’s account of terrorism on the struggle for recognition and against domination, I maintain that his account is best understood according to Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity. The logic of autoimmunity models terrorism as a symbolic, suicidal act of violence that is created by and directed against the violence of hegemony. It is also continually stimulated by a messianic and nihilistic ideal. This article provides a historical account of Derrida’s elaboration of this concept through his continual dialogue with Hegel. That concept is then applied to Hegel’s account of religious and political terrorism. Ultimately, this analysis supports a reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology in which the confrontation with terrorism as autoimmunity is its lynchpin and which culminates in a moral community that is radically open to the other, to difference, and to the undecidable rather than being closed off and insulated by so-called absolute knowing.

In an engaging recent paper, Ian Hacking has argued that Hegel is “speaking to us” once again, after a long period (in Anglo-American philosophy, at least), in which he appeared to be speaking to another audience, located in another world. He has our ear once more because our philosophical thought has once again begun to incorporate Hegelian themes, after decades in which our respective paths did nothing other than diverge. The aim of much Anglo-American philosophy has been to combine a Kantian “conceptual scheme” idealism with a late Wittgensteinian picture of the individual subject as embedded within a system of shared norms, practices and understandings; this has meant that it is now receptive to a form of “internal realism”, which also has a social, historical, contextual dimension, and it is this that many claim to have found in Hegel. As Richard Winfield has noted recently, after decades in the wilderness, Hegel is now an inspirational figure for the anti-foundationalism, anti-Cartesianism and anti-realism of the “new orthodoxy”:

In several of his writings Hegel suggests an identification of his absolute idea/spirit with Aristotle's God in the Metaphysics. This suggestion is remarkable since it indicates that Hegel regarded his philosophy in line with classical positions in ancient metaphysics. Although there is increasing discussion of the relation between Hegel and Aristotle it is still doubtful what it was that Hegel seemed to find at the highest point of Aristotle's philosophy. To clarify this relation within the realm of first philosophy I will first give a short reconstruction of Aristotle's conception of God in order, second, to confront this conception with the absolute idea/spirit in Hegel. Against Ferrarin, I will not primarily discuss the conception of actuality/activity and infinite subjectivity; rather I will focus on Aristotle's and Hegel's ontological understanding of truth. The new thesis in my paper is that Hegel can relate his theory of the absolute idea/spirit to Aristotle's God on the basis of their shared understanding of truth. This understanding allows both of them to find the highest realization and thus the fulfillment of truth in the self-thinking thinking of God (Aristotle) or the self-thinking thinking of the absolute idea/spirit (Hegel). When Hegel seems to return to Aristotle at the end of his system, this return has its systematic link in the idea of a fulfilled truth which is God or the Absolute in the sense of self-thinking thinking. Although Hegel's return to Aristotle's theology has a certain plausibility, it is also limited by the fact that for Aristotle God's self-thinking thinking is not a process of self-determination, as Hegel finds it to be and which leads him to miss a crucial feature of Aristotle's theology.

The financial crisis that currently besets Europe not only disturbs the life of many citizens, but also affects our economic, political and philosophical theories. Clearly, many of the contributing causes, such as the wide availability of cheap credit after the introduction of the euro, are contingent. Analyses that aim to move beyond such contingent factors tend to highlight the disruptive effects of the neoliberal conception of the market that has become increasingly dominant over the last few decades. Yet while the financial sector has received most of the blame, and rightly so, few commentators seem willing to take into account the role played by representative democracy in its current form. Even if it is granted that actual democratic policies fall short of what they ought to achieve, contemporary representative democracy itself is seldom regarded as part of the tangle it was supposed to resolve. David Merill touches upon this issue when he notes, in the preceding issue of this Bulletin, that ‘the economic dilemmas faced today may be ultimately the consequences of state failure’. The state that has failed to regulate the markets is described as ‘weak’ and ‘subject to external blows, blind to its ends, merely one actor among many in the events of the day’ (Merill 2012: 28). Yet Merill does not seem to consider this weakness to be an inherent feature of the constellation of which contemporary democracy is a part.

There are, of course, excellent reasons not to take this path. First, representative democracy has in many cases proved to be the best way of preventing small elites from acquiring political power, and many of the impressive social and political achievements of the twentieth century are the result of democratic processes.

The world we live in proves best understood as a cultural world. Cultural worlds are examined in this article regarding their aesthetic and ethical dimensions, with the help of Hegel and Husserl. The ethical realm is characterized by a tension between ethical conscience and cultural norms. Even Hegel, who is often conceived as a philosopher of customs, explores the significance of conscience in a detailed phenomenology. Husserl provides a curious perspective on ethics when he, under the heading of a renewal (Japanese Kaizo) of reason, provides an account of a vaguely dialectical development of reason as logos which goes beyond the division between the ‘descriptive’ and ‘ethical’. In the wider sense of ethics, it is also ‘good’ to write about the world we live in. Literature (Hermann, Wallace) will be treated here as an exemplary art-form that stands in close proximity to philosophy since both strive to capture in language the world we live in.

First of all, I am very grateful to both commentators for the attention they have devoted to Hegel's Idealism; I am heartened by the kind words and humbled by the magnitude of the problems introduced by their criticisms. These criticisms both rightly refer to what is the heart of my interpretation, the Kant-Hegel relation, and, interestingly enough, raise objections from roughly opposite directions. Professor Pinkard, in effect, charges that I have made too much of that relation and thereby confused transcendental and speculative concerns. He argues here, as he does at greater length in his recent book (Hegel's Dialectic: The Explanation of Possibility), that the philosophically valuable core of Hegel is a ‘category theory’ limited to an ‘explanation’ of the conceptual ‘possibility’ of various judgments, practices, institutions, etc. Professor Harris charges, on the other hand (and with some irony), that I have made too little of the Kant-Hegel relation, or have construed it too narrowly, that the interpretation of Hegel's idealism which I provide thus either unfairly neglects, or does not have the resources to deal with, Hegel's full theory of the ‘whole’, or of Absolute Spirit, his account of the modern community's reconciliation with itself in time. I am thus alleged to have provided an interpretation that is at once too ambitious, and not ambitious enough, and I hope that such responses, at least for the Aristotelians in the audience, count as prima facie evidence that I must have said just the right thing.

My claim in Hegel's Idealism is that the well-known Hegel Renaissance, in post-war Western Europe especially, has still failed to produce a contemporary reconstruction of Hegel's fundamental position, his ‘identity theory’, his identifying the ‘self-actualization’ of the Notion with ‘actuality’, or his theory of the reality of the Absolute Idea.

Rae Langton (1998) offers a non-idealist interpretation of Kantian things in themselves according to which we have no knowledge of things in themselves – the intrinsic nature of things – just because our epistemic access to things is via their relational, non-intrinsic properties. Whatever the merits of her account as an interpretation of Kant's metaphysics, its plausibility presupposes the coherence of her notion of intrinsic properties. According to the account of intrinsic properties Langton uses, as we will see, there are only intrinsic properties if certain worlds are possible. Allais (2006) attacks one half of the modal intuitions on which Langton relies, but is adequately rebutted by Langton (2006). This paper discusses another, far more radical critique of the other half of the modal intuitions underlying Langton's account of intrinsic properties, intuitions which are also the basis of Langton and Lewis' (1998) account of the same. The account of intrinsicness under fire here depends on the possibility of objects existing alone in worlds in which no other objects (not counting their parts) exist. But according to Hegel's Logik, such worlds are simply not possible. To develop this critique, we cast a broad net by linking Langton (1998) with Lewis (2009) and Langton and Lewis (1998), and then consider (in a necessarily limited fashion) claims from the 1832, Lehre vom Sein in Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik, which we consult in the edition of Hegel (2008). The primary aim of this paper is to offer a clear model of the modal error which Hegel purports to identify, and to show its application to Langton's work.

For politics to measure up to reason, two requirements have long been acknowledged: first, that the ends of political action be universal, and second, that the pursuit of such universal ends consist in political self-determination, that is, in self-government.

Aristotle set the stage for all further political inquiry by distinguishing political association through the universality of its end or good, while identifying the end of politics with political activity itself, an activity in which citizens rule over one another while presiding over all other associations, which fall under political dominion owing to the particularity of their pursuits. Aristotle joined the universality of politics with the activity of self-rule by recognising political activity to be an end in itself that is also a master end for the sake of which all other conduct is to be pursued. As such, politics was itself the highest good, making ethics possible by overcoming the hegemony of instrumental action, whose every end is devoid of intrinsic value, leaving conduct ultimately pointless (see Aristotle 1984b: Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a18-1094b12).

Two corollary difficulties, however, undermine Aristotle's enterprise. On the one hand, he is unable to give the universal end of political association a non-arbitrary content. Politics may claim universality by being both an end in itself and a master end, but this is just a recipe for ‘might makes right’, where any prevailing rule would be identical with the highest good. Appeal to a distinctly human function or to forms of rule that pursue the common good rather than the particular interests of some ruler can provide no remedy.

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.