I want to begin with two of Hegel's endings, one well known, the other less so. First, some words from the closing paragraphs of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy:

Art plays a fundamental role in Hegel's mature systematic philosophy, one of three principal forms of what Hegel terms ‘absolute spirit’, that is, a primary way in which humans cognize their nature and its role in the world (HW 10: 366-67). Notwithstanding this, Hegel's philosophy of art has received less attention than have his philosophy of religion, political philosophy, or philosophy of history, all of which were mainstays in the debates between the rival schools of Hegelianism directly after Hegel's death, and each of which exercised considerable authority in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There were no Right or Left Hegelians on questions of art. Of course, this is not to say that Hegel's philosophy of history and conception of dialectical reason did not have decisive impact on the founding of systematic art history and on the philosophy of art in the humanistic Marxism of Lukács, Adorno and Marcuse, but his specific views on aesthetics and the nature and history of the various arts were much less influential. If one were to broaden the scope of influence to include artists, Hegel is hardly worth mentioning next to figures like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

Do Hegel's specific views on art have purchase nowadays? One set of doctrines has received a good deal of attention, at least among philosophers of art: Hegel's claim that art has ‘ended’. Much commentary focuses on Hegel's contentions that (A) the art of Attic Greece was the primary way for that culture to experience their form of life as binding, and that (B) art after a point in that culture can never play that role again, at least not progressively.

In this paper, I consider Charles Taylor's classic article ‘The Opening Arguments of the Phenomenology’, in which Taylor presents an account of the Consciousness chapter of the Phenomenology as a transcendental argument. I set Taylor's discussion in context and present its main themes. I then consider a recent objection to Taylor's approach put forward by Stephen Houlgate: namely, that to see Hegel as using transcendental arguments would be to violate Hegel's requirement that his method in the Phenomenology needs to be presuppositionless. I concede that Houlgate's criticism of Taylor has some force, but argue that nonetheless Taylor can suggest instead that although Hegel is not offering transcendental arguments here, he can plausibly be read as making transcendental claims, so that perhaps Houlgate and Taylor are not so far apart after all, notwithstanding this disagreement.

Hegel lived in a period in which many of his contemporaries reacted strongly against what they saw as the dangers or the excesses of the Enlightenment (the Aufklärung in Germany). One of the strongest reactions to this was Romanticism, a movement more or less born in Jena during the period Hegel was living there, carried out by some of his friends and by people he knew well, and something which both irritated him and which also quite clearly profoundly influenced him. This period in Jena was also the time during which Hegel was undergoing his rather rapid and astonishing philosophical development that culminated in what he always described as his “voyage of discovery,” the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. In that book, Hegel carried out his own famous critique of the Enlightenment, which included his scathing charge that the “Enlightenment itself… is just as little enlightened about itself” and that it misunderstood the arguments of what he called “faith”. This could easily make Hegel seem to be a Romantic critic of the Enlightenment, somebody rejecting the apparent arrogance of all those French deists, Scottish skeptics, and materialists of all sorts in favor of some more emotionalist conception of human experience. Indeed, in a work often cited, this is exactly the conclusion that has been drawn (and it has appeared even in such popular publications as the English magazine, The Economist). On this view, Hegel's critique of the Enlightenment amounts to charging it with investing too much in reason and neglecting the emotional and religious side of experience, thus denying an essential part of human life. In short, that view sees Hegel's philosophy essentially as a species of the Romantic rejection of Enlightenment, bringing into play the familiar textbook oppositions of the mechanical versus the organic, disenchanted versus re-enchanted nature, and the like.

In this paper I return to Hegel's dispute with Kant over the conceptual ordering of external and internal purposiveness to distinguish between two conceptions of teleology at play in the contemporary function debate. I begin by outlining the three main views in the debate (the etiological, causal role and organizational views). I argue that only the organizational view can maintain the capacity of function ascriptions both to explain the presence of a trait and to identify its contribution to a current system, for it is the only view that considers teleology as a natural cause. To establish how teleology can be considered as a natural cause, advocates of the organizational view return to Kant's analysis of internal purposiveness. However, while Kant identifies the requirements that an object must meet to satisfy the demands of teleological judgment, I suggest that he denies that we can know whether they are truly met. I argue that Hegel's philosophy of nature is better equipped to determine how internal purposiveness can be considered as a natural cause, for it grounds organization in a form of purposiveness that is more fundamental than a designer's intention.

Since in Hegel's view the end of philosophy coincides with its beginning, it is reasonable to expect that the end of the Encyclopaedia sheds some light on the Science of Logic. The Encyclopaedia concludes with three syllogisms in which logic, nature and spirit are related to each other in three different ways. This article analyses these three final syllogisms with an eye to how they can contribute to our understanding of the logical movement that starts from pure being. Trendelenburg and Schelling, like many others after them, think that Hegel's project in the Science of Logic is doomed from the start, because there can be no such thing as a non-temporal, purely logical movement. I argue that the three final syllogisms contain Hegel's response to this challenge. I call them ‘meta-encyclopaedic reflections’ in the sense that they take the whole encyclopaedic presentation of the Hegelian system as an object of critical inquiry and identify its limitations. The core of my approach is to examine how each one of these syllogisms situate us, namely the philosophizing subjects, vis-à-vis the world as disclosed by them. They demand that we shift from a third-person to a first-person perspective towards the world. The logical categories initially appear to move of their own accord only due to the limitations of the third-person perspective of the encyclopaedic presentation, which is to be sublated in a higher, first-person perspective. Hence, Hegel would happily admit that a purely logical movement is a mere appearance, but he would also claim that his philosophy can immanently explain the necessity of this appearance in the beginning of philosophy, and explain it better than his critics.

In this paper, I clarify the structure of dialectical contradiction in Marx in order to show how it is influenced by Hegel. To this aim, I focus on the only place where Marx systematically develops the concept of dialectical contradiction, namely, in his analysis of commodity in the first chapter of Capital. Here Marx claims that the commodity is the contradictory unity of use-value and exchange-value. To make this claim intelligible, I first discuss Hegel's conception of ‘the thing’ [Das Ding] in the Science of Logic and demonstrate how for Hegel ‘the thing’ is the contradictory unity of matter and form. With this Hegelian machinery, then, I turn to Marx to show how use-value and exchange-value constitute the matter and the form of commodity, and argue how they contradict each other.

British Idealism is often identified with the three best known British Idealists: T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley and B. Bosanquet. However, the full range of British Idealists includes also E. Caird, D.G. Ritchie, J.S. Mackenzie, H. Jones, J.H. Muirhead, W. Wallace, A.S. Pringle-Pattison, R.B. Haldane, R.L. Nettleship and J. Watson. Shortage of space does not allow a satisfactory discussion of the nature of British Idealist thought, nor is it the aim of this article. What follows intends to be introductory only. It brings to the fore the concept of reconciliation as the idea that gives unity to British Idealism, explains the role of Idealist thought in nineteenth century British social thought, and reveals the contribution of British Idealism to substantive social and political thought. This introductory account is coupled with a bibliographical essay to illustrate the range of concerns Idealist thought embraces.

British Idealism is sometimes described as an intellectual ‘movement’ not as a result of any comprehensive study of the idealists and their views so much as on the strength of its supposed role in providing intellectual support for the ‘collectivism’ or increasing state intervention that is claimed to have dominated British politics in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, the intellectual interest in British Idealism has generally followed on the belief that Idealism was the major force behind the politics of collectivism.

Although British Idealists did constitute a group, this group did not and, indeed, could not have had the effect on British politics that is usually suggested. British Idealism could not have lent itself exclusively to one line of policy.

To oversimplify quite a bit, scholars’ presentation of Hegel's teleology constitutes a continuum according to how more-or-less secured the progress towards the goal is supposed to be, which tracks roughly the nature of the end and its necessity. In this article, rather than focus on the end and progress towards it, we will focus on the means and structure of teleological relationships on Hegel's account. This focus follows from an essential feature of Hegel's discussion of teleology in the Logic, in which teleology is introduced to solve a problem in the individuation of entities. It will turn out that the fullest actualization of the end is in the durable means, which is also thereby individuated. And it will turn out that the paradigmatic historical means—the state—is tensed, as it were, between the end and its realization that makes it synchronically historical. This synchronic historicity is missing in the usual progressive and thus diachronic accounts of the teleological process of history. But first we step back even farther (at least historically). We begin by taking up the two most important philosophical accounts of teleology for Hegel, namely those of Aristotle and Kant. Then we go to Hegel's Logic for his reconstruction of teleological processes against the background of the explanatory need for individuation. We focus on four aspects of Hegel's account: that teleology is a structure of reciprocal interaction, that the purpose is an immanent governing principle, that change is the price of immanence, and that the durable means is the teleological object par excellence. Finally, we trace these features through Hegel's account of world history and conclude with some brief remarks on the historicity of the state described in the Philosophy of Right.

Robert B. Pippin's new book, The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy (hereafter The Culmination), which discusses Heidegger's ‘confrontation’ with Kant, Hegel and the other German idealists, is, like all his books, an exemplarily researched, thoughtful and thought-provoking text. Pippin has the rare ability to painstakingly lead his readers to the core of a philosophical dispute without ever losing their interest. The Culmination will undoubtedly shape any future research on Heidegger's take on Kant and the German idealists.