“Qu'est-ce qui cloche dans le système, qu'est-ce qui boite? La question est aussi boiteuse et ne fait pas question. Ce qui déborde le système, c'est l'impossibilité de son échec, comme l'impossibilité de la réussite: finalement on n'en peut rien dire, et il y a une manière de se taire (le silence lacunaire de l'écriture) qui arrête le système, le laissant désoeuvré, Iivré au sérieux de l'ironie.”

Glas is a tour de force of Hegel scholarship. Although primarily concerned with the Philosophy of Right and the Phenomenology of Spirit, Derrida also offers detailed discussions of The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, the First Philosophy of Spirit of 1803-4, the 1803 essay Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, the Lectures on Aesthetics and the introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. In addition - and this list is not exhaustive - there are discussions of and references to the Logic, the Encyclopaedia, the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, the Differenzschrift, Faith and Knowledge, and abundant quotations from Hegel's correspondence.

In his treatment of subjective mind, Hegel argues that the development that characterizes the vital process of a human individual is logically unique in that it dissolves the contradiction between two logical determinations that characterize any vital activity: the contradiction between the ‘immediate singularity’ of the subject of this process and its ‘abstract generality’. Hegel employs the term Bildung to characterize any vital activity that has this form. The idea that the distinction between human life and non-human life is a logical distinction is one of the main lessons that Hegel thinks we should learn from Aristotle's treatment of the idea of life. In this article I distinguish between two contemporary varieties of this Aristotelian idea: a sophisticated variety that emphasizes the idea of second nature in order to characterize the distinctiveness of the human, and a naive variety that thinks of the human's uniqueness in terms of characterizations that already belong to its first nature. I argue that Hegel is neither sophisticated nor naive but offers a third variety of Neo-Aristotelianism that solves the difficulties of the other two. This has decisive consequences for his understanding of Bildung. Although the notion of Bildung describes an empirical process, Hegel argues, it is not an empirical concept. Rather, it is the concrete concept of the process of actualization that characterizes a self-conscious form of life that reflects the inner temporality of this form's actuality.

In this paper, I shall focus on the relation between habitual body and memory in Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Both Hegel and Merleau-Ponty defend a view of the self that is centred on the role of habituality as embodied activity situated in a context. However, both philosophers avoid committing to what Edward Casey has defined habitual body memory, i.e., an active immanence of the past in the body that informs present bodily actions in an efficacious, orienting and regular manner. I shall explore the reasons why neither Hegel nor Merleau-Ponty develops an explicit account of habitual body memory. This will shed light not only on Hegel’s account of lived experience, but also on Hegel and Merleau-Ponty’s common concern with the habitual body.

“Reading the morning paper is a kind of realistic morning prayer”

Hegel's best known treatment of the European Enlightenment (in his Phänomenologie des Geistes) singles out the problem of religious faith, or the new, modern struggle between insight and faith, between enlightenment and what its defenders saw as mere “superstition”.

This treatment is distinctive and on the face of it highly controversial. For one thing, while the topic is simply announced as die Aufklärung, Hegel makes no attempt at a comprehensive survey. Bacon, Swift, Smith and the British seem to play no discernable role; oddly, neither do Lessing or Mendelssohn or the German, “Berlin” Enlightenment. If there is a focus in these highly typological and categorial distinctions, it is clearly le siècle du lumière, not die Aufklärung or the Battle of the Books; if there is a representative figure, it is unquestionably Diderot; if there is a theme, it is ethical and broadly normative, not scientific or even political.

According to a well-known statement in Hegel's Encyclopaedia, what differentiates the philosophy of nature from physics is ‘the kind of metaphysics used by them both’ (W9: §246Z: 20, N: 11). In the same vein, recent scholarship has stressed that Hegel criticises the logical procedures and metaphysical presuppositions of the working scientist's activity, taking issue with their lack of awareness about the mental categories they use and the alleged consistency of their way of arguing. Put rather more critically, it is often claimed that Hegel's concerns were purely philosophical, and that he never entered into genuinely scientific debate. Unlike Schelling, who engaged in scientific debate, Hegel is thought to have confined himself to observing and judging it, demonstrating his ability to grasp its main features, on the basis of which later to build his philosophy of nature.

To combat the old tradition of negative assessment of Hegel's relation to the empirical sciences, which saw it as aprioristic, dogmatic, misleading and ill-informed, the editors of the critical edition of the Phenomenology retrace some of the contemporary scientific sources for Hegel's objections to description and classification in the natural sciences, and document his appreciation of new developments in electricity and chemistry. Through a primarily historical approach, Hegel's critical remarks on the attempt to fix laws for organic forces (sensibility, irritability, reproduction) and his critique of the scientific status of physiognomy and phrenology, all of which elucidate his allusions in ‘Observing Reason’, are shown to be rooted in contemporary scientific debates. Recendy, however, it has been contended that this kind of scholarship that identifies Hegel's active engagement with the science of his time, ‘tend[s] to reduce the text to a document for historians of nineteenth-century science’ (Stone 2005: xv). In Italy, a scholar has also made a subtle case for his claim that, in contrast to his mature system, Hegel's confrontation with the natural sciences in the Phenomenology is essentially and necessarily critical, aiming to reveal the partiality, one-sidedness, and inadequacy of forms of cognitive approach typical of the natural sciences, and that it forms part of Hegel's dissolution of all of consciousness's forms of externality.

L'Avenir de Hegel [Hegel's Future] is the title of the book I published in 1996 and which bears the subtitle: “Plasticité, Temporalité, Dialectique” [Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectics]. I intend to examine here the kind of reading of Hegel put to work in that book. I must add that l'Avenir de Hegel, before becoming a book, was the title of my doctoral thesis undertaken under the supervision of Jacques Derrida with whom I have been working for many years now. A question emerged recently which I had never considered until now, at least not so directly, so simply: can the interpretation of Hegel that I attempt to elaborate be qualified, immediately and without reservation, as a “deconstructive reading”?

This presupposes, of course, that one can define what a deconstructive reading is. Although Derrida, as we know, refuses to consider deconstruction as a constituted theory from which one could extract axioms and formalize the method, it is nonetheless possible, as I shall attempt to do here, to describe the process of a deconstructive reading.

In writing l'Avenir de Hegel, I had present in my mind the exegetical imperative set out in Of Grammatology under the heading of a “task of reading”: Derrida asserts, “The reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness or of force, but a signifying structure that critical reading should produce” (De la Grammatologie, p. 227; tr. Spivak, p. 158).

I will ask precisely: what does it mean to produce or open a reading, a reading which protects the text in order better to expose or endanger it?

In making “plasticity” (Plastizität) play a major role in Hegel's thought, I undertook to respond to the demands of this “task of reading”. In doing so, I nonetheless discovered, under the very title of plasticity itself, a resistance of the Hegelian text to its own deconstruction. I shall thus have to specify this resistance at the same time as I develop the program of the task of reading.

In the popular press and the halls of politics, controversies over evolution are increasingly strident these days. Hegel is relevant in this connection, even though he rejected the theories of evolution he knew about, because he wants rational understanding and a larger process to comprehend natural processes and their history, but without any claims for intelligent design. The way current debates get publicised, there appear to be two extreme positions. The first is a reductionist materialism: all complex systems are describable purely in terms of the qualities of their most basic components, and the systems themselves result from Darwinian selection. No teleological concepts at all need be applied. At the other extreme is total teleology; all systems and their interactions and development are the result of preconceived conscious purposeful design by a powerful designer. The ontological status of the designer is usually filled out with theological notions.

The Science of Logic is perhaps Hegel's most notoriously impenetrable work. Despite well over a century of commentaries as well as the recent proliferation of scholarship, there exists little agreement concerning the text, whether with regard to particular details or the project of speculative logic in general. Nonetheless, the Logic has often been regarded as exemplifying totalizing metaphysics at its worst. Contemporary philosophers concerned with overcoming metaphysics have thus sought to show not only the incoherence of speculative logic but also the perils of Hegel's supposedly totalizing philosophy.

In contrast, showing the continuity between Kant and Hegel has been the strategy for establishing a ‘non-metaphysical’ view of Hegel's speculative logic. Against readings of Hegel as a metaphysical monist who defends the reality of the Absolute Idea developing in nature and spirit, speculative logic is presented as the absolute-idealist successor to Kantian transcendental logic. Hegel's speculative logic is an ‘idealist logic’, since it aims at expounding the conditions necessary for the determinacy of any possible object of thought. Speculative logic thus clarities that experience is dependent on non-empirical concepts and, ultimately, on selfconsciousness. Along this interpretative line, Hegel's Science of Logic offers an account of thinking as a norm-based activity, and of concepts as rules for fixing determinacy. The great insight of Hegel's Logic is, on this view, twofold. First, Hegel's notion of the concept [der Begriff] is understood as a holistic-inferential system of logical concepts, since it provides an account of conceptual content as determined by every other possible content. Second, Hegel's analysis of the actualization of the concept — of the concept that has ‘made itself the foundation’, in Hegel's obscure phrasing — provides an account of the fundamental role of authority involved in the process of fixing determinacy. To be bound to a rule is to acknowledge it as having authority over us and at the same time to institute it as authoritative over the states of affairs that we seek to determine. That Hegel spoke of the freedom of the concept is, therefore, crucial. It suggests that determinacy is ultimately a matter of the authorization of reason, of establishing one way of fixing intelligibility over against others.

I begin by identifying an ambiguity in the post-Hegelian literature on Immanent Critique, distinguishing two possible definitions: (a) judging an object against its ‘internal’ norms; and (b) accounting for one’s own standpoint with reference to the object. I then claim that both definitions are represented in Hegel’s Phenomenology, and develop extended interpretations of material from the Introduction in order to clarify and substantiate this thesis. This yields revisionist readings of the famous ‘internal criteria’ and ‘self examination’ tropes. My discussion builds towards elucidating the relation between the two definitions of Immanent Critique I have distinguished, as it is developed in the Phenomenology.

This paper collects some of Rahel Levin Varnhagen's thinking about truth. It aims to contextualize Levin Varnhagen's non-conventional writing within German Romanticism. Her so-called ‘diaries’ vary between aphorisms, personal reflections, problem-oriented sketches and apodictic definitions concerning anthropology and society. Truth and honesty are shaped in opposition to lies but also build a base for the process of thinking itself. According to Levin Varnhagen, truth leads to the real quality of things and towards understanding—thinking truth is an epistemic process. The paper follows Levin Varnhagen's quest for and definition of truth by re-reading her diaries as philosophical practice. Thematizing the possibilities of critical female thought by a (Jewish) woman of the early nineteenth century (with a ‘twice incorrect name’, as Barbara Hahn has put it) and the restrictions in education and publishing, the paper addresses furthermore intersectional questions of gender and religion.

The article aims to show that Priest wrongly associates Hegel’s dialectic with his dialetheism. Even if Priest correctly argues that the notion of contradiction in Hegel’s logic is a logical one and that contradiction is meant to be true, Hegel goes a long way beyond Priest’s dialetheism insofar as he is not committed to a dialetheist conception of a three truth-values logic. I start my analysis with a brief introductory overview of the dialetheist’s thesis of the truth of contradiction. Then, in the first part of the article, I show that Hegel’s notion of contradiction can be equated with a logical contradiction and that Hegel argues that some contradictions are true. In the second part of the paper I show that Hegel’s thesis of the truth of contradiction is different from Priest’s, because Hegel endorses a developmental conception of truth which allows him to account for complex and dynamic properties of reality in a way that Priest’s does not allow.

This article highlights the importance of new research on women philosophers and addresses some methodological issues to be taken in consideration. The thesis presented here is that through this new line of research it is possible to analyse the close connection between philosophy, politics and institutions. The paper opens with a critique of the assumption that philosophy has until recently been the exclusive property of men, giving the example of some forgotten women philosophers who lived in Hegel's time. After considering the risk of ghettoization inherent in Women's Studies, the author closes by showing how the reconsideration of women philosophers can help to question the methodology and the status of philosophy in general, and in particular to question the philosophical canon. The text serves as an introduction to a special issue of the Hegel Bulletin dedicated to women philosophers in Hegel's time.

A recently widely accepted view has it that the nature-spirit distinction in Hegel is to be understood as a distinction between a space or realm that is not normative, or does not involve norms, and one that is or does. Notwithstanding the merits of this view, it has tended to create a separation between nature and spirit which is both philosophically troubling and difficult to reconcile with the picture of Hegel as the arch enemy of abstract or unreconciled dualisms. In this paper I aim to show that the defining phenomenon for this view—collective self-government by norms—is on Hegel's account both dependent on living nature that involves normativity broadly conceived all the way down and also subject to the ultimate normative or evaluative principle of Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit—concrete freedom—the essence of spirit according to him. This is to say that for Hegel the normativity of collectively administered norms is neither the most basic nor the highest form of normativity.

Famously, by launching analytic philosophy Moore and Russell revolted against British Idealism, with Hegel tossed in for good measure. In 1923 Russell declared:

To Russell, the philosophical headmaster of the Eighteenth Century was Hume, not Kant. Russell sought to dispatch rationalism with his logically sophisticated empiricism, based on ‘knowledge by acquaintance’: the non-conceptual apprehension of simples. He sought to dispatch Hegel in particular by condemning his alleged conflation of the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication.

The battle lines thus drawn between analytic philosophy and (especially) Hegel's philosophy have had deep, lasting and very unfortunate consequences in the field. Hence it is all the more tragic that neither of Russell's criticisms of Hegel is sound. Sense Certainty presumes that the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication are the same, or rather, that it can dispense with predication and hence with any predicative use of ‘is’. Hegel accepts Sense Certainty's presumption as a premise in his reductio ad absurdum argument against sense certainty. Thus Hegel shares rather than denies Russell's thesis about the two senses of ‘is’. However, Hegel further argues that predication is required in order to identify any particular one presumes to know. In this way, Hegel refutes Russell's ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ just over a century in advance.

According to Hegel, true freedom consists not just in arbitrariness, but in the free willing of right. Right in turn is fully realised in the laws and institutions of ethical life. The ethical subject, for Hegel, is a practical subject that acts in accordance with ethical laws; yet it is also a theoretical, cognitive subject that recognizes the laws and institutions of ethical life as embodiments of right. Such recognition can be self-conscious and reflective; but it can, and indeed must, also be a felt recognition and as such it takes the form of trust. In Hegel’s view, therefore, the proper stance to adopt towards ethical institutions is that of trust; moreover, there is a distinctive freedom to be found in trust itself. Trust is appropriate, however, only when the institutions of ethical life are themselves worthy of it. Hegel is well aware that not all states and their institutions merit trust, but in his view a life without trust in institutions is a life without true freedom.