When the Ideal is understood as ontologically fundamental within the framework of an idealistic system, and the Real, on the other hand, as derived, then the first and foremost task of a philosophy of this kind is to prove the claimed fundamentally of the Ideal. This is immediately followed by the further demand to also substantiate on this basis the existence of the Real and particularly of natural being. These tasks have been understood and attempts made to solve them in very different ways in German Idealism - about which I cannot go into more detail here. Let me say this much: that Fichte and Schelling, it appears to me, already fail at the first task, ie. neither Fichte nor Schelling really succeeds in substantiating their pretended ideal as an absolute principle of philosophy. Fichte believes he has such a principle in the direct evidence of the self. However, as this is of little use for the foundation of a generally binding philosophy because of its ultimately private character, Fichte already replaces it with the principle of the absolute self already in his first Wissenschaftlehre of 1794. As a construction detached from the concrete self, this of course lacks that original direct certainty from which Fichte started in the first place, in other words: because the construction of an absolute self can no longer refer to direct evidence, it must be substantiated separately, something which Fichte, I believe, nonetheless fails to do. The same criticism can, in my view, be made of Schelling, who ingeniously substitutes constructions for arguments. His early intuition of an absolute identity which simultaneously underlies spirit and nature, remains just as thetic and unproven as that eternal subject on which he based the representation of his system in, for example, the Munich lectures of 1827.

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.

It is generally held that 19th and early 20th century British Idealism was fundamentally Hegelian in character and the term ‘the British Hegelians’ has long been in common usage. Yet, particularly in recent years, it has been argued that some of the most influential British idealists were not Hegelians at all. T H Green may still be an idealist, and F H Bradley an ‘absolute idealist’ but, despite traces of Hegelian vocabulary or principles in their work, several scholars now hold that neither ought to be considered a disciple of Hegel. One might well wonder whether this is also true of Bernard Bosanquet, who has generally been regarded as the most Hegelian of the major idealists.

It is unlikely that Bosanquet would be offended in being called a Hegelian. In his metaphysics, his political philosophy and, particularly, his logic, Bosanquet draws on Hegel's insights and arguments. He saw his work as indebted to Hegel (specifically, to a tradition that traced its roots through Hegel, back to Kant, Rousseau and, ultimately, Plato) and, at the beginning of his philosophical career, Bosanquet criticised F H Bradley's logic for not having respected the principles laid out by Hegel beforehand. It is no surprise, then, that Bosanquet described Hegel as one of the two “great masters who 'sketched the plan’” (the other being Kant).

Still, it is hard to say what, precisely, is it that makes an author a ‘Hegelian’. Is it the use of Hegel's categories and terminology? Is it that the author is explicitly indebted to Hegel? Is it that the author's work shows an allegiance to Hegel's conclusions and that he sees himself as, at most, completing and extending what Hegel did? One might also ask, what type of Hegelian we have in mind – there are ‘left Hegelians’, ‘right Hegelians’ and so on. Of course, in attempting to trace such an intellectual debt, one must, as far as possible, try to distinguish what is distinctively Hegelian from what is to be found in earlier authors, but taken up by Hegel.

In this paper it is argued that the conceptions of embodied meaning and of intuition that Hegel appeals to in the Aesthetics anticipate some of Merleau-Ponty’s insights concerning the distinctive character of pre-conceptual, sensuous forms of meaning. It is argued that, for Hegel, our aesthetic experience of the beautiful is such that we cannot readily differentiate in it the purportedly distinct roles that sensation and thought play, and so that the account of sensuous intuition operative here differs from the one appealed to in more familiar, ‘intellectualist’ conceptions that are premised upon our being able to make such a distinction. Some of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights are brought to bear to help support and illuminate some of the implications of Hegel’s conception of such sensuously embodied meaning.

The Great Financial Crisis that broke in 2008 and the Great Recession that followed has led many to question the very structure of contemporary economies. Some argue that the economic model of the past forty years is now broken. Criticism has also been directed at the orthodoxies of economics. For example, neoclassical equilibrium economics, the mainstream economics of the day, is accused of failing to understand some of the most basic aspects of the modern economy (debt and money), of supporting policies that have led to the economic breakdown (deregulation), and of failing to see the crisis coming (Bezemer 2012, Keen 2011). Consequently, heterodox thinking in economics is getting a hearing as never before. Heterodox economics offers itself as the requisite radical reconstruction of the science of economics and also proposes policies for the radical reconstruction of the major economics.

Yet to talk of the reconstruction of the modern market economy is at the same time to raise the ethical question: what shape ought the market economy to take? Heterodox economics may acutely analyse the inadequacies of real economies and propose plausible reforms, but as an essentially descriptive science there will be limits on its ability to state what ought to be. Rather, what is required seems to be a systematic prescriptive ethics. In other words, recent events in the world of economics have provided an opening for what ethical philosophy should be best at providing. Determining whether a specific ethical philosophy, to be identified shortly, has the capacity to address the questions raised by heterodox economics is the task of this paper.

Hegel's relation to Kant is often portrayed in terms of epistemic impatience. For W.H. Walsh, for example, whereas Kant seeks to ‘demonstrate that certain kinds of thing [cannot] be objects of human knowledge’, and thus that there are ‘limits to men's cognitive aspirations’, Hegel issues the ‘demand that thought be free to range unchecked wherever it chooses’ and claims the ‘Absolute’ as an object of human knowledge. There are two flaws in this standard account. First, it underestimates the cognitive confidence of Kant's project of a critique of pure reason. Central to this project is the idea that reason has the resources to adjudicate its own claims and thus to know itself. Second, it neglects Hegel's conception of dialectic as the inner discipline of thought. I shall deal with each of these issues in turn. The first part of the paper examines the intellectual commitments entailed by the very idea of a critique of pure reason; the second part addresses the boundary-determining function of dialectic. A fuller understanding of what is meant by ‘critique’ and ‘dialectic’ should enable us not only to re-assess Hegel's relation to Kant, but also to retrieve their shared conception of philosophical reflection as rational self-knowledge. The aim of this paper therefore is to highlight the common ground between the two projects, rather than to emphasise their critical distance. I seek to show that Hegel shares Kant's conviction that ‘philosophy consists in knowing its bounds’ (seine Grenzen zu kennen), even though he accords such knowledge a different status from Kant.

It is quite common when explicating the nature of Kant's break with the preceding Early Modern tradition to cite his attitude towards the acquisition and deployment of concepts. It is claimed that Kant sought to distinguish two tasks that had become unfortunately intertwined and conflated — explaining how we come to acquire our concepts on the one hand and showing how we are justified in deploying them in judgement on the other. This conflation can be expressed in terms of a conflation of the natural and the normative, of descriptive and prescriptive questions. The topic of the conditions of concept-possession, i.e. how we have come to possess the concepts that we do, is an entirely psychological inquiry, involving ‘natural’ descriptive inquiries. The topic of concept-deployment, the story about how we use our concepts in veridical judgements about the world, is an entirely philosophical question, since it involves the question of how we ought to deploy those concepts in judgement. The fundamental distinction between the natural and the normative is drawn by Kant, it is claimed, in order to distinguish these two practices of acquisition and deployment.

The manner in which this claim is expressed is through Kant's distinction between the question of fact (quaestio facti) and the question of right (quaestio juris). I want to claim that a proper understanding of this distinction doesn't support this notion of Kant's ‘normative turn’. In fact, the distinction is best understood within an interpretation whereby Kant is understood as continuing to endorse the Early Modern conviction that the provision of a concept's possession-conditions is sufficient to determine that concept's deployment-conditions, and that the task of the Transcendental Deduction is to determine the possession-conditions for the Categories.

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.

In his debate with Dreyfus McDowell defends the ‘pervasiveness thesis’, the thesis that rational mindedness pervades the lives of rational animals, their perceptual experiences and exercises of agency. To counter this idea, Dreyfus introduces the notion of ‘social standing’: the culturally inculcated yet non-conceptual sense of the appropriate distance that one should stand from another person. McDowell claims that social standing is not a counter-example to the pervasiveness thesis because it stands altogether outside of it. In this paper I argue that this response is a misstep, that we should see social standing as falling within the pervasiveness thesis. While such phenomena do not normally fall within the scope of a subject's practical self- knowledge they are still pervaded by rational mindedness. They are because the dispositions and habits that comprise our second nature, although not the realization of an exercise of conceptual capacities, can be brought within the scope of a subject's practical self-knowledge and in fact changed, and this is enough to establish that they are pervaded by rational mindedness. I argue that we can find a picture like this in a Hegelian-pragmatist account of our habitual second nature.

This paper argues that Hegel’s account of subjectivity and agency as historically coined is essential to an accurate understanding of his theory of tragedy. Focusing on Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, I argue that Hegel’s historical account of agency is necessary for understanding his theory of the ancient tragic hero. Although Hegel’s theory of ancient tragedy is often described in terms of a conflict between ethical spheres embodied in two individuals, the conflict in Oedipus is between Oedipus’ deeds and his later knowledge of what has actually occurred. I show how this seemingly subjective conflict is in keeping with Hegel’s theory. Further, while Hegel sees Oedipus as wrong to take full moral accountability for the consequences of his deeds, at the same time, for Hegel, this is the right action for a tragic hero, and the very thing that renders Oedipus timelessly and tragically heroic, rather than a mere victim of fate.

In this paper, I explore the question of the reality of God for Hegel. I first consider the contemporary interpretative debate on Hegel’s metaphysics and the implications of this debate for the Hegelian conception of God. I then advocate a ‘qualified revisionist’ approach to Hegel, and, as a further qualification to such an approach, I suggest an interpretation of the objective reality that Hegel attributes to God as mediated objectivity. I analyse how Hegel’s ‘mediated objectivity’ applies to religious representations, suggesting that a figural reading of the kind theorized by philologist Erich Auerbach should be adopted. Finally I reconstruct Hegel’s distinction between the image (Bild) of God, the concept (Begriff) of God, and the Idea (Idee) of God, and I argue that the answer to the question of the objective reality of God in Hegel’s philosophy of religion can be retrieved in the process according to which the concept turns into the Idea.

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.

In the 1930s, C. I. Lewis, who was responsible for the revival of modal logic in the era of modern symbolic logic, characterized ‘intensional’ approaches to logic as typical of post-Leibnizian ‘continental philosophy’, in contrast to the ‘extensionalist’ approaches dominant in the British tradition. Indeed Lewis’s own work in this area had been inspired by the logic of his teacher, the American ‘Absolute Idealist’, Josiah Royce. Hegel’s ‘Subjective Logic’ in Book III of his Science of Logic, can, I suggest, be considered as an intensional modal logic, and this paper explores parallels between it and a later variety of modal logic—tense logic, as developed by Arthur Prior in the 1950s and 60s. Like Lewis, Prior too had been influenced in this area by a teacher with strong Hegelian leanings—John N. Findlay. Treated as an intensional (with an ‘s’) logic, Hegel’s subjective logic can be used as a framework for addressing issues of intentionality (with a ‘t’)—the mind’s capacity to be intentionally directed to objects. In this way, I suggest that the structures of his subjective logic can clarify what is at issue in the ‘Psychology’ section of the Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Subjective Spirit.

Does Hegel's social philosophy leave sufficient room for individual agents, or does the Hegelian vision of self-actualising Geist ultimately swallow up individuals in an over-collectivist and all-too-metaphysical system? It depends of course on what is ‘sufficiently’ individualist and what is ‘too’ collectivist or ‘too’ metaphysical. It is common knowledge that Hegel at least tries to avoid one-sided extremes: with concepts like recognition, ethical life and objective spirit, Hegel tried to develop a view, which gives both individuality and sociality their due. To judge how well Hegel succeeds is a matter of detailed analyses. In this paper I focus on one specific topic: intentional action, or more specifically, Hegel's views on the idea of retrospective and intersubjective determination of intention.

The main point is to distinguish four perspectives on human action: 1) The agent's ‘moral’ perspective and the understanding and description under which the agent acted; from this perspective we can thematise the operative intention-in-action and distinguish ‘action’ from ‘deed’. 2) The agent's retrospective awareness and appropriation of the action: was what I did really justified and did it express my true goals? 3) The retrospective takes of others concerning the action, from within relevant social practices and the prevailing Sittlichkeit. 4) The perspective of Reason or Idea as emerging in world history.

Although Hegel is very critical of representative democracy, his views on political participation are in many ways richer and more sophisticated than the ones favoured today by most Western societies. The present paper aims to shed light on this apparent paradox by dispelling some of the misunderstandings still associated with Hegel’s ethical and political thought. I argue, on the one hand, that Hegel’s emphasis on the notion of freedom does not amount to an endorsement of political liberalism, but to a critique of its underlying principles. On the other hand, I show that the Hegelian theory of the modern state, albeit falling short of a fully democratic constitutional solution, is by no means opposed to social justice or political pluralism. Hegel views political freedom as the result of a global web of mutual recognition, embodied by social institutions destined to bridge the gap between private and communal interests. Despite the ambiguous and outdated elements of Hegel’s description, I believe his overall solution remains uniquely relevant, and an important source for the ongoing debate about the merits and limitations of contemporary democracies.

Hegel's phenomenological method allows and requires him to justify his own positive views only by thorough internal critique of the views he opposes; Hegel calls this ‘determinate negation’ (§1). Hegel's transcendental-pragmatic epistemology is sharply opposed to empiricism. One key tenet of Modern empiricism is aconceptual ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ of particulars. This view is deeply embedded in Hume's official ‘copy theory’ of sensory impressions and ideas. Both of these views are required by Hume's account of abstract general ideas. Both of these views saw widespread revival in twentieth-century empiricism. Can these views be criticised on strictly internal grounds, as Hegel requires? This paper answers in the affirmative. More thoroughly than any other philosopher, Hume attempted to analyse our conceptual, propositionally-structured thought solely in terms of our ultimate awareness of nothing but objects, whether they be sensory impressions or their copies, ‘ideas’. In this context, Hume's account of our ideas of space and time have long been regarded as anomalies in, if not exceptions to, his account of the generality of thought. I argue that these ideas are not anomalous, but rather are typical of Hume's account of the generality of thought, an account that ultimately undermines Hume's official empiricist account of the generality of thought, based on his copy theory. I reexamine Hume's ‘idea of existence’ to identify some key equivocations between ‘ideas’ as objects and ‘ideas’ as concepts that are crucial to Hume's attempt to account for the generality of thought. The main issue is clarified by placing it within its Modern context (§2). The key issues are then specified by considering Hume's idea of existence (§3). The fundamental role played in Hume's account by his equivocations are then developed in detail by examining Hume's accounts of abstract ideas (§4), of distinctions of reason (§5), of the idea of equality (§6), and of the ideas of space and time (§7). On this basis I contend that Hume's account of the generality of thought is fundamentally linguistic, and is rooted in judgmental discriminations of kinds that cannot be accounted for by appeal to impressions of sensation or reflection, nor their corresponding idea-objects. These conclusions are reinforced and extended by critical evaluation of Garrett's analysis and defence of Hume's account of abstract ideas (§8). Hume is thus not only the great Modern exponent of the copy theory of impressions and ideas, he is also its first and still one of its most profound critics (§9). To this considerable extent, not only are the most basic principles of Hume's empiricism subject to internal critique, as Hegel requires, but Hume himself provides all the essentials of such a critique. These results serve to substantiate and highlight the philosophical significance of Hegel's critique of ‘Sense Certainty’ (§10).

Critics of Marx of various stripes have rejected the view of historical necessity that he purportedly inherits from Hegel. Marx famously pledges allegiance to Hegelian necessity by arguing, for example, that social antagonisms ‘spring from natural laws’ that work themselves out with ‘iron necessity’; that the bourgeoisie produces its own ‘gravediggers’; that the proletariat’s victory is ‘inevitable’. In response, some commentators have argued that Marx’s allegiance to Hegelian modality has more to do with understanding possibility as indexed to actuality than with claims about the necessary logic and eventual collapse of capital. Iain Macdonald complicates both classic and revisionary accounts by distilling a rare but powerful notion in Marx’s early and middle period: ‘deactualization’ (Entwirklichung). Marx deploys this term to theorize the ‘thwarting’ indeed ‘undoing’ of real possibility within the ‘living process of actuality’. For Macdonald, this is a deeply ‘unHegelian moment’ in Marx’s corpus. In this paper, I provide a reading of Hegel’s treatment of modality in the Doctrine of Essence that shows that Hegelian modality not only makes room for alternate possibilities, but indeed accounts for thwarted possibilities within actuality. Rather than formal or real modality, Hegelian absolute modality is the proper philosophical framework for thinking the coextensive actualization and deactualization distinctive of capitalism.