The aim of the Phenomenology of Spirit is to provide its reader with a “ladder” to the standpoint of science, showing him “this standpoint within himself (§26). By the standpoint of science, the standpoint of absolute knowing, I understand a perspective in which human cognition has no absolute limits or barriers, in which no items and types of items, most notably Kant's things in themselves, are intrinsically or a priori external to human cognition. Hegel is only attempting to provide a ladder to this standpoint because he believes that no demonstration or deduction of it is possible. Hegel's denial of the possibility of demonstration is premised on a simple logical insight: if what is presupposed as external to reason and cognition – material objects, other persons, language, social practices, history – are in fact constitutive conditions of them, then a position whose premises are weaker than what it seeks to demonstrate, as for example one might attempt to explicate the possibility of linguistic meaning only through reference to elaborate structures of intention, must necessarily fail. Hence, Hegel's initially puzzling formula that states that the “aether” of knowing is “pure self-recognition in absolute otherness” (§26), is designedly anti-Kantian: we only come to apperceptive self-awareness, what for Kant is pure or transcendental self-consciousness, through cogntion of things in themselves, the very things access to which Kant denies as a condition apperception.

I propose a new reading of Hegel’s discussion of modality in the ‘Actuality’ chapter of the Science of Logic. On this reading, the main purpose of the chapter is a critical engagement with Spinoza’s modal metaphysics. Hegel first reconstructs a rationalist line of thought — corresponding to the cosmological argument for the existence of God — that ultimately leads to Spinozist necessitarianism. He then presents a reductio argument against necessitarianism, contending that as a consequence of necessitarianism, no adequate explanatory accounts of facts about finite reality can be given.

Charles Taylor claims that not only Kant, but also successors of Kant such as Fichte and Hegel, advocate a primitive concept of action, namely, a basic, irreducible, indispensable concept allegedly essential to our self-understanding. This paper shows how philosophers like Robert Brandom agree with Taylor explicitly with regard to Hegel, and attribute to him transcendental non-metaphysical arguments in support of such a concept. It then proceeds to challenge this attribution (both of the concept and the type of argument), offering a brief presentation of an alternative non-transcendental metaphysical approach to the Hegelian idea of giving actuality to a concept (or end) through a productive activity.

According to a widely shared view, a radical change took place in the role of intersubjectivity in Hegel's philosophy somewhere between Jena and Berlin. For instance, Jürgen Habermas's judgement is that whereas in the Jena writings – in the Jena Realphilosophien, and perhaps still in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit – Hegel conceived of intersubjectivity as an essential element in the constitution of subjectivity and of objectivity, in Berlin Hegel's intersubjectivist conception was replaced by a metaphysics of the absolute I or absolute self-consciousness, in which intersubjectivity no longer plays any important constitutive role.

Perhaps it is due to something like this view having been mostly taken for granted even among Hegel-specialists that scholarly literature on intersubjectivity in Hegel's late Encyclopaedic system is indeed very scarce. Robert R. Williams' Hegel's Ethics of Recognition argues convincingly that the theme of intersubjective recognition can be seen as a central thread running through the whole of Hegel's Encyclopaedic philosophy of objective spirit. But very little has so far been written on the theme of intersubjectivity or intersubjective recognition in Hegel's Encyclopaedic philosophy of subjective spirit. My thesis in what follows is that intersubjectivity or intersubjective mediation in recognition can and should in fact be seen as an essential constituent also of subjective spirit as Hegel conceptualises it in the 1830 Encyclopaedia.

The aim of this article is to clarify the critical role of Hegel's early logic, through an assessment of the dialectical process of sublation [Aufhebung] of the determinations of finite thinking at stake within its exposition. I want to show that the dialectical-critical work of logic has a speculative meaning for Hegel, thereby displaying the inward correspondence between critical and speculative aspects of philosophical activity. By pointing out the evidence from fragmentary texts on logic relating to Hegel's teaching activity in 1801–1802, I will first put into question the idea of an introductory role of logic. In so doing I challenge a widespread reading which argues for the presence of a sharp separation between critical logic and speculative metaphysics. I will then focus on the texts on logic in the 1804–1805 Reinschrift, reading them as the worksite wherein the dawning form of a full-fledged dialectical logic is first prepared and elaborated. More generally, if this paves the way for establishing a continuity between Hegel's early and mature logic and his concept of dialectic, it is also paramount for understanding how the activity of systematic philosophy in the mature version of the system essentially constitutes an ongoing work on the forms of the finite.

This paper defends Hegel’s positive contribution in the Subjective Logic and argues that it can be understood as presenting a compelling account of the space of reasons as a form of second nature. Taking Hegel’s praise of Kant’s conception of internal purposiveness and its connection to what he calls the Idea as a point of departure, I argue that Hegel’s theory of the Idea that concludes the Logic must be understood in direct reference to Kant’s argument in the third Critique that purposiveness defines the space of judgement’s power. I take up two arguments that help to understand Hegel’s appropriation and transformation of Kant’s purposiveness thesis: first, Hegel’s contention that internal purposiveness must have primacy over external purposiveness when considered in relation to judgement; and second, Hegel’s presentation of a logical concept of life as the immediate form of the Idea.

It is a commonplace among certain recent philosophers that there is no such thing as the essence of anything. Nietzsche, for example, asserts that things have no essence of their own, because they are nothing but ceaselessly changing ways of acting on, and reacting to, other things. Wittgenstein, famously, rejects the idea that there is an essence to language and thought — at least if we mean by that some a priori logical structure underlying our everyday utterances. Finally, Richard Rorty urges that we “abandon […] the notion of ‘essence’ altogether”, along with “the notion that man's essence is to be a knower of essences”.

It would be wrong to maintain that these writers understand the concept of essence in precisely the same way, or that they are all working towards the same philosophical goal. Nevertheless, they do share one aim in common: to undermine the idea that there is some deeper reality or identity underlying and grounding what we encounter in the world, what we say and what we do. That is to say, they may all be described as anti-foundationalist thinkers — thinkers who want us to attend to the specific processes and practices of nature and humanity without understanding them to be the product of some fundamental essence or “absolute”.

The essay aims to reveal the priority of the ‘social’ over the ‘political’ in Bosanquet's thought by making more prominent what Bosanquet calls ‘social’. It is the domain of human connectedness and cooperation that occupies the space between the ‘political’, state action, and the personal, narrowly conceived individual. The centrality of the ‘social’ emerges against the backdrop of two rival interpretations of Bosanquet's relationship with British Idealism over state action. The one claims that Green's split into ‘right’ (Bosanquet) and ‘left’ (Ritchie). The other interpretation restores unity, denying that the right-left divide introduces fundamental differences into the Idealist camp. Though not a laissez-faire individualist, Bosanquet's restrictive stance on state action with regard to the poor reveals, I argue, ‘social individualism’. Best expressed in his prioritizing of ‘social cooperative action’ over state action, at the heart of social individualism lies a conceptual-normative nexus between self-maintaining, self-managing, self-governing individuals and social cooperation.

My aim in this paper is to show that and how animal organisms are appropriate subjects of normative evaluation, on Hegel's view. I contrast my reading with the interpretive positions of Sebastian Rand and Mark Alznauer. I disagree with Rand and agree with Alznauer that animal organisms are normatively evaluable for Hegel. I substantiate my disagreement with Rand, and supplement Alznauer's interpretation, by spelling out the role that the ‘generic process’ or ‘genus process [Gattungsprozess]’ plays within Hegel's account of animal organisms and their normative evaluability. In the course of my discussion, I highlight the main differences that Hegel purports to identify between animal and vegetable organisms and suggest that the upshot of those differences is that some but not all plants are normatively evaluable, by his lights. I also situate Hegel's discussion of the Gattungsprozess within the debate on biological functions in the philosophy of biology over the last few decades.

In the Philosophy of Right Hegel argues that modern life has produced an individualized freedom that conflicts with the communal forms of life constitutive of Greek ethical life. This individualized freedom is fundamentally unsatisfactory, but it is in modernity seemingly resolved into a more adequate form of social freedom in the family, aspects of civil society, and ultimately the state. This article examines whether Hegel’s state can function as a community and by so doing satisfy the need for a substantial ethical life that runs through Hegel’s social thought. The article also examines why Hegel does not provide a detailed analysis of community, as a distinct sphere between the private and the public political sphere in the Philosophy of Right, and why it is not a key platform of his social freedom.

The rise of computers and robots, heralded in science fiction and pervading ever more daily experience, has fostered a rampant temptation to model mind as a mechanism and expect machines one day to simulate all mental reality. This temptation reflects more than technological developments, however. It arises from the perennial dilemma of two complementary approaches to mind that proceed from the assumption of a mind/body duality: one conceiving mind to be wholly immaterial and the other reducing mind to inanimate matter. Exploring the difficulties of these views puts us in a position to evaluate the relation of mind and machine, helped along the way by key insights from Hegel.

The notion that mind cannot be material seems confirmed in every moment of self-consciousness, whose purely temporal flow of mental content testifies to the apparent nonspatial existence of mind. Yet so long as mind is construed as immaterial, it lacks the resources to have any temporal ordering, possess any unity, or retain any specifically mental character. Deprived of materiality, mental life is hardly distinguishable from a succession of logical categories that exhibit determinacy in general rather than anything particular to mind. The possibilities of any non-logical content are excluded. Lacking any embodiment, mind has nothing with which passively to receive content in the manner of sensibility, or to retrieve and refashion any such sensible content in images. Mind could perhaps generate conceptual content, but this would be indistinguishable from the thoughts that logic produces in its thinking of thinking.

It is not surprising that a book entitled Hegel's Ethical Thought (hereafter, “HET”) should attract the attention of Hegelians. But I hope the Hegelians who read HET will forgive me for the fact that they were not its intended audience. My principal aim in the book was to contribute to contemporary discussions of the history of ethics and ethical theory by showing the direct relevance of Hegel's thought to issues that still interest moral philosophers.

This aim does not presuppose (as Pinkard would have it) that philosophy consists of a “menu” of positions from which we are to choose arbitrarily. On the other hand, you can't expect a hearing from an audience of non-Hegelians if you arrogantly assume beforehand that Hegel's philosophy encompasses what is true in all others. (HET does include some attempts to argue that Hegel's ethical theory has such advantages, especially over eudaimonistic and Kantian theories. See HET, Chapter 3, §§ 7-8 and Chapters 8-9.) Hegel's thought is now taken more seriously among English speaking philosophers than at any time during my life, but a major obstacle to this welcome change has been the narrowminded sectarian arrogance often found among his admirers.

The same aim also dictated that I not read Hegel's ethical thought so as to make it dependent on his speculative logic. Here Hegelians must descend from the mists of speculation long enough to face up to some cold, hard facts. First, there is no generally accepted interpretation even of what Hegelian logic is about, not to mention matters of finer detail. Second, on no interpretation does Hegelian speculative logic have any credibility at all for philosophers today.

In section 82 of Being and Time Heidegger calls Hegel's account of time ‘the most radical way in which the ordinary [or vulgar] understanding of time has been given form conceptually’ (BT 480). For Heidegger, in the vulgar conception ‘the basic phenomenon of time is seen in the “now”; by contrast, Dasein's own “ecstatico-horizonal temporality temporalizes itself primarily in terms of the future (BT 479). Hegel's problem, it seems, is that he has no time for the future.

As Heidegger explains in his 1924 lecture on the concept of time, Dasein is futural because it is essentially possibility — ‘the possibility of its certain yet indeterminate past (CT 12). That future pastness is, of course, Dasein's death. Dasein is thus oriented towards the future because it is being-towards-death — the death that is certain to come, one knows not when.

The vulgar interpretation of time represents a flight both from Dasein's death and from its futural temporality, since it places the present at the centre of concern. Time, for the vulgar understanding, is simply ‘a sequence of “nows” which are constantly “present-at-hand”, simultaneously passing away and coming along’ (BT 474). The past and future are thus understood to be no more than the now that is no longer or is not yet. The future in particular is hereby distorted: for it is not thought to be the certain though indeterminate possibility in relation to which our present existence is first constituted, but is conceived as present existence that is yet to come.