Students of the Hegelian school must acknowledge an abiding debt to Ernst Barnikol. Upon his death in 1968, he left uncompleted a voluminous manuscript on Bruno Bauer, representing over forty years of research. Of this manuscript, conserved at the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, only a fraction has been published, but even this fraction, in its almost six hundred pages, continues to set standards in the field for meticulous scholarship, rigorous analysis, and balanced criticism. Barnikol's interests were primarily theological, though he recognised clearly that Bauer's religious critique was politically motivated. Barnikol also discovered, but did not publish, Bauer's 1829 Latin manuscript on Kant's aesthetics. This text, adjudicated by Hegel and awarded the Prussian royal prize in philosophy, had been deposited among Hegel's correspondence in the archives of the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. It was first published in 1996, in the original Latin, with German translation and commentary. In referring to his discovery, Barnikol made a substantive claim which must be disputed here, that Bauer's early text remained without influence on his subsequent work. Focusing on Bauer's depiction of art, and on the relation of art and religion as manifestations of spirit, we can trace lines of continuity and development in his thought, from his 1829 manuscript to his writings of 1841-42. The central idea of the early manuscript, a Hegelian conception of the unity of thought and being, is the key to deciphering the complex and elusive meaning of Bauer's critical theory in the Vormdrz.

In this paper, I will try to propose a general characterisation of the spirit in Hegel's Encyclopaedia. This characterisation is based on the opposition between nature and spirit. More precisely, in my view the Hegelian spirit can be defined as the activity of bringing the natural exteriority back to a living totality.

We know that for Hegel the notion of spirit takes so many shapes that their unity is difficult to find. For instance, what does the soul in the subjective spirit, property in the objective spirit and the cult of the Greek gods in the absolute spirit have in common? Furthermore, when we consider property, for example, the problem is knowing if the spirit is here constituted by the owner, by the deeds of ownership or by the living relationship between the owner and the possessed goods.

Moreover, the Hegelian spirit is a philosophical descendant of several different traditions. The question is, therefore, to know how these traditions are linked in the Hegelian notion. I will present these briefly before stating my general hypothesis about the definition of the spirit.

First, the Hegelian spirit is connected to the noûs of the Greek philosophers (the Latin spiritus, intellectus). The noûs — on the one hand, an immaterial entity leading the universe, and, on the other, a faculty of the soul — is most often distinguished by its separate and rational nature. For Hegel too, the spirit, as a non-perceptible entity, constitutes the freest and most rational stage in the development of the Idea.

This paper offers an alternative perspective to the traditional interpretation of Hegel's philosophical reflection on history, departing from a reinterpretation of Hegel's reading of the tragic action of Antigone in Chapter VI of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The customary interpretation of this text affirms that Hegel shows how the conflict of tragic action finds its truth and its end in the identity of spirit. Tragic conflict is left behind to the same extent that (modern historical) spirit sublates the Greek ethical substance. This way, spirit can guarantee that our historical time is released from the past of the substance, or the spiritual movement of mediation from the immediacy of an ‘in-itself’. My reading, by contrast, finds under the tragic conflict of this text of Hegel's nothing but the ‘no’ of death that negates itself, or a principle that has the form of an original and irreducible conflict. Under this interpretation of Hegelian spirit, it becomes clear that it can neither fail to posit some form of ‘in-itself’ nor sublate its own tragic nature. This way it is shown that Hegel's reflection on the past does not reassure the superiority of the identity of the (modern) present (as the end of history), but rather illuminates its ‘broken’ nature. I thus offer an alternative view on Hegel's comprehension of the relation between present and past and between philosophy and time.

In his essay What is living and what is dead of the philosophy of Hegel?, Benedetto Croce praises Hegel for bestowing the highest value on beauty, in particular artistic beauty. He emphasises Hegel's ‘tendency to make art a primary element in human life, a mode of knowledge and of spiritual elevation’, and the ‘constant contact of Hegelian speculation with taste and with works of art, and the dignity which it assigned to the artistic activity’ (Croce 1985: 121). This tendency, Croce writes, is what makes Hegelian speculation congenial to the great aesthetic theories of the Romantic period. In this paper, I shall put forward some considerations which render support to Croce's observation that there is a strand of unreserved and absolute appreciation of beauty, in particular artistic beauty, in Hegelian philosophy. My focus will be in particular on the question of why Hegel thinks that the experience of beauty — which I will be referring to, in short, as aesthetic experience — is of special, even absolute value for human beings. This will involve, in the first part of the paper, an analysis of what Hegel takes to be the content of such experience; hence an analysis of Hegel's notion of beauty.

Such emphasis on the absolute value of beauty invites of course the question of how beauty relates, in Hegel's system, to what Hegel regards as the highest value of all: reconciliation. Hegel believes that both philosophical speculation — which culminates in knowledge of the absolute truth — and the achievement of the highest practical good, the participation in civic life, are ways of reconciling the human individual with the world they live in. Does the same apply to beauty, or aesthetic experience? I will briefly touch on the relation between aesthetic experience and reconciliation in the second part of the paper. In this context, we will also consider an objection to the view that Hegel's appreciation of aesthetic experience is unrestricted or absolute, which arises from consideration of Hegel's famous claim that philosophy is higher than art.

This article challenges the restrictive association of critical theory with the Frankfurt School by exploring the differential reception of Hegel by German critical thinkers on both sides of the Iron Curtain after 1945. In the West, Theodor Adorno held Hegelian ‘identity thinking’ partly responsible for the atrocities of National Socialism. Meanwhile in the East, Ernst Bloch turned Hegel into a weapon against the communist regime. The difference between Adorno and Bloch’s positions is shown to turn on the relationship between speculation, dialectics and critique. Whereas for Adorno Hegelian speculation was the root of dangerous identity thinking, Bloch saw the repression of speculative thought as a cornerstone of totalitarianism. However, it is argued that ultimately Bloch and Adorno were united in their reception of Hegel by a shared understanding that the goal of critical theory, namely the transformation of the social totality, could not be achieved without utopian speculation.

McDowell's Mind and World is a commentary on a traditional, dualist, epistemology which puzzles over, and offers accounts of, a fundamental division between mental, subjective items, and non-mental, objective items in experience. The principal responses to that tradition which McDowell considers are those of Davidson's coherentism, Evans's form of realism, and Kant; but it is Kant's famous B75 text which occupies centre stage:

Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer; Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind.

(Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind).

I shall unfortunately say nothing of the philosophical import of McDowell's reflections on these positions, for my aim here is to focus on his account of Kant. My view is that his account is fundamentally mistaken, and I can indicate the points of disagreement in two related ways. First, as McDowell stresses, his Kant is Strawson's Kant. But, as I have argued elsewhere Strawson's Kant is not Kant, and so McDowell's Kant is not Kant either. Second, more specifically, Strawson's Kant has notoriously two sides, light and dark, insightful and monstrous, in which the dark side, the so-called ‘Metaphysics of Transcendental Idealism”, cannot be eliminated, and McDowell follows Strawson in this. Indeed in Strawson's The Bounds of Sense that dark side has equal status with the more promising insights, although more recently he has modified that strong view. My claim is that this bizarre dualism, and especially the dark side which McDowell unwisely calls the “transcendental story” (MW p 41), are not present in Kant in anything like the way that Strawson and McDowell suppose.

To assert the primacy of objective spirit is to claim that certain distinctively human capacities, such as thinking and acting, are not capacities we have as individuals considered singly but are in some way dependent on shared public norms or social institutions. In this essay, I provide a brief history of arguments for the primacy of objective spirit from Hegel to the present, identifying three distinct strategies for defending this thesis: the teleological argument, the sociological argument and the quasi-transcendental argument. Although it has now become quite common to read Hegel as advancing a quasi-transcendental argument, one similar to the argument found in Wittgenstein’s famous remarks about ‘rule-following’, I show that Hegel’s most interesting claims about the social dimensions of human mindedness are incompatible with this strategy and can only be vindicated if he is read as offering a teleological argument.

In Georges Bataille’s view, the Hegelian interpretation of kenotic sacrifice as passage from Spirit to the Speculative Idea effaces the necessarily representational character of sacrifice and the irreducible non-presence of death. But Hegel identifies these aspects of death in the fragments of the 1800 System. In sacrificial acts, subjectivity represents its disappearance via the sacrificed other, and hence is negated and conserved. Sacrifice thus provides the representational model of sublation pursued in the Phenomenology as a propaedeutic to Science. Bataille’s critique clarifies the fragments of the 1800 System, contextualizing Hegel’s rehabilitation of kenotic sacrifice in the Phenomenology. Bataille’s poetics parodies Hegelian kenosis via repetition of material difference, enacting an ecstatic temporality which Hegel perhaps suppresses as the condition of his system. Finally—if Bataille is correct in his assessment—the system would be subjected to a reversal, with radical implications for the philosophy of religion.

Two concepts have polarized the philosophical debates on functions since the 1970s. One is Millikan's concept of ‘proper function’, meant to capture the aetiology of biological organs and artefacts. The other is Cummins's concept of ‘dispositional function’, designed to account for the real work that functional devices perform within a system. In this paper I locate Hegel's concept of biological function in the context of those debates. Admittedly, Hegel's concept is ‘etiological’, since in his account the existence of purposive organs is explained by appeal to their purpose, yet, against Millikan's concept, Hegel's does not presuppose the phenomenon of natural selection nor derives the function of tokens from the function of types. So, my aim is, first, to present Hegel's approach to biological functions as one neither purely etiological nor purely dispositional. It will appear rather as an example of an organizational account (as those advocated today by McLaughlin, Mossio and others), that attributes function according to present performances (unlike etiological accounts) and emphasizes the role of functional parts in their self-production within the system they belong to (unlike dispositional accounts). Finally, I briefly discuss how Hegel's concept performs against common objections to organizational accounts.

Peirce's study of Kant, and later of Hegel, and Dewey's (1930) retention of much of Hegel's social philosophy are recognised idealist sources of pragmatism. Here I argue that the transition from idealism to pragmatic realism was already achieved by Hegel. Hegel's ‘Objective Logic’ corresponds in part to Kant's ‘Transcendental Logic’ (WdL, GW 21:47.1-3). Hegel faults Kant for relegating concepts of reflection to an Appendix to his Transcendental Logic (WdL, GW 12:19.34-38), and for treating reason as ‘only dialectical’ and as ‘merely regulative’ (WdL, GW 12:23.12, .16-17). I present three important yet neglected features of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason which are key enthymemes undergirding Hegel's critical reconstruction of Kant's Critical philosophy (§2). I then summarise some features of the philosophical context within which Hegel begins to re-assess and reconstruct Kant's Transcendental Logic (§3), and review several key steps in this direction Hegel undertook in the 1807 Phenomenology (§4). (A related paper extends these results to Hegel's Logic and Encyclopaedia.) These points show that Hegel's reanalysis of Kant's Critical philosophy is the first and still one of the most sophisticated and adequate pragmatic — specifically pragmatic realist — accounts of the a priori.

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel critically refers to Hinduism as ‘The Religion of Imagination’ or, in another translation, ‘The Religion of Phantasy’. Hegel’s study of Hinduism came during the period when there was a rapidly growing interest in India, indeed, an Indomania, in the German-speaking world. Hegel meticulously kept up with the most recent publications in the field. This article examines Hegel’s critical assessment of Hinduism in order to determine what specifically he finds objectionable in it. It is argued that his objection ultimately concerns what he takes to be the mistaken conception of what it is to be a human being that underlies the Hindu view. This conception, he claims, undermines the development of subjective freedom that he takes to be so important.