This paper defends an interpretation of Fanon's theory of recognition as revolving around his claim that we have a basic right to demand human behaviour from the other. Developing key Hegelian ideas in a novel direction, I argue that Fanon's theory of recognition employs a concretely universal concept of humanity as a normative orientation for establishing what he calls a ‘world of reciprocal recognitions’, which he equates with the creation of a ‘human reality’. In the first section, I take up the three passages from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit cited by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks to outline three key features of Fanon's theory of recognition. In section two, I argue that there are three senses of ‘universal humanity’ operative in Fanon's work: a false universal, an abstract universal, and a concrete universal. Whereas the first two are critical, pejorative uses, the third provides the normative orientation for his account of recognition and social struggle. In the third section, I show how Fanon combines features of Hegel's concrete universal with features of Sartre's existential humanism in order to avoid an essentialist or ahistorical approach to human nature. Specifically, I argue that the ideas of self-transcendence and a universal human condition shed light on what Fanon refers to as the right of reciprocal recognition to demand human behaviour from the other, and our one human duty to not renounce our freedom.

In notes to Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie lectures, written around the time of Haiti's 1825 ‘ransom’—the 150 million francs demanded by France to indemnify former slave and plantation owners—we find an uncanny remark. Hegel appears to report on a different ransom, a compensated abolition of slavery in North America that never happened, anticipating an application of the Fifth Amendment's takings clause that US legal scholarship routinely fails to mention. In view of Alan Brudner's enlistment of Hegel as the philosopher ‘uniquely’ able to understand the Fifth Amendment's requirement for compensation for expropriations—a ‘constitutional essential for liberalism’—this paper explores the meaning of these passages in the historical context of the legal abolitions of Hegel's time: feudalism and slavery. The slaveholder indemnities were clearly the unjust ‘dividends’ of the colour line, but their legal foundations and developments in US thought of the nineteenth century also usefully illustrate takings law's foreclosure of political and social transformation through the securitization of value. Reading these histories and Hegel's comments alongside the critical interventions of the black radical tradition, I suggest that Hegel's curious remarks on compensated takings suggest not only a critical divergence from Brudner's understanding of ‘dialogic community’, but a crucial limitation in his field of analysis which pivoted on the denigration of black sovereignty. This paper thus suggests an understanding of US takings law through the shifting understandings of the term ‘ransom’—which for abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass signified not a resolution of slavery, but rather the threat of its perpetuation—and Douglass's elaboration of the pathology of the colour line.

Hegel's philosophy has been a fundamental reference point for a broad network of mid-twentieth century anticolonial thinkers and activists, a major inspiration for figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Martin Luther King Jr. and Angela Davis, among others. James's Notes on Dialectics (1948) constitutes one of the most significant textual engagements with Hegel from within that internationalist tradition. Even though James considered Notes to be his most important work and one of his lasting contributions to Marxist theory, it remains the least read and studied of his books. In comparison to the abovementioned thinkers, all of whom drew inspiration from Hegel's social and political philosophy, in his monograph, James turns instead to Hegel's most difficult text, the Science of Logic, as the true locus of Hegel's critical theory. Situating James's study within the Marxist philosophical tradition, this essay explores how James interprets, appropriates and makes use of Hegel's dialectic.

In his ambitious Schelling's Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel, Peter Dews sets out to reconstruct the fundamental difference between Schelling and Hegel on the basis of two related claims. The first, historical claim is that both are dealing with ‘our current historical situation’, which Dews identifies with ‘modernity’ (Dews 2023: 10). The second, systematic claim is that their mature systematic thinking is characterized by what he calls throughout the book, with reference to a canonical paper by Dieter Henrich (Henrich 1976), their respective Grundoperationen (‘basic operations’). He then walks the reader through major positions that Schelling developed over the course of his philosophical career in order to demonstrate how Schelling arrives at a specific genealogical account of modernity. On this account, modernity is understood as a formation of consciousness, which is supposedly not subject to the Hegelian type of dialectic which, according to Dews, is driven by

Hegel's Eurocentrism has become something of an elephant in the room, too obvious to merit discussion. The secondary literature on Hegel often concedes that many of Hegel's comments about the Orient are misguided and uninformed, and then declares that such remarks are of no consequence to his philosophy. However, recently, some scholars have contended that Hegel's view of freedom is fundamentally connected to his negative vision of the Orient and Africa. For example, Alison Stone asserts that Hegel's idea of freedom is premised on his Eurocentrism and colonialism. Drawing on Peter Sahota's essay on Hegel and Hinduism, she argues that Hegel's idea of freedom as liberation from nature tends to exclude non-Western conceptions of freedom. If Stone's contention is true, there would be no way to, as she puts it, save Hegel from himself. I argue that we can move some way towards rescuing Hegel by noting how scholars from modern Asia incorporated some of Hegel's ideas to struggle against Eurocentrism. This essay will read Hegel's comments on the Orient in light of his larger philosophy and then examine how Japanese scholars, specifically Okakura Tenshin (1863–1913) construct what could be called a Hegel-inspired defense of the concept of Asia or the Orient. I claim that if one understands the excesses of Western life to be linked to a vision of freedom based merely on self-interest and pleasure, when scholars and activists from Asia question Western culture, they actually follow Hegel's insights. Okakura, who studied Hegel in college, rethought Asia as overcoming the abstract individualist freedom of the West and replacing it a more holistic, and partially, Hegelian form of freedom.

It would be an honour for any author to receive two such thoughtful and detailed responses to their published work. I feel particularly grateful because one of my aspirations, in writing Schelling's Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel, was to encourage a more in-depth discussion of the whole range of Schelling's thinking than has been common until now in the English-speaking world. In developing their critiques, both Karen Ng and Markus Gabriel provide informative accounts of some of Schelling's main concerns, helping to make clear his achievements as a thinker, and his status as a challenging interlocutor for philosophers sympathetic to one or another form of Hegelianism.

In the multi-faceted trajectory of post-Kantian thought, Schelling—both the person and his philosophy—has always been a controversial figure. Popular historical accounts focus on his precocious interventions as part of the ‘Jena set’, initially building on Fichte's philosophy of the ‘I’, but quickly coming to challenge his predecessor's philosophical dominance. In the crucial period of the late 1790s, Schelling's most notable intervention was to develop a philosophy of nature alongside the Kantian and Fichtean theories of transcendental subjectivity, which caught the attention of Goethe and led to his appointment, at the age of twenty-three, as professor of philosophy at the University of Jena. But Schelling's life and philosophical work continued well beyond this well-documented period, culminating in a late system in which he developed key ideas surrounding freedom, existence, modality and the history of human consciousness that all revolved around a distinction between what he called negative and positive philosophy. This distinction, and his insistence on the need for the development of the latter mode of philosophy, came to challenge some of the core assumptions of the largely rationalist German idealist project and it remains, to this day, perhaps the most powerful alternative to the Hegelian system that rose to dominance already within Schelling's own lifetime, but also well beyond it.