bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Dancer–Researcher–Performer: A Brazilian Method
Authors: Cálipo Nara , Rodrigues Graziela
Published: August 2016

Brazil, a country of miscegenation, saw its culture being built considerably rich from the shock of the differences that were presented here throughout the history: indigenous people (first inhabitants), Europeans (coming from our colonizers), and Africans (through slave labor arising from Africa). The Brazilian method dancer–researcher–performer (BPI, or Bailarino–Pesquisador–Intérprete, in Portuguese) proposes the development of the dancer framed in popular manifestations in Brazil, where the subject first contacts its own origin and then performs field research in some popular manifestation. The experience is unfolded in directed practical labs, where the emotional records of this encounter, between the interpreter and the individuals in the field, are elaborated and developed reaching a very unique and expressive movement quality, coming from the subject in process.

In the artistic product created in the BPI, the dancer does not interpret a character: the character is embodied; it lives what emerged from the body; it is a real interlacing and elaboration of the relationship of its country culture with artistic creation.

The BPI leads the interpreter in an integrative way, going against the current trend in dance, in which the dancer must leave his or her body at the disposal of idealizations. We will describe a process of a BPI whose fieldwork took place with the Terecô agrarian religious manifestation, rural women who work as breakers of the babaçu coconut. The product of this process, which occurred with the author, was presented in the communities within the Amazon forest in Brazil.
On the sharp regularity for arbitrary actions of nilpotent groups on the interval: the case of
Authors: JORQUERA EDUARDO , NAVAS ANDRÉS , RIVAS CRISTÓBAL
Published: August 2016

In this work, we determine the largest $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ for which the nilpotent group of four-by-four triangular matrices with integer coefficients and the value one in the diagonal embeds into the group of $C^{1+\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}}$ diffeomorphisms of the closed interval.
Kierkegaard and Speculative Theology
Authors: Pattison George
Published: August 2016

In recent years, the long-standing philosophical and religious duel between ‘Hegel’ and ‘Kierkegaard’ has quiedy transmuted into something that, if still far from an amicable resolution, is something much less black and white. We are, of course, collectively grateful to Jon Stewart for demonstrating not only something of the extent to which ‘Kierkegaard's relation to Hegel’ needs to be re-envisaged as ‘Kierkegaard's relations to Hegel,’ but also that, often, even mosdy, the passages where Kierkegaard is seemingly attacking Hegel are actually directed against one or other, often Danish, representative of Hegelianism — above all, against J. L. Heiberg and H. L. Martensen. As a biographical narrative, this is largely beyond dispute — though, as many of Stewart's critics have noted, this does not necessarily lead, as he himself suggests, to the elimination of crucial philosophical differences between the two erstwhile protagonists.

In this paper, I accept Stewart's point that Kierkegaard's reception of Hegel is inseparable from his multiple receptions of Hegelianism. I shall, however, offer a particular focus on a part of the story that, I believe, still remains under-represented in the secondary literature, namely, Kierkegaard's early response to a number of those theologians often referred to as ‘Right’ Hegelians. This focus calls for a revision of Stewart's emphasis on the relation to Heiberg and Martensen as the decisive factor in Kierkegaard's anti-Hegelianism.
Kierkegaard's Recurring Criticism of Hegel's ‘The Good and Conscience’
Authors: Stewart Jon
Published: August 2016

Kierkegaard was, at least during his early years, an avid reader of Hegel's philosophy. For example, his dissertation, The Concept of Irony, constitutes a careful study of, among other things, Hegel's account of Socrates in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and of Hegel's discussion of Romantic irony in both the Lectures on Aesthetics and the book review of Solger's Posthumous Writings. Similarly, in connection with the analysis of Antigone in Either/Or and the discussion of universals and particulars in the unfinished Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus dubitandum est, Part Two, there is clear evidence that Kierkegaard consulted the relevant parts of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Based on these examples, Kierkegaard's use of Hegel can almost always be characterised as ad hoc. He goes directly to specific passages or discussions in Hegel's texts, which are of special interest in connection with works that he himself is writing. Thus, when working on The Concept of Irony, the first part of which is concerned with Socratic irony, Kierkegaard goes specifically to the section in Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy that treats Socrates, without feeling any obligation to read the book from cover to cover.
Ibsen and Hegel on Egypt and the Beginning of Great Art
Authors: Gjesdal Kristin
Published: August 2016

In the young Henrik Ibsen's intellectual quarters, abroad as well as in his native Norway, Hegelianism was very much the philosophical system de rigueur. Hegel's student Marcus Jacob Monrad taught phenomenology and aesthetics at the University of Christiania (now Oslo) throughout the 1850s, and promoted a wider Hegelian way of thinking through frequent book reviews and newspaper articles. In Italy, soon to be his home away from home, Ibsen socialised with the art-historian Lorentz Dietrichson, whose views on the history of art were outspokenly Hegelian. Ibsen was also in touch with the Hegelian circle gathering around the painter I. C. Dahl at the Academy of Art in Dresden. While Ibsen rarely engages in explicit philosophical discussion, he makes a significant exception when responding to the Danish translation of John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism. He admits that he has no professional expertise in this area but continues to observe that, insofar as ‘there are writers [like Mill] who lay down the law about philosophy without any knowledge of Hegel or German thought in general,’ it seems to him that ‘anything is allowed.’ To think philosophically without Hegel appears to Ibsen as tantamount to thinking without a reference point or standard.
Hegel's Defence of Plotinus against F. H. Jacobi
Authors: Tavoularis Stylianos
Published: August 2016

Although Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy was teaching material intended for students and published posthumously, it would be wrong to regard this work as irrelevant to his philosophical project. In his introduction to the Lectures, Hegel emphasised that the history of philosophy should not be treated as a mere accumulation of opinions, or as a random collection of correct and incorrect views according to some later standards. The history of philosophy, just like art, religion and Recht, reflects the necessary logical determinations of the Idea, and in this sense it should be studied with the intent of revealing those determinations. Hegel, of course, intended his project to be sufficiently established through the Phenomenology and the Logic without the need to resort to any historical manifestations of culture. However, his interpretation of the history of philosophy does reveal his own philosophical agenda more straightforwardly than the ahistorical complex accounts of his other major works.

Hegel's intention was to present the development of the history of philosophy as a reflection of the development of the Idea. Therefore, one would assume that the further we go back in time, we would find philosophers whose doctrines were less mature and more distant from Hegel's own conception of philosophy. However, Hegel seems to have singled out a few favourite philosophers, to whom he did not hesitate to attribute insights that could not possibly have been developed at the time, according to his pre-conceived pattern of development. One famous example was Aristotle, whom he credited with the conception of a Reason that becomes its own object, i.e., Reason which is ‘in and for-itself.’ A philosopher belonging to the ‘objective’ stage of the spirit could not normally have achieved such a conception.
Force, Understanding and Ontology
Authors: Westphal Kenneth R.
Published: August 2016

In Night Thoughts Henry Harris made plain that Hegel imbibed naturalism deeply in Jena. Harris states:

The balance of social influence has shifted so drastically between Hegel's time and ours … from the religious to the scientific establishment, that Hegel's own contribution to this shift has itself become an obstacle to the right understanding of what he said. He wanted to swing religious consciousness into full support of a scientific interpretation of human life …. His own choice of language was conditioned by the Christian teaching, but also by the knowledge that the Christian doctrine of spirit was derived from Stoic sources. (Harris 1983, 302)

The Stoics were uncompromising materialists and naturalists. Harris (1998, 492) admitted, however, that Night Thoughts is less successful than Towards the Sunlight because he didn't have detailed knowledge of contemporaneous natural science and so could not explicate Hegel's philosophy of nature effectively. Similarly, Hegel's 1804–05 philosophy of nature is omitted from the collective translation of Hegel's Jena system edited by Burbidge and di Giovanni because

its translation would require specialized knowledge that none of the […. translating collective] has and also because it is removed from the interests of all of them. (Hegel 1986, vii–viii.)

This lack of interest leaves two members of Hegel's philosophical system – his logic and metaphysics – precariously imbalanced because they lack their third supporting member, the philosophy of nature. This can only result in serious distortion of our understanding of Hegel's system.
Transforming Representations into Thoughts and Thoughts into Concepts
Authors: Burbidge John W.
Published: August 2016

In an attempt to make sense of the argument in Hegel's Science of Logic, I have suggested that, when we focus our attention on a concept, we find that our thought moves to other, related concepts. We can then turn our thoughts not only to those other concepts, but also to the movement itself: the transitions, ‘becomings’, or processes that lead from one to the other. Reflection can in its turn look back over these processes, along with their beginnings and endings, to consider them as synthetic wholes. Finally, thought can collapse those syntheses into simple unities that become new conceptual starting points. The whole dynamic described in the Logic is something that takes place in the realm of thought as a result of the activity of thinking.

One of the earliest and most penetrating reviews of my On Hegel's Logic (Burbidge 1991) by George di Giovanni (di Giovanni 1982) took exception to this approach because it committed the fallacy of psychologism. Rather than basing logic on the concepts as objective entities that have a life of their own, I was subordinating it to the subjective processes that occur in the minds of thinkers — and as subjective, logic was amenable to contingencies and distractions that would betray its strict objectivity.

The fallacy of psychologism was first identified by Gottlob Frege. Once I examined his arguments, I found it quite relevant to my study of Hegel. Initially, Frege draws a sharp contrast between ideas and concepts — at least that is how the English translators have rendered his German.
Feminism and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: ‘Lordship and Bondage’ and ‘Ethical Action’
Authors: Fritzman J. M. , Gauthier Jeffrey A.
Published: August 2016

In quest of an authoritative text for determining the relationship between Hegel and feminism, nearly all writers on the subject have turned to his interpretation of Antigone in chapter six of the Phenomenology of Spirit. There are at least two compelling reasons for this. In the first place, as the comprehensive introduction to Hegel's writings, the Phenomenology of Spirit is the obvious place to begin in exploring Hegel's arguments on the subject (compare Forster 1998: 13-14). Because the description of gender relations in the world of ancient Greece in chapter six is Hegel's only extended discussion on the topic, this obviously recommends that discussion as a starting point for study. In the second place, Hegel refers back to the division of gender roles in that chapter in some of his discussions concerning gender and women in subsequent ethical writings, most notably in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. This would suggest that Hegel himself took the discussion there as authoritative on matters of gender.

Despite general agreement that Hegel's account of Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit is significant, scholars differ on how best to interpret that significance. Kelly Oliver argues that Hegel's restriction of women to traditional family roles in chapter six prevents them from participating in later stages of the dialectic, a fact that ‘undermines Hegel's entire project in the Phenomenology’ (Oliver 1996: 69). Patricia Jagentowicz Mills claims that ‘Hegel's interpretation of Sophocles’ play Antigone is central to an understanding of woman's role in the Hegelian system' (Mills 1996: 59), but goes on to argue that Hegel uses a distortion of the play ‘to represent woman in the family in transhistorical terms’ (Mills 1996: 78).
Kierkegaard contra Hegel on the ‘Absolute Paradox’
Authors: Schönbaumsfeld Genia
Published: August 2016

In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel propounds three interrelated theses:

(1) The radical continuity of religion and philosophy:

The subject of religion as of philosophy is the eternal truth in its objectivity, is God and nothing but God and the explication of God. Philosophy is not worldly wisdom, but knowledge of the non-worldly, not knowledge of the outer substance, of empirical being and life, but knowledge of what is eternal, of what God is and what emanates from his nature. For this nature must reveal and develop itself. Philosophy therefore explicates itself only by explicating religion, and by thus explicating itself, explicates religion … Hence religion and philosophy collapse into each other; philosophy is indeed itself religious service [Gottesdienst]. (Hegel 1986c: 28)

(2) The view that philosophy renders in conceptual form the essence of what Christianity consists in and thus transcends the merely subjective vantage-point of faith:

In philosophy religion obtains its justification from the thinking consciousness … Faith already contains the true content, but it still misses the form of thought. All previously considered forms — feeling, representation — can have the content of truth, but they themselves are not the true form which makes the true content necessary. Thought is the absolute judge before whom the content needs to prove and justify itself, (ibid.: 341)

(3) Philosophy alone shows Christianity to be rational and necessary:

This vantage-point [of philosophy] is therefore the justification of religion, especially of the Christian, the true religion; it apprehends [erkennen] the content in its necessary form [nach seiner Notwendigkeit], according to reason; at the same time it also knows the forms in the development of this content. (ibid.: 339)
Romanticized Enlightenment? Enlightened Romanticism? Universalism and Particularism in Hegel's Understanding of the Enlightenment
Authors: Pinkard Terry
Published: August 2016

Hegel lived in a period in which many of his contemporaries reacted strongly against what they saw as the dangers or the excesses of the Enlightenment (the Aufklärung in Germany). One of the strongest reactions to this was Romanticism, a movement more or less born in Jena during the period Hegel was living there, carried out by some of his friends and by people he knew well, and something which both irritated him and which also quite clearly profoundly influenced him. This period in Jena was also the time during which Hegel was undergoing his rather rapid and astonishing philosophical development that culminated in what he always described as his “voyage of discovery,” the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. In that book, Hegel carried out his own famous critique of the Enlightenment, which included his scathing charge that the “Enlightenment itself… is just as little enlightened about itself” and that it misunderstood the arguments of what he called “faith”. This could easily make Hegel seem to be a Romantic critic of the Enlightenment, somebody rejecting the apparent arrogance of all those French deists, Scottish skeptics, and materialists of all sorts in favor of some more emotionalist conception of human experience. Indeed, in a work often cited, this is exactly the conclusion that has been drawn (and it has appeared even in such popular publications as the English magazine, The Economist). On this view, Hegel's critique of the Enlightenment amounts to charging it with investing too much in reason and neglecting the emotional and religious side of experience, thus denying an essential part of human life. In short, that view sees Hegel's philosophy essentially as a species of the Romantic rejection of Enlightenment, bringing into play the familiar textbook oppositions of the mechanical versus the organic, disenchanted versus re-enchanted nature, and the like.
Hegel's Critique of the Triumph of Verstand in Modernity
Authors: Houlgate Stephen
Published: August 2016

In his lectures on the philosophy of history Hegel passes this famous judgement on the French Revolution. “Anaxagoras had been the first to say that nous governs the world; but only now did humanity come to recognize that thought should rule spiritual actuality. This was thus a magnificent dawn”. What first gave rise to discontent in France, in Hegel's view, were the heavy burdens that pressed upon the people and the government's inability to procure for the Court the means of supporting its luxury and extravagance. But soon the new spirit of freedom and enlightenment began to stir in men's minds and carry them forward to revolution. “One should not, therefore, declare oneself against the assertion”, Hegel concludes, “that the Revolution received its first impulse from Philosophy” (VPW, p 924).

However, Hegel points out that the legacy of the revolution is actually an ambiguous one. For, although the principles which guided the revolution were those of reason and were indeed magnificent – namely, that humanity is born to freedom and self-determination – they were held fast in their abstraction and turned “polemically”, and at times terribly, against the existing order (VPW, p 925). What ultimately triumphed in the revolution was thus not concrete reason itself, but abstract reason or understanding (VPW, p 923). In Hegel's view, the enduring legacy of such revolutionary understanding was, not so much the Terror, but the principle that “the subjective wills of the many should hold sway” (VPW, p 932). This principle, which Hegel calls the principle of “liberalism” and which we would call the principle of majority rule, has since spread from France to become one of the governing principles of modern stat. It has been used to justify granting universal suffrage, to justify depriving corporations and the nobility of the right to sit in the legislature, and in some cases to justify abolishing the monarchy. What is of crucial importance for Hegel, however, is that such measures have not rendered the state more modern and rational, but have in fact distorted the modern state.
Does Hegel's Critique of Kant's Moral Theory Apply to Discourse Ethics?
Authors: Finlayson Gordon
Published: August 2016

Several years ago Jürgen Habermas wrote a short answer to the question: “Does Hegel's Critique of Kant apply to Discourse Ethics?” The gist of his short answer is, “no”. Insofar as Hegel's criticisms of the formalism and abstract universalism of the moral law never even applied to Kant's moral theory in the first place, they also fail to apply to discourse ethics. Insofar as Hegel's criticisms of the rigorism of the moral law and of Kant's conception of autonomy do hit the mark, discourse ethics successfully draws their sting by reconceiving Kant's moral standpoint along the following lines. 1. Kant wrongly undertakes to establish the moral law as a “fact of reason”: discourse ethics derives the moral standpoint from two premises — one formal, a rationally reconstructed logic of argumentation, and one material, namely our intuitions about how to justify utterances. 2. Kant wrongly contends that we must be able to think of ourselves as both intelligible characters, inhabiting a noumenal world, and as empirical characters inhabiting the world of appearances: discourse ethics allows that in everyday contexts of action and in the context of moral discourse we have one character that has real needs and interests. 3. Kant is also mistaken in arguing that moral autonomy requires human beings to abstract away from their needs and interests and to will universalizable maxims for the sake of their universal form: discourse ethics understands moral autonomy to consist in the free adoption of a standpoint from which conflicts of interest can be impartially regulated, by giving special weight to the satisfaction of universalizable interests. 4. Kant misconceives the categorical imperative as an objective test of universalizability that is applied by individual wills in isolation: discourse ethics reconceives the moral universalism as an ideal of intersubjective agreement of participants in discourse. On the differences between the principles of discourse ethics and Kant's categorical imperative Habermas is wont to cite McCarthy's summary of his — Habermas' — position: “Rather than ascribing as valid to all others any maxim that I can will to be a universal law, I must submit my maxim to all others for the purposes of discursively testing its claim to universality. The emphasis shifts from what each can will without contradiction to be a general law, to what all can will in agreement to be a universal norm” (MCCA 67).
Ethical Life and the Demands of Conscience
Authors: Neuhouser Frederick
Published: August 2016

My aim in this paper is to investigate Hegel's claim that ethical life (Sittlichkeit) does not simply negate but rather incorporates, or preserves, crucial elements of the Enlightenment conception of moral subjectivity that Hegel associates with the standpoint of Morality (Moralität). More specifically, the part of Hegel's view I want to examine here is his claim that individual moral conscience (Gewissen) has its place within the rational social order as depicted in Part III of The Philosophy of Right, “Ethical Life”. There is a widespread perception among Hegel's liberal critics that his vision of the rational social order allows no place for the genuine expression of moral conscience. This is the view expressed, for example, in Ernst Tugendhat's recent charge that Hegel's view excludes the possibility of “adopting a rational perspective” on a society's prevailing norms and practices’: “Hegel does not allow for the possibility of a responsible, critical relation to the … state. Instead he tells us that existing laws have an absolute authority. The independent conscience of the individual must disappear, and trust takes the place of reflection. This is what Hegel means by the Aufhebung of morality into ethical life”.
McTaggart on the right to be punished
Authors: Bennett Christopher
Published: August 2016

J. M. E. McTaggart's interpretation of Hegel's theory of punishment has a strange double life. On the one hand it is considered important by philosophers of punishment for setting forth an novel and suggestive account of what we are, or ought to be, doing when we punish wrongdoers. What such writers are interested in is the prospect that a “right to be punished” gives of resuscitating retributivism, giving a non-consequentialist account of punishment which is not grounded in vengeance-seeking or an ineffable intuition of justice. McTaggart's view seems to hold out the promise of such a novel retributivism.

On the other hand, Hegel scholars themselves seem to regard McTaggart's account as dead in the water as an interpretation of Hegel's remarks in the Philosophy of Right (from which his view is clearly drawn). At first sight, after all, there seems to be little textual evidence to support his reading. And two more recent accounts of Hegel's remarks on punishment have nothing to say about one of the central theses for which McTaggart argues, the one which I defend as an interpretation of Hegel here. The question for those sceptical of his reading remains how someone like McTaggart could have fallen prey to such a mis-interpretation; but perhaps it can just be explained as yet another case of a thinker reading his own views into Hegel rather than reading what is there. Perhaps McTaggart was over-zealous in putting forward his own thoughts and overlooked his scholarly duties.
Hegel's Critique of Foundationalism in the “Doctrine of Essence”
Authors: Houlgate Stephen
Published: August 2016

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”.
Hegel's Hat Trick
Authors: Burbidge John W.
Published: August 2016

“Hegel achieved the most miraculous things,” wrote Karl Popper. “A master logician it was child's play for his powerful dialetical method to draw real physical rabbits out of purely metaphysical hats”.

It is a serious charge, supported by Hegel's preference for Kepler over Newton, his ‘deduction of the actual position of the planets’ while ignoring the recent discovery of the planet Ceres, and his claim that ‘magnetizing iron increases its weight’.

Because Popper is so convinced that Hegel is a fraud, he does not deign to investigate the actual pattern of Hegel's argument. The obscure, abstract vocabulary is dismissed as bombast and tautology.
The Concept of Mediation in Hegel and Adorno
Authors: O'Connor Brian
Published: August 2016

Given its centrality to the intellectual thought processes through which the great structures of logic, nature, and spirit are unfolded it is clear that mediation is vital to the very possibility of Hegel's encyclopaedic philosophy. Yet Hegel gives little specific explanation of the concept of mediation. Surprisingly, it has been the subject of even less attention by scholars of Hegel. Nevertheless it is casually used in discussions of Hegel and post-Hegelian philosophy as though its meaning were simple and straightforward. In these discussions mediation is the thesis that meanings are not atomic in that the independence of something is inseparable from its relation to something else. Hence being is mediated by nothing, the particular by the universal, the individual by society. But does Hegel ever explain mediation in a way which justifies such use of the concept? The same easy employment of mediation is found in Theodor Adorno whose works are replete with the use of this concept and, indeed, acknowledgements of its Hegelian origin. But the concept of mediation in Adorno's negative dialectic is operative in an entirely different context from that of Hegel. How, it might be asked, can a concept be so adaptable? I want to argue that mediation is, in fact, an equivocal term which in both Hegel and Adomo covers a variety of entirely different conceptual relations. Furthermore, as propounded by both Hegel and Adorno it lacks the rigour which could allow the particular conclusions which the concept allegedly facilitates.
The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self: Towards a Heterodox Reading of “Lordship and Bondage” in Hegel's Phenomenology
Authors: McDowell John
Published: August 2016

Hegel's Phenomenology traces an education of consciousness, as a result of which it is to attain the standpoint of absolute knowing. For consciousness (as such) its object is other than itself. The goal is for this otherness to be aufgehoben — cancelled as the simple otherness it at first appears to be, though preserved at a higher level, as a “moment” in a more comprehensive conception. Inquiry will then in principle be able to avoid a certain sort of philosophical anxiety. We shall no longer need to be troubled by the spectre of a gulf between subject and object, which is the pretext for a transcendental scepticism.

At the standpoint of absolute knowing, the progress of knowledge is to become intelligible as the free self-development of “the Notion”. Hegel sees this conception as indebted to Kant, in a way he makes explicit when he writes, in the Science of Logic: “It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason that the unity which constitutes the nature of the Notion is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception, as the unity of the I think, or of self-consciousness.” This is obviously an allusion to the Transcendental Deduction. There — especially in the second-edition recasting — Kant comes close to Hegel's conception of absolute knowing.

I shall begin by spending some time on this Kantian background. That will place the apperceptive I, whose unity is the unity of the I think, in the picture.
Tragic Entanglements: Between Hegel and Derrida
Authors: de Boer Karin
Published: August 2016

In an early text on Bataille, Derrida notes that Bataille's reinterpretation of Hegel “is a simulated repetition of Hegelian discourse. In the course of this repetition a barely perceptible displacement disjoints all the articulations and penetrates all the points welded together by the imitated discourse. A trembling spreads out which then makes the entire old shell crack.” There is no doubt that this remark refers not just to Bataille's reading of Hegel, but also to the way in which deconstruction intends to make the old shell of Hegelianism, and hence of the history of philosophy in general, tremble. By doing this, deconstruction can be said to open up a way of reflecting on contemporary culture that from Plato onwards had been foreclosed by the predominant tendency of philosophy.

According to a famous saying by Hegel, philosophy grasps its own time in thought. This is to say that philosophy explicitly articulates the implicit self-understanding of the culture to which it belongs and out of which it emerges. If contemporary philosophy still faces the task of comprehending its own time, then it should develop a logic which is as philosophical as Hegel's, but which distinguishes itself from the latter by addressing the radical finitude of any effort to bring about meaning, truth, presence, harmony, stability, or justice. Such a logic should respond to the experience that the moments in which human life threatens to lose its dignity are not cancelled out by what is commonly called ‘progress’. To my mind, it is precisely this experience that deconstruction seeks to grasp in thought. I understand deconstruction as drawing attention to that which allows something — for instance a culture — to constitute itself, yet at the same time threatens to make it fall apart. Whereas philosophy can be said to have always shied away from the insight into the radical instability of whatever human beings may venture, Derrida, on the other hand, can be considered to take this very instability as the guiding principle of his philosophy. On the basis of such a principle, the ways in which human life organizes itself will no longer be interpreted in terms of increasing self-actualization, autonomy, or control, but rather by addressing the conflicts from which the various modes of human self-organization may not be able to disentangle themselves.
Hegel on Intersubjective and Retrospective Determination of Intention
Authors: Laitinen Arto
Published: August 2016

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.
On the Role of Intersubjectivity in Hegel's Encyclopaedic Phenomenology and Psychology
Authors: Ikäheimo Heikki
Published: August 2016

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 End of History in Hegel
Authors: Harris H S
Published: August 2016

When we are studying Hegel's answer to any question, or his solution to any problem, we must always look first at the systematic context in which the problem is raised, or the question asked. Hegel's “philosophy of world-history” comes as the climactic stage of the development of “objective spirit”; and it provides the transition to the spheres of “absolute spirit”. The philosophical comprehension of political history provides the ultimate context for our political theory; and then it leads us on to the sphere in which we are directly aware of “the Absolute”. Our political science comes to an end, when we recognize that “the world's history is the world's court of judgment”. But that “court of judgment” has jurisdiction only over the objective forms of political and social organization. The judgment of history is not the “Last Judgment” for everything and everyone. There are modes of experience which emerge and develop in history, but which are recognized as transhistorical; and when “philosophy”, as the historical quest for wisdom, reaches its goal, we can see and say why Greek art has an enduring significance for us, even though the Greek religion (which their art expressed in its highest form) has passed over into history just as completely and irrevocably as the “city-state”. Our political thought and action exists in the context of a religious ideal that will not allow us to divide the human community into “us” and “them”, the freemen and the slaves, the civilized and the barbarians. But only the arrival of philosophical “wisdom” has enabled us to see and say what is “absolute” about our religion (just as it is we, and not the Greeks themselves, who have the “absolute” consciousness of Greek art).
Philosophical History and the End of History
Authors: Pompa Leon
Published: August 2016

The apparent implication of Hegel's conception of philosophical history, that the future must be foreclosed or that history must come to an end, has long been a source of difficulty both for Hegelians themselves and for commentators on Hegel's philosophy. The suggestion that the truth of history can be understood only when reason has actualised itself in the state seems to carry an implication, that there is no further work either for reason or philosophy to do, which is hard to accept given the obvious fact that the present world hardly seems beyond the possibility of rational improvement. It is not my intention in this paper to engage in any direct discussion of previous interpretations. Instead I shall address the substantial problem itself by trying to explain certain requirements of Hegel's philosophy of history and then to develop and examine their consequences for the concept of an end of history.

I shall begin by examining some initial reasons why it might be thought that Hegel is committed to the notion of an end of history. A convenient way of doing this is by noting very briefly some features of the philosophical route which leads him to the idea of philosophical history in the Introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. As is well known, he begins by identifying a number of different kinds of history, the distinguishing feature of each of which is the historian's viewpoint. Thus the first, original history, is history as written by those who are involved in it and who share the spirit of its time. It is really a kind of contemporary history in which, since the historian shares the spirit of his time, he writes from that viewpoint. But because he writes from within it, he cannot be conscious of his viewpoint and cannot, therefore, transcend it in the sense of understanding it as part of a larger whole. Next come the four forms of reflective history, ie. universal history, pragmatic history, critical history and specialised history, in which each kind of historian tries to transcend the viewpoint of his time in an attempt to view history reflectively. But, for a series of different reasons, each is unsuccessful.
Perpetual War/Perpetual Peace: Kant, Hegel and the End of History
Authors: Hutchings Kimberly
Published: August 2016

Recently our particular end of history has been characterized as the coming of age of a post-communist, liberal nation-state system and global political economy. On this interpretation of history and international relations, the philosophy of world history is no longer needed, since the meaning of history, its goal and end, are already known. In essence, we have arrived at the Kantian regulative ideal of perpetual peace, not in the form of a world state, but of an international order in which commerce can take over the role of war and deterrence in ensuring progress. In this paper, I will be arguing for a different understanding of the end of history, one which recalls the philosopher's attention to world history as the realm of the self-relation of spirit most in need of philosophical comprehension. In order to do this, I will be examining the differences between Kant's treatment of history and war in the critical philosophy, and Hegel's speculative transformation of that treatment in his own work. It will be argued that in Kant's work a posited end of history serves to undermine the philosophical comprehension of history, by removing that comprehension from history. Whereas in Hegel's work the experienced end of history opens up the understanding of history by acknowledging the philosopher's identity with his time. The paper falls into three sections. In the first part I will present a reading of Kant's philosophy of history and war, and try to illustrate its consequences for attempts to theorise and moralise about world history in the present. In the second part I will demonstrate how Hegel's philosophy of history and war differs from Kant's, giving us an alternative starting point for our contemporary comprehension of the end of history. Finally, I will comment on a recent Hegelian reading of world history by Hayo Krombach, Hegelian Reflections on the Idea of Nuclear War.
Fiat vita, pereat veritas Nietzsche's Untimely Reflections on Hegel's Dialectic of History
Authors: Axiotis Ares
Published: August 2016

You will indulge me if I begin with a commonplace. The term “history” is an ambiguous expression which can be taken either in the sense of res gestae or in the sense of rerum gestarum memoria. According to the former meaning, it refers to the phenomenon itself, the past course of human events, whereas, according to the latter meaning, it denotes the representation of this phenomenon.

German allows Hegel to mark the difference in terms of the relation between Geschichte and Historie. He also speaks of “objective” and “subjective” history in this connection. Yet by suppressing the brute opacity of language in favour of its teleological function, he is able to turn a blind eye to history's semiotic double game, the free play between literal and figural meaning within the linguistic sign. Hegel thus propounds the view that identity and difference at the level of the signifier are ultimately recuperated as expressive moments or alienations of the signified, the pure idea of History on its circular journey to itself. Linguistic signs are capable of meaning, according to Hegel, precisely because of their dialectical structure. The proliferation of meaning in language through the play of words is not random and anarchic but guided systematically by the invisible hand of spirit.
Aristotle and Hegel on Nature: Some Similarities
Authors: Santoro-Brienza Liberato
Published: August 2016

Michael Petry has observed that “until 1970 there was nobody among the hegelians, not to mention the philosophers of the Naturwissenschaften, willing to recognise Hegel's philosophy of nature as an area of investigation to be taken seriously.” An analogous fate seems to have afflicted Aristotle's Physics, if one agrees with Heidegger that: “The Aristotelian Physics is the arcane (verborgene) fundamental book of Western philosophy and, insofar as arcane, it has never been studied sufficiently.”

Fortunately, the past neglect has been amply compensated for by the considerable degree of interest shown, in more recent years, towards both Hegel's and Aristotle's philosophy of nature. With reference to Hegel, that interest may have been nourished initially by the recognition of some isomorphic traits obtaining in Hegel's doctrine and in the methodology of structuralism and gestaltism. Furthermore, part of that interest must have also been triggered by the overall state of bankruptcy and disrepute which have befallen mechanistic, quantitative, empirical or neo-empirical and neo-positivist explanations of reality and of nature. Think of the developments of genetic biology, pathology and genetic engineering. Quantum Mechanics, the highly speculative turn in physics, cosmology, mathematics. By now, the assumptions, methods and findings of these sciences seem to be more kin to Aristotle and Hegel than to Newton and Galileo. Other hypothetical reasons could be offered, to explain the renewed attention paid to Hegel's philosophy of nature.

One point, to begin with, emerges from the panorama of recent research on Hegel, namely that - regardless of and despite the recurrent mythical, hyper-animistic, anthropomorphic images, sustained by analogies and metaphorical diction; also despite of the frequent obscurities and downright factual mistakes - the philosopher cannot be sweepingly accused of scientific ignorance, nor of endemically gratuituous a priori, abstract reflection.
Evolution and Emanation of Spirit in Hegel's Philosophy of Nature
Authors: Drees Martin
Published: August 2016

Having studied Hegel's philosophy, as it is epitomized in the Encyclopaedia, many scholars would be in agreement with David G Ritchie who, in his book on Darwin and Hegel (1893), remarked: “Everywhere in Hegel we read about Entwickelung; but of Evolution he does not speak in so friendly a manner.” Bearing in mind the distinction between “Entwicklung” (“development”) and “evolution” and recalling Hegel's criticism of conceptions of natural evolution in the initial section of the Philosophy of Nature, it is certainly not immediately evident why a serious scholar like John N Findlay should maintain that “if any philosopher is a philosopher of evolution, that philosopher is Hegel.”

It can hardly be denied, however, that more recent studies in Hegel's philosophy can be used to support Findlay's statement to a certain extent. Not only has the relevance of Hegel's philosophy for an adequate understanding of organic life and its evolution been strongly emphasized; it has even been asserted that Hegel had at his disposal a concept of evolution essentially determining the methodic approach of his philosophy of nature.

Now I would not venture to ascertain whether or not Hegel's concept of evolution is of present relevance for our understanding of nature and even less would I dare to decide on the hypothetical question whether or not Hegel, if he “had lived a little later, … would have given us an evolutionary, teleological theory of Nature as he did of mind in history.” In my paper, I would like to deal with a subject matter of more limited scope. Discussions concerning the systematic importance and present relevance of Hegel's concept of evolution tend to be somewhat vague and abstract as long as the meaning of “evolution” in Hegel's philosophy is anything but unequivocal. Therefore, I am going to attempt to outline a systematic reconstruction of the function of Hegel's concept of evolution within the conceptual framework of Hegel's encyclopaedic Philosophy of Nature. More precisely, I will try to elucidate: 1) the question whether or not Hegel's criticism of philosophic and scientific concepts of evolution led him to his own positive concept of evolution; 2) the question in what sense a specific Hegelian concept of evolution is relevant for the understanding of the notional development taking place between the logical “absolute Idea” and “subjective spirit”.