bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
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 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.
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.
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”.
Hegel's Correspondence Theory of Truth
Authors: Harris H S 
Published: August 2016

“The world”, said Wittgenstein, “is the totality of facts, not of things”. According to the “correspondence theory”, therefore, “the truth” will be the totality of assertions that state “the facts”. In Hegel's mature theory of “truth”, this is not “philosophical truth” at all, but the ideal limit of “correct statement”.“Philosophical truth” however – like Wittgenstein's Tractatus – is a rather special subset of “the truly assertible facts”. It is the set that contains all of the true assertions about the logical structure of human cognitive experience. Thus, it is a set of “logical facts”; and if we are to know scientifically, what “human knowledge” is, we must be able to state these “facts” correctly. Hence Hegel's theory of “truth” is not independent of his theory of “correctness”. He has a “correspondence theory” of “truth”; but “Truth” is a property of assertions about “knowledge”, not of assertions about “the world”. For this reason, the theory of “truth” becomes a complex and interesting topic in Hegel's view, and not the boringly simple matter already disposed of in the formal definition of “correctness”. What is called “the correspondence theory” does not deserve the honorific name of “theory” at all. It is a formal logical truth that can be stated in a single sentence. Only in Hegel's theory of “experience” does “correspondence” become, for the first time, interesting.
Rupture, Closure, and Dialectic
Authors: Flay Joseph C 
Published: August 2016

The general intent of this paper is to examine Hegel's preoccupation with the question of beginnings. To anticipate, in Hegel's view every account in respect to its beginning – indeed, everything in respect to its beginning – is both immediate and mediated. All things therefore begin having already begun; all things begin in medias res. But if all things begin having already begun, all things begin as a rupture of one sort or another.This necessity of rupture puts the problematic of beginnings for Hegel into clear focus: system, in order to be system, must involve closure; but because of the nature of beginnings, system must also involve rupture. A judicious view of the texts show, I think, that Hegel is not willing to give up either thesis. Consequently, if the system is to be viable, the rupture cannot efface the closure; but if the system is to begin, the closure must not efface the rupture. Rupture and closure must coexist. Hegel's concern with beginning, then, is a concern with how legitimately to initiate the system without either ignoring or effacing rupture, and without preempting the possibility of closure.In Parts One and Two I will establish Hegel's clear awareness of rupture and of the part it plays in the system. If we examine the Preface and Introduction to the Science of Logic and to the Phenomenology of 1807 we find Hegel discussing a series of ruptures – indeed a circle of ruptures – which begin with a rupture at the beginning of the Science of Logic. There is first this rupture in the system as system, instantiated in the necessary reference by the Logic back to the Phenomenology. Behind this, there is a rupture in the Phenomenology itself in its own mediated beginnings, a rupture rooted in the immediate experience of natural consciousness. Behind this second rupture there is a third, a rupture in the contemporary Zeitgeist as it is instantiated in the natural attitude of natural consciousness. This rupture takes the form of the loss in natural consciousness of traditional certitude, a loss brought about by the incursion of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy on this natural, everyday consciousness. If we reflect back to the first rupture noted – that at the beginning of the Logic and put it into the context of this causal chain of ruptures, we see that philosophy in fact experiences a self-caused rupture. This self-caused rupture is due to philosophy's own effects on the Zeitgeist as internalized by natural consciousness at the end of the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth centuries.