In this paper I return to Hegel's dispute with Kant over the conceptual ordering of external and internal purposiveness to distinguish between two conceptions of teleology at play in the contemporary function debate. I begin by outlining the three main views in the debate (the etiological, causal role and organizational views). I argue that only the organizational view can maintain the capacity of function ascriptions both to explain the presence of a trait and to identify its contribution to a current system, for it is the only view that considers teleology as a natural cause. To establish how teleology can be considered as a natural cause, advocates of the organizational view return to Kant's analysis of internal purposiveness. However, while Kant identifies the requirements that an object must meet to satisfy the demands of teleological judgment, I suggest that he denies that we can know whether they are truly met. I argue that Hegel's philosophy of nature is better equipped to determine how internal purposiveness can be considered as a natural cause, for it grounds organization in a form of purposiveness that is more fundamental than a designer's intention.

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.

I want to begin with two of Hegel's endings, one well known, the other less so. First, some words from the closing paragraphs of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy:

British Idealism is often identified with the three best known British Idealists: T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley and B. Bosanquet. However, the full range of British Idealists includes also E. Caird, D.G. Ritchie, J.S. Mackenzie, H. Jones, J.H. Muirhead, W. Wallace, A.S. Pringle-Pattison, R.B. Haldane, R.L. Nettleship and J. Watson. Shortage of space does not allow a satisfactory discussion of the nature of British Idealist thought, nor is it the aim of this article. What follows intends to be introductory only. It brings to the fore the concept of reconciliation as the idea that gives unity to British Idealism, explains the role of Idealist thought in nineteenth century British social thought, and reveals the contribution of British Idealism to substantive social and political thought. This introductory account is coupled with a bibliographical essay to illustrate the range of concerns Idealist thought embraces.

British Idealism is sometimes described as an intellectual ‘movement’ not as a result of any comprehensive study of the idealists and their views so much as on the strength of its supposed role in providing intellectual support for the ‘collectivism’ or increasing state intervention that is claimed to have dominated British politics in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, the intellectual interest in British Idealism has generally followed on the belief that Idealism was the major force behind the politics of collectivism.

Although British Idealists did constitute a group, this group did not and, indeed, could not have had the effect on British politics that is usually suggested. British Idealism could not have lent itself exclusively to one line of policy.

In this paper, I consider Charles Taylor's classic article ‘The Opening Arguments of the Phenomenology’, in which Taylor presents an account of the Consciousness chapter of the Phenomenology as a transcendental argument. I set Taylor's discussion in context and present its main themes. I then consider a recent objection to Taylor's approach put forward by Stephen Houlgate: namely, that to see Hegel as using transcendental arguments would be to violate Hegel's requirement that his method in the Phenomenology needs to be presuppositionless. I concede that Houlgate's criticism of Taylor has some force, but argue that nonetheless Taylor can suggest instead that although Hegel is not offering transcendental arguments here, he can plausibly be read as making transcendental claims, so that perhaps Houlgate and Taylor are not so far apart after all, notwithstanding this disagreement.

In this paper, I clarify the structure of dialectical contradiction in Marx in order to show how it is influenced by Hegel. To this aim, I focus on the only place where Marx systematically develops the concept of dialectical contradiction, namely, in his analysis of commodity in the first chapter of Capital. Here Marx claims that the commodity is the contradictory unity of use-value and exchange-value. To make this claim intelligible, I first discuss Hegel's conception of ‘the thing’ [Das Ding] in the Science of Logic and demonstrate how for Hegel ‘the thing’ is the contradictory unity of matter and form. With this Hegelian machinery, then, I turn to Marx to show how use-value and exchange-value constitute the matter and the form of commodity, and argue how they contradict each other.

This paper advances a philosophical interpretation of Hegel's Logic as defending a metaphysics, which includes an absolute, itself comparable to God in other systems of metaphysics of interest to Hegel, including Aristotle's and Spinoza's. Two problems are raised which can seem to block the prospects for such a metaphysically inflationary interpretation. The key to resolving these problems is consideration of the kinds of metaphysical priority that Hegel sees in Aristotle. This allows us to build a philosophical model of Hegel's absolute, and to demonstrate how the model fits the argument of Hegel's Logic. Application of this model provides a philosophical explanation of the senses in which Hegel's metaphysics is idealist; he argues that thought is absolute and comparable to God in other systems of metaphysics: thought is both self-determining and metaphysically prior to being.

To oversimplify quite a bit, scholars’ presentation of Hegel's teleology constitutes a continuum according to how more-or-less secured the progress towards the goal is supposed to be, which tracks roughly the nature of the end and its necessity. In this article, rather than focus on the end and progress towards it, we will focus on the means and structure of teleological relationships on Hegel's account. This focus follows from an essential feature of Hegel's discussion of teleology in the Logic, in which teleology is introduced to solve a problem in the individuation of entities. It will turn out that the fullest actualization of the end is in the durable means, which is also thereby individuated. And it will turn out that the paradigmatic historical means—the state—is tensed, as it were, between the end and its realization that makes it synchronically historical. This synchronic historicity is missing in the usual progressive and thus diachronic accounts of the teleological process of history. But first we step back even farther (at least historically). We begin by taking up the two most important philosophical accounts of teleology for Hegel, namely those of Aristotle and Kant. Then we go to Hegel's Logic for his reconstruction of teleological processes against the background of the explanatory need for individuation. We focus on four aspects of Hegel's account: that teleology is a structure of reciprocal interaction, that the purpose is an immanent governing principle, that change is the price of immanence, and that the durable means is the teleological object par excellence. Finally, we trace these features through Hegel's account of world history and conclude with some brief remarks on the historicity of the state described in the Philosophy of Right.

Hegel's Science of Logic is one of the most challenging books in the philosophical library. Its primary text is a mass of abstract terms, woven into sentences that become quite complex. That text avoids illustrations or examples, but plunges on from paragraph to paragraph as the concepts being discussed subtly change their character, develop associations with contrary terms, become part of a complex network of reciprocal interaction, and then collapse into a new integrated thought which then serves as an immediate beginning for the next discussion.