Nearly every major philosophy, from Plato to Hegel and beyond, has argued that democracy is an inferior form of government, at best. Yet, virtually every contemporary political philosophy working today endorses democracy in one variety or another. Should we conclude then that the traditional canon is meaningless for helping us theorise about a just state? In this paper, I will take up the criticisms and positive proposals of two such canonical figures in political philosophy: Plato and Hegel. At first glance, each is rather disdainful, if not outright hostile, to democracy. This is also how both have been represented traditionally. However, if we look behind the reasons for their rejection of (Athenian) democracy and the reasons behind their alternatives to democracy, I believe we can uncover a new theory of government that does two things. First, it maps onto the so-called Schumpeterian tradition of elite theories of democracy quite well. Second, perhaps surprisingly, it actually provides an improved justification for democratic government as we practice it today than rival theories of democracy. Thus, not only are Plato and Hegel not enemies of modern democratic thought after all, but each is actually quite useful for helping us develop democratic theory in a positive, not negative, manner.

The paper analyses the concept of ‘bad infinity’ in connection with Hegel’s critique of infinitesimal calculus and with the belittling of Hegel’s mathematical notions by the representatives of modern logic and the foundations of mathematics. The main line of argument draws on the observation that Hegel’s difference is only derivatively a mathematical one and is primarily of a broadly logico-epistemological nature. Because of this, the concept of bad infinity can be fruitfully utilized, by way of inversion, in an analysis of the conceptual shortcomings of the most prominent foundational attempts at dealing with infinite quanta, such as Cantor’s set theory and Hilbert’s axiomatism. As such, the paper is an attempt at reconstructing Hegel’s philosophy of mathematics and its role in his philosophical system and, more importantly, as a contribution to logic in the more general and radical sense of the word.

Hegel's very first acknowledged publication was, among other things, an attack on Fichte. In 1801, Hegel was still laboring in almost complete obscurity, while Fichte was an international sensation, though already somewhat past the peak of his meteoric career. In the 1801 Differenzschrift, Hegel cut his teeth by criticizing Fichte's already widelycriticised Wissenschaftslehre, and by demonstrating that Schelling's philosophical system was not simply to be equated with it. Fichte himself never bothered to respond to Hegel's criticisms; indeed he never publicly acknowledged their existence. This was not because he was unconcerned with criticisms of his views; quite the contrary. But at the time he had bigger fish to fry. He responded to Jacobi's criticisms, and to Schelling's; he replied in great detail to critical questions raised by Reinhold, and with vituperative intensity to objections raised by skeptics and purportedly loyal Kantians. But Hegel's Differenzschrift was left without a Fichtean rebuttal. This is a pity, both because of the missed opportunity to illuminate by controversy central issues at stake in the post-Kantian period, but also because it made it easier for Hegel simply to reiterate his youthful criticism as if it were the last word. And reiterate it he did: in one form or another Hegel's early criticisms of Fichte reappear at every subsequent stage of his career: in the Phenomenology, in the Science of Logic, in the Encyclopaedia, as the final chapter in Hegel's History of Philosophy, and in countless other minor works and documents from the Nachlass and correspondence.

This paper presents what we call ‘Hegel's philosophy of biology’ to a target audience of both Hegel scholars and philosophers of biology. It also serves to introduce a special issue of the Hegel Bulletin entirely dedicated to a first mapping of this yet to be explored domain of Hegel studies. We submit that Hegel's philosophy of biology can be understood as a radicalization of the Kantian approach to organisms, and as prefiguring current philosophy of biology in important ways, especially with regard to the nature of biological organization, the role of teleology in biological explanation, and the relation between life and cognition.

This article offers a discussion of James Kreines’s book Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal. While broadly sympathetic to Kreines’s ‘concept thesis’ as a conceptual realist account of Hegel, the article contrasts two Kantian arguments for transcendental idealism to which Hegel’s position may be seen as a response—the argument from synthetic a priori knowledge and the argument from the dialectic of reason—and explores the implications of Kreines’s commitment to the latter over the former.

Kant claims in Groundwork IV:454 that the correctness of his complex philosophical deduction is confirmed by the ‘practical use of common human reason’. My paper discusses how this confirmation is possible, and why it is important for Kant’s project in the Groundwork. I argue that agents without philosophical training consider an intelligible standpoint, which is one of the central elements of the deduction, to be possible (i), that they take up this standpoint insofar as they reason under the idea of freedom (ii), and that they can be brought to acknowledge the higher normative authority of this standpoint (iii). Kant’s complex deduction is not alien to common agents insofar as it spells out these three elements of our ordinary understanding of metaphysics, agency, and morality. I conclude that the confirmation of the deduction by common human reason shows that even the content of Groundwork III can become popular, and can serve to inform and direct moral education and moral improvement.

This paper aims to understand Hegel’s claim in the introduction to his Philosophy of Mind that mind is an actualization of the Idea and argues that this claim provides us with a novel and defensible way of understanding Hegel’s naturalism. I suggest that Hegel’s approach to naturalism should be understood as ‘formal’, and argue that Hegel’s Logic, particularly the section on the ‘Idea’, provides us with a method for this approach. In the first part of the paper, I present an interpretation of Hegel’s method in which life plays a central role. In the second part of the paper, I develop Hegel’s method by providing a reading of Hegel’s Subjective Spirit, focusing on the sections ‘Anthropology’ and ‘Phenomenology’ in particular, arguing that they display the dialectic between life and cognition outlined by Hegel’s Idea.

The first part of this essay develops the idea of logic as the science of thought, articulating, and thus being, the self-consciousness of thought. It explains that logic, so understood, is nothing other than metaphysics, the science of what is in so far as it is. Self-consciousness, then, thought itself, is not empty, but the source of all content. The second part of the essay discusses the opening paragraphs of Hegel’s Science of Logic; it shows how, in these paragraphs, thought is revealed to be the source of its own content in virtue of its original negativity. Thus the second part begins to make concrete the idea of logic provided by the first.

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.

In this article I develop an interpretation of the opening passages of Hegel's essay ‘With what must the beginning of science be made?’ I suggest firstly that Hegel is engaging there with a distinctive problem, the overcoming of which he understands to be necessary in order to guarantee the scientific character of the derivation of the fundamental categories of thought which he undertakes in the Science of Logic. I refer to this as ‘the problem of beginning’. I proceed to clarify the nature of the problem, which I understand to be motivated by a concern to avoid arbitrariness, and then to detail the nature of Hegel's proposed solution, which turns on understanding how the concept of ‘pure being’, understood in a specific sense to be both mediated and immediate, avoids the concerns about arbitrariness which accompany attempts to begin merely with something mediated, or merely with something immediate. On this basis, I offer a number of criticisms of alternative approaches to the beginning of Hegel's Logic.

The accounts of social freedom offered by G. W. F. Hegel and Axel Honneth identify the normative demands on social institutions and explain how individual freedom is realized through rational participation in such institutions. While both offer normative reconstructions of the market economy, public sphere and family, they both derive the norms of educational institutions from education’s role in preparing people for participation in other institutions. We argue that this represents a significant defect in their accounts of social freedom because they both fail to account for the distinctive aims and norms of education. Only educational institutions bring individuals into a both shared and autonomous standpoint necessary for participation in social life. We thus argue both that Hegel’s and Honneth’s accounts are empirically inadequate and that they neglect the normative demands on schools to contribute to individual moral and intellectual development.

In the Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel states that ‘philosophy … contains the sceptical as a moment within itself — specifically as the dialectical moment’ (§81, Addition 2), and that ‘scepticism’ as ‘the dialectical moment itself is an essential one in the affirmative Science’ (§78). On the one hand, the connection between scepticism and dialectic is obvious. Hegel claims that scepticism is a problem that cannot be just removed from the philosophical agenda by knock-down anti-sceptical arguments. Scepticism intrinsically belongs to philosophical thinking; that is to say, it plays a constructive role in philosophical thinking. On the other hand, scepticism has to be construed as the view according to which we cannot know whether our beliefs are true, i.e., scepticism plays a destructive role in philosophy no matter what. It is particularly this role that clashes with Hegel's claim of having established a philosophical system of true cognition of the entirety of reality. In the following I argue that for Hegel the constructive and the destructive role of scepticism are reconcilable. I specifically argue that it is dialectic that makes both consistent since scepticism is a constitutive element of dialectic.

In order to show in what sense scepticism is an intrinsic feature of dialectic I begin by sketching Hegel's early view of scepticism specifically with respect to logic and metaphysics. The young Hegel construes logic as a philosophical method of human cognition that inevitably results in ‘sceptical’ consequences in that it illustrates the finiteness of human understanding. By doing so, logic not only nullifies finite understanding but also introduces to metaphysics, i.e., the true philosophical science of the absolute.

One of the more surreal moments in Kierkegaard's journals involves a scene from the Underworld. Hegel has been reading Trendelenburg's Logical Investigations, and goes over to Socrates to complain. Alas, the conversation has trouble getting off the ground:

Socr.: Should we begin by being altogether in disagreement, or should we agree on something we could call a presupposition?…. What do you presuppose as your starting-point?

H.: Nothing at all.

Socr: That's quite something! So perhaps you don't start at all?

H.: I not start, I who have written 21 volumes?

Socr: Ye gods, what a hecatomb you have offered!

H.: But I start from nothing.

Socr.: Is that not something?

H.: No – on the contrary. That first makes its appearance in the conclusion of the whole, in the course of which I discuss science, world history etc.

Socr.: How might I be able to master this difficult task for many remarkable things may well be included which would show up my stupidity… You know that I did not even allow Polos to talk more than 5 minutes at a time, and you want to talk XXI volumes.

Kant's philosophy is generally known as transcendental philosophy or transcendental idealism, terms often thought to describe the inquiry into the subjective conditions of empirical knowledge carried out in the Critique of Pure Reason. On this conception of transcendental philosophy Kant is seen to pursue a project very different from both Wolffian metaphysics and Hegelian speculative science. This view is confirmed by scholars who compare Kant's conception of transcendental philosophy to the Scholastics' conception of ‘transcendentals’ such as unity, truth, and perfection. On their account, there remains a puzzling gap between, on the one hand, the scholastic conception of the most general determinations of all beings and, on the other hand, Kant's investigation into the conditions of possibility of experience.

In this article I want to challenge this common view of Kant's transcendental philosophy for two reasons. The first reason concerns the question of how the Critique of Pure Reason itself should be read. I take the view that in the first Critique Kant's primary aim is to determine the conditions of synthetic a priori knowledge rather than to identify the a priori conditions of empirical knowledge. Since metaphysics was traditionally considered to be the discipline that possessed a priori knowledge of things, this view makes good sense of Kant's presentation of the Critique of Pure Reason as a work intended to transform metaphysics into a science. In this article I hope to clarify the nature of this transformation by determining the elements which Kant's transcendental philosophy has in common with Wolff's ontology, as well as the respects in which Kant turns against Wolff. I thus hope to solve some of the riddles posed by Kant's use of the term ‘transcendental philosophy’ in the Critique of Pure Reason.

“Qu'est-ce qui cloche dans le système, qu'est-ce qui boite? La question est aussi boiteuse et ne fait pas question. Ce qui déborde le système, c'est l'impossibilité de son échec, comme l'impossibilité de la réussite: finalement on n'en peut rien dire, et il y a une manière de se taire (le silence lacunaire de l'écriture) qui arrête le système, le laissant désoeuvré, Iivré au sérieux de l'ironie.”

Glas is a tour de force of Hegel scholarship. Although primarily concerned with the Philosophy of Right and the Phenomenology of Spirit, Derrida also offers detailed discussions of The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, the First Philosophy of Spirit of 1803-4, the 1803 essay Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, the Lectures on Aesthetics and the introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. In addition - and this list is not exhaustive - there are discussions of and references to the Logic, the Encyclopaedia, the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, the Differenzschrift, Faith and Knowledge, and abundant quotations from Hegel's correspondence.

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”.

“Reading the morning paper is a kind of realistic morning prayer”

Hegel's best known treatment of the European Enlightenment (in his Phänomenologie des Geistes) singles out the problem of religious faith, or the new, modern struggle between insight and faith, between enlightenment and what its defenders saw as mere “superstition”.

This treatment is distinctive and on the face of it highly controversial. For one thing, while the topic is simply announced as die Aufklärung, Hegel makes no attempt at a comprehensive survey. Bacon, Swift, Smith and the British seem to play no discernable role; oddly, neither do Lessing or Mendelssohn or the German, “Berlin” Enlightenment. If there is a focus in these highly typological and categorial distinctions, it is clearly le siècle du lumière, not die Aufklärung or the Battle of the Books; if there is a representative figure, it is unquestionably Diderot; if there is a theme, it is ethical and broadly normative, not scientific or even political.