“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.

The Science of Logic is perhaps Hegel's most notoriously impenetrable work. Despite well over a century of commentaries as well as the recent proliferation of scholarship, there exists little agreement concerning the text, whether with regard to particular details or the project of speculative logic in general. Nonetheless, the Logic has often been regarded as exemplifying totalizing metaphysics at its worst. Contemporary philosophers concerned with overcoming metaphysics have thus sought to show not only the incoherence of speculative logic but also the perils of Hegel's supposedly totalizing philosophy.

In contrast, showing the continuity between Kant and Hegel has been the strategy for establishing a ‘non-metaphysical’ view of Hegel's speculative logic. Against readings of Hegel as a metaphysical monist who defends the reality of the Absolute Idea developing in nature and spirit, speculative logic is presented as the absolute-idealist successor to Kantian transcendental logic. Hegel's speculative logic is an ‘idealist logic’, since it aims at expounding the conditions necessary for the determinacy of any possible object of thought. Speculative logic thus clarities that experience is dependent on non-empirical concepts and, ultimately, on selfconsciousness. Along this interpretative line, Hegel's Science of Logic offers an account of thinking as a norm-based activity, and of concepts as rules for fixing determinacy. The great insight of Hegel's Logic is, on this view, twofold. First, Hegel's notion of the concept [der Begriff] is understood as a holistic-inferential system of logical concepts, since it provides an account of conceptual content as determined by every other possible content. Second, Hegel's analysis of the actualization of the concept — of the concept that has ‘made itself the foundation’, in Hegel's obscure phrasing — provides an account of the fundamental role of authority involved in the process of fixing determinacy. To be bound to a rule is to acknowledge it as having authority over us and at the same time to institute it as authoritative over the states of affairs that we seek to determine. That Hegel spoke of the freedom of the concept is, therefore, crucial. It suggests that determinacy is ultimately a matter of the authorization of reason, of establishing one way of fixing intelligibility over against others.

According to a well-known statement in Hegel's Encyclopaedia, what differentiates the philosophy of nature from physics is ‘the kind of metaphysics used by them both’ (W9: §246Z: 20, N: 11). In the same vein, recent scholarship has stressed that Hegel criticises the logical procedures and metaphysical presuppositions of the working scientist's activity, taking issue with their lack of awareness about the mental categories they use and the alleged consistency of their way of arguing. Put rather more critically, it is often claimed that Hegel's concerns were purely philosophical, and that he never entered into genuinely scientific debate. Unlike Schelling, who engaged in scientific debate, Hegel is thought to have confined himself to observing and judging it, demonstrating his ability to grasp its main features, on the basis of which later to build his philosophy of nature.

To combat the old tradition of negative assessment of Hegel's relation to the empirical sciences, which saw it as aprioristic, dogmatic, misleading and ill-informed, the editors of the critical edition of the Phenomenology retrace some of the contemporary scientific sources for Hegel's objections to description and classification in the natural sciences, and document his appreciation of new developments in electricity and chemistry. Through a primarily historical approach, Hegel's critical remarks on the attempt to fix laws for organic forces (sensibility, irritability, reproduction) and his critique of the scientific status of physiognomy and phrenology, all of which elucidate his allusions in ‘Observing Reason’, are shown to be rooted in contemporary scientific debates. Recendy, however, it has been contended that this kind of scholarship that identifies Hegel's active engagement with the science of his time, ‘tend[s] to reduce the text to a document for historians of nineteenth-century science’ (Stone 2005: xv). In Italy, a scholar has also made a subtle case for his claim that, in contrast to his mature system, Hegel's confrontation with the natural sciences in the Phenomenology is essentially and necessarily critical, aiming to reveal the partiality, one-sidedness, and inadequacy of forms of cognitive approach typical of the natural sciences, and that it forms part of Hegel's dissolution of all of consciousness's forms of externality.

In the popular press and the halls of politics, controversies over evolution are increasingly strident these days. Hegel is relevant in this connection, even though he rejected the theories of evolution he knew about, because he wants rational understanding and a larger process to comprehend natural processes and their history, but without any claims for intelligent design. The way current debates get publicised, there appear to be two extreme positions. The first is a reductionist materialism: all complex systems are describable purely in terms of the qualities of their most basic components, and the systems themselves result from Darwinian selection. No teleological concepts at all need be applied. At the other extreme is total teleology; all systems and their interactions and development are the result of preconceived conscious purposeful design by a powerful designer. The ontological status of the designer is usually filled out with theological notions.

L'Avenir de Hegel [Hegel's Future] is the title of the book I published in 1996 and which bears the subtitle: “Plasticité, Temporalité, Dialectique” [Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectics]. I intend to examine here the kind of reading of Hegel put to work in that book. I must add that l'Avenir de Hegel, before becoming a book, was the title of my doctoral thesis undertaken under the supervision of Jacques Derrida with whom I have been working for many years now. A question emerged recently which I had never considered until now, at least not so directly, so simply: can the interpretation of Hegel that I attempt to elaborate be qualified, immediately and without reservation, as a “deconstructive reading”?

This presupposes, of course, that one can define what a deconstructive reading is. Although Derrida, as we know, refuses to consider deconstruction as a constituted theory from which one could extract axioms and formalize the method, it is nonetheless possible, as I shall attempt to do here, to describe the process of a deconstructive reading.

In writing l'Avenir de Hegel, I had present in my mind the exegetical imperative set out in Of Grammatology under the heading of a “task of reading”: Derrida asserts, “The reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness or of force, but a signifying structure that critical reading should produce” (De la Grammatologie, p. 227; tr. Spivak, p. 158).

I will ask precisely: what does it mean to produce or open a reading, a reading which protects the text in order better to expose or endanger it?

In making “plasticity” (Plastizität) play a major role in Hegel's thought, I undertook to respond to the demands of this “task of reading”. In doing so, I nonetheless discovered, under the very title of plasticity itself, a resistance of the Hegelian text to its own deconstruction. I shall thus have to specify this resistance at the same time as I develop the program of the task of reading.

A recently widely accepted view has it that the nature-spirit distinction in Hegel is to be understood as a distinction between a space or realm that is not normative, or does not involve norms, and one that is or does. Notwithstanding the merits of this view, it has tended to create a separation between nature and spirit which is both philosophically troubling and difficult to reconcile with the picture of Hegel as the arch enemy of abstract or unreconciled dualisms. In this paper I aim to show that the defining phenomenon for this view—collective self-government by norms—is on Hegel's account both dependent on living nature that involves normativity broadly conceived all the way down and also subject to the ultimate normative or evaluative principle of Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit—concrete freedom—the essence of spirit according to him. This is to say that for Hegel the normativity of collectively administered norms is neither the most basic nor the highest form of normativity.

Hegel's Science of Logic achieves its conclusion with a chapter on the ‘absolute Idea’ that parallels the ending of other works such as the ‘absolute Knowing’ chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the ‘absolute Spirit’ chapter of the Encyclopedia. However, the ending of the Logic claims special systematic attention due to the fact that Hegel presents here the ‘discourse on method’ of his philosophy. The method of philosophy — of philosophical thinking and philosophical knowing — is the method of speculative logic. This logic “takes the place” of the old metaphysics — of the traditional metaphysica generalis and metaphysica specialis — going beyond Kant's own critique and proposing a new science that establishes itself as the “eigentliche Metaphysik”. The project of concluding this new speculative metaphysics with a theory of method is complicated by the double systematic placing that Hegel attributes to his logic which, at the same time, figures as the very first and very last science of the whole system of philosophy. In this perspective, the absolute Idea of the Logic gains its double relation to the phenomenological ‘absolute knowing’ and to the highest moment of ‘absolute spirit’.

The article aims to show that Priest wrongly associates Hegel’s dialectic with his dialetheism. Even if Priest correctly argues that the notion of contradiction in Hegel’s logic is a logical one and that contradiction is meant to be true, Hegel goes a long way beyond Priest’s dialetheism insofar as he is not committed to a dialetheist conception of a three truth-values logic. I start my analysis with a brief introductory overview of the dialetheist’s thesis of the truth of contradiction. Then, in the first part of the article, I show that Hegel’s notion of contradiction can be equated with a logical contradiction and that Hegel argues that some contradictions are true. In the second part of the paper I show that Hegel’s thesis of the truth of contradiction is different from Priest’s, because Hegel endorses a developmental conception of truth which allows him to account for complex and dynamic properties of reality in a way that Priest’s does not allow.

This article highlights the importance of new research on women philosophers and addresses some methodological issues to be taken in consideration. The thesis presented here is that through this new line of research it is possible to analyse the close connection between philosophy, politics and institutions. The paper opens with a critique of the assumption that philosophy has until recently been the exclusive property of men, giving the example of some forgotten women philosophers who lived in Hegel's time. After considering the risk of ghettoization inherent in Women's Studies, the author closes by showing how the reconsideration of women philosophers can help to question the methodology and the status of philosophy in general, and in particular to question the philosophical canon. The text serves as an introduction to a special issue of the Hegel Bulletin dedicated to women philosophers in Hegel's time.

In his treatment of subjective mind, Hegel argues that the development that characterizes the vital process of a human individual is logically unique in that it dissolves the contradiction between two logical determinations that characterize any vital activity: the contradiction between the ‘immediate singularity’ of the subject of this process and its ‘abstract generality’. Hegel employs the term Bildung to characterize any vital activity that has this form. The idea that the distinction between human life and non-human life is a logical distinction is one of the main lessons that Hegel thinks we should learn from Aristotle's treatment of the idea of life. In this article I distinguish between two contemporary varieties of this Aristotelian idea: a sophisticated variety that emphasizes the idea of second nature in order to characterize the distinctiveness of the human, and a naive variety that thinks of the human's uniqueness in terms of characterizations that already belong to its first nature. I argue that Hegel is neither sophisticated nor naive but offers a third variety of Neo-Aristotelianism that solves the difficulties of the other two. This has decisive consequences for his understanding of Bildung. Although the notion of Bildung describes an empirical process, Hegel argues, it is not an empirical concept. Rather, it is the concrete concept of the process of actualization that characterizes a self-conscious form of life that reflects the inner temporality of this form's actuality.

Famously, by launching analytic philosophy Moore and Russell revolted against British Idealism, with Hegel tossed in for good measure. In 1923 Russell declared:

To Russell, the philosophical headmaster of the Eighteenth Century was Hume, not Kant. Russell sought to dispatch rationalism with his logically sophisticated empiricism, based on ‘knowledge by acquaintance’: the non-conceptual apprehension of simples. He sought to dispatch Hegel in particular by condemning his alleged conflation of the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication.

The battle lines thus drawn between analytic philosophy and (especially) Hegel's philosophy have had deep, lasting and very unfortunate consequences in the field. Hence it is all the more tragic that neither of Russell's criticisms of Hegel is sound. Sense Certainty presumes that the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication are the same, or rather, that it can dispense with predication and hence with any predicative use of ‘is’. Hegel accepts Sense Certainty's presumption as a premise in his reductio ad absurdum argument against sense certainty. Thus Hegel shares rather than denies Russell's thesis about the two senses of ‘is’. However, Hegel further argues that predication is required in order to identify any particular one presumes to know. In this way, Hegel refutes Russell's ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ just over a century in advance.

The apparent implications of the latest findings of the life sciences for our freedom and autonomy are both exciting and controversial: They undermine a common view of human freedom: a fundamentally Cartesian view. A superior account of our freedom was developed by Kant and Hegel. Key features of Hegel's account show that we can expect from the life sciences further insights into the biological basis of our freedom and autonomy, but not their repudiation. I begin with basic features of Cartesian self-transparency (II) and then review three findings of contemporary life sciences (III). I then detail key features of Hegel's anti-Cartesianism (IV), in order to formulate the basic question about our freedom posed by the claim that biology explains away human freedom (V). I criticize this biological determinism by drawing upon Hegel's account of human freedom as autonomy (VI), and comment briefly on biologism in moral theory (VII).

In this paper, I shall focus on the relation between habitual body and memory in Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Both Hegel and Merleau-Ponty defend a view of the self that is centred on the role of habituality as embodied activity situated in a context. However, both philosophers avoid committing to what Edward Casey has defined habitual body memory, i.e., an active immanence of the past in the body that informs present bodily actions in an efficacious, orienting and regular manner. I shall explore the reasons why neither Hegel nor Merleau-Ponty develops an explicit account of habitual body memory. This will shed light not only on Hegel’s account of lived experience, but also on Hegel and Merleau-Ponty’s common concern with the habitual body.

The Great Financial Crisis that broke in 2008 and the Great Recession that followed has led many to question the very structure of contemporary economies. Some argue that the economic model of the past forty years is now broken. Criticism has also been directed at the orthodoxies of economics. For example, neoclassical equilibrium economics, the mainstream economics of the day, is accused of failing to understand some of the most basic aspects of the modern economy (debt and money), of supporting policies that have led to the economic breakdown (deregulation), and of failing to see the crisis coming (Bezemer 2012, Keen 2011). Consequently, heterodox thinking in economics is getting a hearing as never before. Heterodox economics offers itself as the requisite radical reconstruction of the science of economics and also proposes policies for the radical reconstruction of the major economics.

Yet to talk of the reconstruction of the modern market economy is at the same time to raise the ethical question: what shape ought the market economy to take? Heterodox economics may acutely analyse the inadequacies of real economies and propose plausible reforms, but as an essentially descriptive science there will be limits on its ability to state what ought to be. Rather, what is required seems to be a systematic prescriptive ethics. In other words, recent events in the world of economics have provided an opening for what ethical philosophy should be best at providing. Determining whether a specific ethical philosophy, to be identified shortly, has the capacity to address the questions raised by heterodox economics is the task of this paper.

In this paper it is argued that the conceptions of embodied meaning and of intuition that Hegel appeals to in the Aesthetics anticipate some of Merleau-Ponty’s insights concerning the distinctive character of pre-conceptual, sensuous forms of meaning. It is argued that, for Hegel, our aesthetic experience of the beautiful is such that we cannot readily differentiate in it the purportedly distinct roles that sensation and thought play, and so that the account of sensuous intuition operative here differs from the one appealed to in more familiar, ‘intellectualist’ conceptions that are premised upon our being able to make such a distinction. Some of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights are brought to bear to help support and illuminate some of the implications of Hegel’s conception of such sensuously embodied meaning.

It is generally held that 19th and early 20th century British Idealism was fundamentally Hegelian in character and the term ‘the British Hegelians’ has long been in common usage. Yet, particularly in recent years, it has been argued that some of the most influential British idealists were not Hegelians at all. T H Green may still be an idealist, and F H Bradley an ‘absolute idealist’ but, despite traces of Hegelian vocabulary or principles in their work, several scholars now hold that neither ought to be considered a disciple of Hegel. One might well wonder whether this is also true of Bernard Bosanquet, who has generally been regarded as the most Hegelian of the major idealists.

It is unlikely that Bosanquet would be offended in being called a Hegelian. In his metaphysics, his political philosophy and, particularly, his logic, Bosanquet draws on Hegel's insights and arguments. He saw his work as indebted to Hegel (specifically, to a tradition that traced its roots through Hegel, back to Kant, Rousseau and, ultimately, Plato) and, at the beginning of his philosophical career, Bosanquet criticised F H Bradley's logic for not having respected the principles laid out by Hegel beforehand. It is no surprise, then, that Bosanquet described Hegel as one of the two “great masters who 'sketched the plan’” (the other being Kant).

Still, it is hard to say what, precisely, is it that makes an author a ‘Hegelian’. Is it the use of Hegel's categories and terminology? Is it that the author is explicitly indebted to Hegel? Is it that the author's work shows an allegiance to Hegel's conclusions and that he sees himself as, at most, completing and extending what Hegel did? One might also ask, what type of Hegelian we have in mind – there are ‘left Hegelians’, ‘right Hegelians’ and so on. Of course, in attempting to trace such an intellectual debt, one must, as far as possible, try to distinguish what is distinctively Hegelian from what is to be found in earlier authors, but taken up by Hegel.