The topic that I wish to consider is the significance, both systematic and historical, for Kant's system as a whole, of the postulates of pure practical reason, more specifically, of the two theological postulates concerning the existence of God and personal immortality which form the basis of Kant's moral theology. My discussion will focus on the problems of Kant's moral theology in the eyes of his early contemporaries, for whom it constituted a crux in Kant's project. Different views were taken by Kant's contemporaries of what exactly these problems signified regarding the future of Critical philosophy. For the thinkers I will be looking at here, the miscarriage of the moral theology constituted a fatal fault in the Kantian project. For the German Idealists, the moral theology instead provided a vital clue as to how the Kantian system could be transformed into a more radical idealism, while confirming that it needed to be. The role of the practical postulates in the development of German Idealism demands a separate treatment; what I will argue here is simply that the practical postulates do indeed represent a point at which Kant's philosophical system displays a deep and interesting tension, in light of which both historical responses are prima facie intelligible.

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.

In ‘Le puits et la pyramide’, Jacques Derrida critiques the way in which Hegel privileges speech over writing at Encyclopedia §459. He traces that privileging back to Hegel's teleologically motivated view of time as the sublation of space, which he takes in turn to be motivated by Hegel's concern, as a metaphysical thinker, for validating and securing the philosophical dream of “full presence”. This, on Hegelian terms, involves subjecting the “materiality” of space to the “ideality” of time.

Perhaps surprisingly, Hegel himself openly concedes Derrida's first two points. By limiting his discussion of language in the Encyclopedia to consideration of its function as a vehicle for the expression of representations, Hegel requires himself to discuss the relative merits of spoken and written utterances, an issue which he then argues out in favour of the former. Within the written domain, alphabetic and hieroglyphic writing must also be compared, and it is hardly astonishing that Hegel should view the key contrast between the two as that of the temporality inherent in alphabetic speech, which captures sound, as opposed to the spatiality of hieroglyphics, which exist only as inscriptions.

Hegel's privileging of speech over writing is thus no mere slip; it is a whole set of consciously elaborated arguments, undertaken for specifically stated reasons. This casts doubt on the third of Derrida's points above: is Derrida mistaking the purpose of a specific discussion for the motivating force of teleology in general? Is Hegel's openly conceded privileging of spoken over written language justified by something other than a teleology dictated by an unexamined metaphysical preference for “full presence”?

Readers of Auguste Comte's Cours de Philosophie positive which began to appear just before Hegel's death might well have imagined, from the work's title, that they were about to confront an interpretation of Hegel's philosophical system. If Hegel himself had assembled his writings as systematically as his doctrines, that collective title would probably have embraced their meaning with greater accuracy than any other. The positivity of Comte's philosophy was of course strikingly different from Hegel's and was in a crucial sense meant to supplant it, replacing it with a genuinely scientific understanding of society, just as metaphysics had earlier overturned theology. Over the past hundred and fifty years or so, Comte's positive philosophy – which he also termed sociology – has in its various formulations by his disciples come to encapsulate the proper agenda of the human sciences for a post-metaphysical, post-Hegelian, age.

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.

This article explores the writings of Ludwig Heinrich Jakob and Johann Benjamin Erhard, two young Kantians who produced original defences of resistance and revolution during the 1790's. Comparing these two neglected philosophers reveals a crucial divergence in the liberal theory of revolution between a perspective that emphasises resistance by the individual and another that emphasises revolution by the nation. The article seeks to contribute to a more nuanced view of the political theory of the German Enlightenment, which has often been presented as excessively obedient to authority.

The historian Charles Ingrao repeated a common perception when, in an article on enlightened absolutism, he speculated that, ‘the German's greater acceptance of authority both then and now may be rooted in their own distinctive national culture’ (Ingrao 1986: 165). This idea of the obedient German has been promoted especially by those who seek cultural explanations for the authoritarian bent of German society in the 20th century (such as Mandt 1974 and Lepenies 2006). But the idea has a longer history. Herder described Germany as the land of obedience, and Kant wrote that, ‘in keeping with their penchant for law and order, they [the Germans] will rather submit to despotic treatment than venture on innovations (especially wilful reforms of government)’ (Kant 1974: AA 7: 318). By ‘wilful reforms of government’ Kant meant revolution. Madame de Staël later observed that Germans ‘join the greatest boldness of thought to the most obedient character’ (Staël Holstein 1813: 35). As Frederick Beiser has shown, this view, which was repeated by Heine and Marx, came to dominate the historiography (Beiser 1992: 7).

This paper elaborates Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘war machine’ in relation to key theses in Hegel’s political philosophy, with the aim of showing how it illuminates the conditions under which politics and political institutions as Hegel understands them both emerge and are compromised. After first introducing the idea of the war machine and its appropriation by discussing it in relation to Carl Schmitt’s theory of partisan warfare, it examines both the war machine and Hegel’s theory of the State by way of a focus on Hegel’s discussions of drive (Trieb) and semblance (Schein). Regarding the first, the paper explores how both Hegel and Deleuze and Guattari conceive of social structure in terms of a structure of drives even while they differ in their understandings of the drives in relation to desire and subjectivity. Regarding the second, the paper explores how moments of semblance identified by Hegel as he develops his system of Right reveal points where the war machine can emerge from within State structures. The paper argues that the war machine concept challenges understandings of politics built on friend/enemy antagonisms and the use of external conflict to secure internal unity, the former being Schmitt’s explicit political project and the second being the place at which Hegel’s project ultimately finds itself when it fails to secure the rational structure of Ethical Life.

This article argues that the citizens of Hegel's state cannot maintain themselves as politically free because they are susceptible to mutual enslavement. I demonstrate this by focusing on the Roman republican background of Hegel's constitution, the potential trajectory of its dissolution and the accompanying means of its cyclical fortification through courage. Hegel, by integrating aspects of the Roman mixed constitution also adopts the idea of decadence within his conception of civil society. After locating the source of decadence in the contractual relations of peace and the bourgeois inability to overcome the fear of death, I go on to argue that war for Hegel provides a theatre where freedom may be regenerated through courage. However, I also show that modern wars do not provide sufficient means of perpetuating Hegel's constitution. To demonstrate this, I distinguish three forms of war: colonial, limited and total war, arguing that only the latter offers a solution to decay of political disposition and loss of freedom, but that—by being itself susceptible to decadence—it cannot salvage Hegel's state from dissolution and reduction to contractual relations.

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

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

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.

For reasons of space only the first half of the article on T.M. Knox appears in this issue, of the Bulletin. The second half, dealing with his translating activities and Hegelian scholarship, will appear in the Spring/Summer 1901 issue.

The author wishes to thank warmly Mr. Andrew M. Knox and the many contemporaries, friends and colleagues of T.M. Knox for the valuable information they have kindly given him. He is also much obliged to Mr. Robert Smart, the Keeper of the Muniments at St. Andrews University Library, for his unfailing help in consulting the Knox papers in the Library, and for the kind loan of material for the Knox exhibition in September 1980. Mr. Andrew Knox's loan of his brother's photographs for the exhibition was also much appreciated. Thanks are due to Pembroke College, Oxford for a research qrant towards preparing this study.

To say that Hegel's position on the relationship between religion and state is not easy to categorise would be a vast understatement. Eluding comfortable labels, his ideas on the subject diverge from historically prevalent conceptions, which together are often thought to be exhaustive. On the one hand, Hegel's position contrasts sharply with theocratic doctrines that propose a simple identity of political and religious institutions, or subjugate the former to the latter. Almost equally distant from Hegel's position, however, are liberal and Enlightenment views that urge the complete separation of religion from secular authority and mundane politics.

This tension is characteristic of many of Hegel's writings on the subject, from the earliest to die most mature. On numerous occasions, Hegel voices his vehement opposition to the notion of a radical split between religion and the ‘ethical’ (sittlich) institutions of political power. In an early fragment from 1798 he writes, ‘if the principle of the state is a complete totality, then church and state cannot possibly be unrelated’, and similar sentiments are voiced in many other writings, including Hegel's very last lectures on the Philosophy of Religion from 1831. Yet, at other junctures he contends, rather, that only ‘in despotism church and state are one’. Of all Hegel's extended discussions of the subject, one — in the Remark and Addition to §270 of the Philosophy of Right — lays emphasis on the cleft between church and state; others — in §552 of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Third Edition), the aforementioned 1831 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, and the final sections of the Philosophy of History — seem, on the contrary, to stress the essential and eventual unity of religious and political life. To reconcile such seemingly contradictory views within a coherent position (even a dialectically coherent one) and salvage Hegel's position from the muddle of apparent contradictions and oblique formulations is therefore a challenge.

Hegel's Philosophy of Right is more than a major work of political and legal philosophy; it is a battleground for two different interpretive approaches. My Hegel's Political Philosophy: A Systematic Reading of the Philosophy of Right argues that these approaches are mistaken about their differences and that one approach offers a more compelling interpretation of Hegel's Philosophy of Right than the other. I will briefly outline my defence of the systematic reading of the Philosophy of Right before replying to the constructive criticisms raised by Redding, Rosen and Wood.

There are two different interpretative approaches to understanding Hegel's Philosophy of Right. These are the metaphysical and the non-metaphysical readings. The former often highlight Hegel's insistence that some political states may be considered more ‘true’ or ‘actual’ than others. This reading also often emphasises the special place of religion in Hegel's philosophical system, for example. In contrast, the non-metaphysical reading argues that such an interpretation is not only unattractive, but perhaps even unnecessary because Hegel's views on ‘actuality’ and ‘actualization’ are less controversial than traditional metaphysical readings of Hegel's philosophy have claimed. Commentators must choose between these competing camps and interpretations of Hegel's work are conceived within these approaches. Importantly, each reading claims that its approach best captures Hegel's philosophical importance. But would Hegel endorse either the metaphysical or non-metaphysical reading?

The problem is that this debate rests on a central misconception about Hegel's philosophy. The debate is characterized as a disagreement about the role and perhaps the very existence of metaphysics in Hegel's philosophy. But this is a false impression. It is virtually nowhere in doubt that metaphysics is present in Hegel's philosophy, including his Philosophy of Right. Therefore, the debate between a ‘metaphysical’ and ‘non-metaphysical’ reading of Hegel's works is not a debate about whether these works contain metaphysics. The characterization of the debate invites a false impression about what is at stake.

The aim of this essay is to cast light on the puzzling transition from logic to nature that is stated at the end of Hegel's Science of Logic. The passage is summed up by the famous intriguing sentence about the absolute idea freely resolving to let itself go.

Firstly, I shall sketch the, so to speak, “divine” features of the absolute philosophical knowing that is to be developed in the Encyclopaedia system. My point is to account for the relationship between the standpoint reached by the Phenomenology of Spirit and the content of the Logic, regarded as the presentation of God as he is in his eternal essence.

Secondly, I shall focus attention on the way in which the developed idea of philosophical knowing is systematically displayed in the Encyclopaedia. My point is now to account for: i) the mutual relationships among the three parts of philosophical science (science of logic, philosophy of nature, philosophy of spirit); and ii) the relationship between these parts and the whole of philosophy.

Thirdly, I shall examine the two main and opposite standard interpretations of the transition from the first to the second part of the Encyclopaedia. My point here is to challenge the conceptual presuppositions of the readings under consideration, by means of a close examination of the revised editions of Hegel's text.

Fourthly, I shall argue for a different view. My last point is to focus on the character of the absolute idea's self-determination. It involves letting the determination of the distinction exist as something independent, so that the “other” obtains the determinacy of “other-being”, of an actual entity. Therefore it must be distanced from the divine way of generating (the Father-Son relationship) that is the form of love. I shall conclude by discussing the implications of Hegel's use of the notion of “creation” and his paradoxical definition of nature as being the Son and not the Son of God.

This article discusses Kant's transcendental idealism in relation to his perplexing use of ‘body’ and related terms in Prolegomena §13. Here Kant admits the existence of bodies external to us, although unknown as what they might be in themselves. It is argued that we need to distinguish between a phenomenal and a noumenal use of ‘body’ to make sense of Kant's argument. The most important recent discussions of this passage, i.e., Prauss (1977), Langton (1998) and Bird (2006), are presented and shown to suffer from both systematic and exegetical shortcomings. The article is a contribution to understanding the nature of Kant's transcendental idealism, defending the view, especially against Prauss and Bird, that Kant is committed to the existence of things in themselves.

This article puts forward a philosophical interpretation of Bettina von Arnim's epistolary book Die Günderode, in the following stages. First I situate von Arnim's work in relation to women's participation in early German Romanticism and idealism. The ideal of Symphilosophie, which was integral to Romantic epistemology, created possibilities for women to participate in philosophical discussion, albeit not on equal terms with men. This suggested that perhaps Symphilosophie between women could be more equal and reciprocal. However, interpreters have considered the Sym- in Günderrode and von Arnim's Symphilosophie more than the -philosophie, whereas here I foreground Die Günderode's rich philosophical content. I trace the stages in the unfolding dialogue between Günderrode and von Arnim and identify von Arnim's philosophical standpoint as it emerges from this dialogue. For Günderrode, finite beings are attracted together and can only fully unite by dying and superseding their boundaries. This feeds into a gigantic cosmic process through which the earth spiritualizes itself, progressively transcending its own materiality. Von Arnim likewise thinks that all finite beings are dynamically interconnected within the earth's creative process. But, unlike Günderrode, von Arnim thinks that finite beings can realize their interconnectedness within life without needing to die, which means in turn that material nature can rise into successive levels of spirit without its materiality having to be superseded. This metaphysical difference orchestrates many other philosophical disagreements between the two women. I then conclude that on balance, and with significant qualifications, Die Günderode embodies a successful Symphilosophie between women, but that von Arnim is simultaneously pointing out the fragility of Symphilosophie. The more independence dialogue partners have, the more liable they are to move away in new directions and abandon or outgrow the conversation, just as Günderrode turns away from von Arnim by the end of the book.

In his Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel affirms that truth is ‘usually’ understood as the agreement of thought with the object, but that in the ‘deeper, i.e. philosophical sense’, truth is the agreement of a content with itself or of an object with its concept. Hegel then provides illustrations of this second sort of truth: a ‘true friend’, a ‘true state’, a ‘true work of art’. Robert Stern has argued that Hegel's ‘deeper’ or ‘philosophical’ truth is close to what Heidegger labelled ‘material’ truth, namely a property attributed to a thing on the basis of the accordance of that thing with its essence. It has since been common to think of Hegel's concept of ‘philosophical’ truth as ‘ontological’, ‘objective’ or ‘material’ in contrast to ‘epistemological’ or ‘propositional’ definitions. In this paper, I wish to add an important nuance to the existing literature on this subject: even though things have a truth-value for Hegel, the latter is always negative. I argue that Hegel's criterion of ‘philosophical’ truth, which is best formulated as ‘agreement with self’, is first and foremost intended to examine the truth-value of thought-determinations. I then argue that even though this criterion may also be applied to examine the truth-value of things (namely, even though things have a truth-value), things never fall under this definition. After reviewing several of Hegel's explicit remarks on the matter, I provide an alternative explanation to those features of Hegel's ‘philosophical’ truth which have led scholars to view it as a truth in things. Especially, I argue that what are generally seen as Hegel's examples (‘true friend’, ‘true state’, ‘true work of art’) are not intended as examples but only as imperfect illustrations of ‘philosophical’ truth.

Both Marx, the founding father of what later came to be known as critical theory, and those who follow in his footsteps, regard critical theory as distinctive in that it will combine the critically normative dimension of traditional philosophy with the strict attentiveness to given facts (to “the real … material world”) definitive of modern empirical science. Critical theory contends that its unique fusion of science and philosophy will overcome their respective defects, correcting both the uncritical passivity of natural science and the speculative utopianism of philosophy. By so doing, it promises to give birth to a new kind of theory with emancipatory power.

Critical theorists from Marx to Habermas also see a thoroughgoing critique of Hegel as decisive for a critical theory. In their view, whatever insights Hegel may otherwise have provided, his philosophy is irreparably flawed because of its methodological commitment to a speculative method which cuts theory loose from reality and leads it to a distorted, mystically idealistic view of the human condition which is at once both Utopian and quietistic. According to critical theorists, Hegel's fundamental theoretical error lay in privileging the ideal over the real; because he does that, he is unable to get reality right. Consequently, he can neither comprehend freedom properly, as a normatively critical concept, nor understand the real conditions for freedom inherent in the status quo.

The essay aims to reveal the priority of the ‘social’ over the ‘political’ in Bosanquet's thought by making more prominent what Bosanquet calls ‘social’. It is the domain of human connectedness and cooperation that occupies the space between the ‘political’, state action, and the personal, narrowly conceived individual. The centrality of the ‘social’ emerges against the backdrop of two rival interpretations of Bosanquet's relationship with British Idealism over state action. The one claims that Green's split into ‘right’ (Bosanquet) and ‘left’ (Ritchie). The other interpretation restores unity, denying that the right-left divide introduces fundamental differences into the Idealist camp. Though not a laissez-faire individualist, Bosanquet's restrictive stance on state action with regard to the poor reveals, I argue, ‘social individualism’. Best expressed in his prioritizing of ‘social cooperative action’ over state action, at the heart of social individualism lies a conceptual-normative nexus between self-maintaining, self-managing, self-governing individuals and social cooperation.