Hegel uses the term Einsicht (‘insight’) throughout several key subsections of Chapter Six of the Phenomenology of Spirit (notably in ‘Faith and Pure Insight’ and ‘The Struggle of the Enlightenment with Superstition’). Nowhere else in his work does the term enjoy such a sustained treatment. Commentators generally accept Hegel’s use of the term in the Phenomenology as simply referring to the type of counter-religious reasoning found in the French Enlightenment. I show how Hegel derives the term, through the lens of Kant’s essay, ‘What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?’ from the Pantheismusstreit, the philosophical debate between Mendelssohn and Jacobi about knowledge of God. The Aufklärung provenance of Einsicht shows how a deep complicity between faith and reason, in the form of immediate knowing, leads beyond the Terror to a happier outcome in the Morality section. Finally, passing reference to Einsicht in the Vorbegriff of the Encyclopaedia Logic confirms its role in the ethical and political vocation of Hegel’s Science.

Hegel's lectures on aesthetics embrace the world history of art in its broadest sense, encompassing the advanced cultures of Asia, Egypt, and Mesopotamia as well as the specifically European tradition that extends from Classical Antiquity through to the art of the Nazarenes and the burgeoning Romanticism of his own day. This attempt to bring the different stages and forms of art into a coherent system and to tell the story of their successive unfolding from the standpoint of philosophy lies at the very heart of Hegel's aesthetics. Indeed, the detailed attention that Hegel pays to the historical development of art has led Ernst Gombrich to recognise him as the founding father of the modem discipline of art history, with all the ambivalence that this expression conveys. In this paper, however, I am concerned less with the way in which Hegel's aesthetics have informed, and continue to inform, our ongoing attempts to understand the art of the past than with the relevance that his ideas still possess in relation to the art of the present. I shall argue that Hegel's aesthetics can tell us a great deal about contemporary art and that, read in the right way, his views provide an important corrective to a significant strand of contemporary art theory.

This paper examines Hegel's view of the relationship of human rights and political membership. Attention is accorded the concept of a right to have rights, one famously thematized by Hannah Arendt but articulated already earlier by Hegel. The discussion has five parts. Part One considers how for Hegel a notion of political membership is entailed by the concept of right itself. Part Two examines the place occupied by modern civil society in a realised account of human rights. Part Three considers the challenges posed to realised right by the phenomenon of modern poverty and the experience of ‘rightlessness’ it occasions. Part Four details how Hegel's conception of the corporation addresses the phenomenon of rightlessness, taking into account his uniquely reflexive understanding of a right to have rights and its contribution to the project of the Philosophy of Right. The concluding section briefly compares Hegel's conception of membership rights to Arendt's.

To assert the primacy of objective spirit is to claim that certain distinctively human capacities, such as thinking and acting, are not capacities we have as individuals considered singly but are in some way dependent on shared public norms or social institutions. In this essay, I provide a brief history of arguments for the primacy of objective spirit from Hegel to the present, identifying three distinct strategies for defending this thesis: the teleological argument, the sociological argument and the quasi-transcendental argument. Although it has now become quite common to read Hegel as advancing a quasi-transcendental argument, one similar to the argument found in Wittgenstein’s famous remarks about ‘rule-following’, I show that Hegel’s most interesting claims about the social dimensions of human mindedness are incompatible with this strategy and can only be vindicated if he is read as offering a teleological argument.

Students of the Hegelian school must acknowledge an abiding debt to Ernst Barnikol. Upon his death in 1968, he left uncompleted a voluminous manuscript on Bruno Bauer, representing over forty years of research. Of this manuscript, conserved at the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, only a fraction has been published, but even this fraction, in its almost six hundred pages, continues to set standards in the field for meticulous scholarship, rigorous analysis, and balanced criticism. Barnikol's interests were primarily theological, though he recognised clearly that Bauer's religious critique was politically motivated. Barnikol also discovered, but did not publish, Bauer's 1829 Latin manuscript on Kant's aesthetics. This text, adjudicated by Hegel and awarded the Prussian royal prize in philosophy, had been deposited among Hegel's correspondence in the archives of the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. It was first published in 1996, in the original Latin, with German translation and commentary. In referring to his discovery, Barnikol made a substantive claim which must be disputed here, that Bauer's early text remained without influence on his subsequent work. Focusing on Bauer's depiction of art, and on the relation of art and religion as manifestations of spirit, we can trace lines of continuity and development in his thought, from his 1829 manuscript to his writings of 1841-42. The central idea of the early manuscript, a Hegelian conception of the unity of thought and being, is the key to deciphering the complex and elusive meaning of Bauer's critical theory in the Vormdrz.

In his essay What is living and what is dead of the philosophy of Hegel?, Benedetto Croce praises Hegel for bestowing the highest value on beauty, in particular artistic beauty. He emphasises Hegel's ‘tendency to make art a primary element in human life, a mode of knowledge and of spiritual elevation’, and the ‘constant contact of Hegelian speculation with taste and with works of art, and the dignity which it assigned to the artistic activity’ (Croce 1985: 121). This tendency, Croce writes, is what makes Hegelian speculation congenial to the great aesthetic theories of the Romantic period. In this paper, I shall put forward some considerations which render support to Croce's observation that there is a strand of unreserved and absolute appreciation of beauty, in particular artistic beauty, in Hegelian philosophy. My focus will be in particular on the question of why Hegel thinks that the experience of beauty — which I will be referring to, in short, as aesthetic experience — is of special, even absolute value for human beings. This will involve, in the first part of the paper, an analysis of what Hegel takes to be the content of such experience; hence an analysis of Hegel's notion of beauty.

Such emphasis on the absolute value of beauty invites of course the question of how beauty relates, in Hegel's system, to what Hegel regards as the highest value of all: reconciliation. Hegel believes that both philosophical speculation — which culminates in knowledge of the absolute truth — and the achievement of the highest practical good, the participation in civic life, are ways of reconciling the human individual with the world they live in. Does the same apply to beauty, or aesthetic experience? I will briefly touch on the relation between aesthetic experience and reconciliation in the second part of the paper. In this context, we will also consider an objection to the view that Hegel's appreciation of aesthetic experience is unrestricted or absolute, which arises from consideration of Hegel's famous claim that philosophy is higher than art.

Hegel famously criticizes Kant’s resolution of the antinomies. According to Sedgwick, Hegel primarily chastises Kant’s resolution for presupposing that concepts are ‘one-sided’, rather than identical to their opposites. If Kant had accepted the dialectical nature of concepts, then (according to Sedgwick) Kant would not have needed to resolve the antinomies. However, as Ameriks has noted, any such interpretation faces a serious challenge. Namely, Kant’s first antinomy concerns the universe’s physical dimensions. Even if we grant that the concept of the finite is necessarily related to that of the infinite, the physical universe cannot both have and lack a temporal beginning. I argue that Hegel neither adopts Sedgwick’s view that Kant’s antinomies require no resolution nor absurdly accepts that the physical universe both has and lacks a temporal beginning. Instead, Hegel proposes a sophisticated resolution of Kant’s first antinomy (including its physical aspect) that depends on Hegel’s theory of the Absolute.

Two concepts have polarized the philosophical debates on functions since the 1970s. One is Millikan's concept of ‘proper function’, meant to capture the aetiology of biological organs and artefacts. The other is Cummins's concept of ‘dispositional function’, designed to account for the real work that functional devices perform within a system. In this paper I locate Hegel's concept of biological function in the context of those debates. Admittedly, Hegel's concept is ‘etiological’, since in his account the existence of purposive organs is explained by appeal to their purpose, yet, against Millikan's concept, Hegel's does not presuppose the phenomenon of natural selection nor derives the function of tokens from the function of types. So, my aim is, first, to present Hegel's approach to biological functions as one neither purely etiological nor purely dispositional. It will appear rather as an example of an organizational account (as those advocated today by McLaughlin, Mossio and others), that attributes function according to present performances (unlike etiological accounts) and emphasizes the role of functional parts in their self-production within the system they belong to (unlike dispositional accounts). Finally, I briefly discuss how Hegel's concept performs against common objections to organizational accounts.

In Georges Bataille’s view, the Hegelian interpretation of kenotic sacrifice as passage from Spirit to the Speculative Idea effaces the necessarily representational character of sacrifice and the irreducible non-presence of death. But Hegel identifies these aspects of death in the fragments of the 1800 System. In sacrificial acts, subjectivity represents its disappearance via the sacrificed other, and hence is negated and conserved. Sacrifice thus provides the representational model of sublation pursued in the Phenomenology as a propaedeutic to Science. Bataille’s critique clarifies the fragments of the 1800 System, contextualizing Hegel’s rehabilitation of kenotic sacrifice in the Phenomenology. Bataille’s poetics parodies Hegelian kenosis via repetition of material difference, enacting an ecstatic temporality which Hegel perhaps suppresses as the condition of his system. Finally—if Bataille is correct in his assessment—the system would be subjected to a reversal, with radical implications for the philosophy of religion.

In this paper, I will try to propose a general characterisation of the spirit in Hegel's Encyclopaedia. This characterisation is based on the opposition between nature and spirit. More precisely, in my view the Hegelian spirit can be defined as the activity of bringing the natural exteriority back to a living totality.

We know that for Hegel the notion of spirit takes so many shapes that their unity is difficult to find. For instance, what does the soul in the subjective spirit, property in the objective spirit and the cult of the Greek gods in the absolute spirit have in common? Furthermore, when we consider property, for example, the problem is knowing if the spirit is here constituted by the owner, by the deeds of ownership or by the living relationship between the owner and the possessed goods.

Moreover, the Hegelian spirit is a philosophical descendant of several different traditions. The question is, therefore, to know how these traditions are linked in the Hegelian notion. I will present these briefly before stating my general hypothesis about the definition of the spirit.

First, the Hegelian spirit is connected to the noûs of the Greek philosophers (the Latin spiritus, intellectus). The noûs — on the one hand, an immaterial entity leading the universe, and, on the other, a faculty of the soul — is most often distinguished by its separate and rational nature. For Hegel too, the spirit, as a non-perceptible entity, constitutes the freest and most rational stage in the development of the Idea.

This paper offers an alternative perspective to the traditional interpretation of Hegel's philosophical reflection on history, departing from a reinterpretation of Hegel's reading of the tragic action of Antigone in Chapter VI of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The customary interpretation of this text affirms that Hegel shows how the conflict of tragic action finds its truth and its end in the identity of spirit. Tragic conflict is left behind to the same extent that (modern historical) spirit sublates the Greek ethical substance. This way, spirit can guarantee that our historical time is released from the past of the substance, or the spiritual movement of mediation from the immediacy of an ‘in-itself’. My reading, by contrast, finds under the tragic conflict of this text of Hegel's nothing but the ‘no’ of death that negates itself, or a principle that has the form of an original and irreducible conflict. Under this interpretation of Hegelian spirit, it becomes clear that it can neither fail to posit some form of ‘in-itself’ nor sublate its own tragic nature. This way it is shown that Hegel's reflection on the past does not reassure the superiority of the identity of the (modern) present (as the end of history), but rather illuminates its ‘broken’ nature. I thus offer an alternative view on Hegel's comprehension of the relation between present and past and between philosophy and time.

One of the reasons why there is no Hegelian school in contemporary ethics in the way that there are Kantian, Humean and Aristotelian schools is because Hegelians have been unable to clearly articulate the Hegelian alternative to those schools’ moral psychologies, i.e., to present a Hegelian model of the motivation to, perception of, and responsibility for moral action. Here it is argued that in its most basic terms Hegel's model can be understood as follows: the agent acts in a responsible and thus paradigmatic sense when she identifies as reasons those motivations which are grounded in his or her talents and support actions that are likely to develop those talents in ways suggested by his or her interests.

Peirce's study of Kant, and later of Hegel, and Dewey's (1930) retention of much of Hegel's social philosophy are recognised idealist sources of pragmatism. Here I argue that the transition from idealism to pragmatic realism was already achieved by Hegel. Hegel's ‘Objective Logic’ corresponds in part to Kant's ‘Transcendental Logic’ (WdL, GW 21:47.1-3). Hegel faults Kant for relegating concepts of reflection to an Appendix to his Transcendental Logic (WdL, GW 12:19.34-38), and for treating reason as ‘only dialectical’ and as ‘merely regulative’ (WdL, GW 12:23.12, .16-17). I present three important yet neglected features of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason which are key enthymemes undergirding Hegel's critical reconstruction of Kant's Critical philosophy (§2). I then summarise some features of the philosophical context within which Hegel begins to re-assess and reconstruct Kant's Transcendental Logic (§3), and review several key steps in this direction Hegel undertook in the 1807 Phenomenology (§4). (A related paper extends these results to Hegel's Logic and Encyclopaedia.) These points show that Hegel's reanalysis of Kant's Critical philosophy is the first and still one of the most sophisticated and adequate pragmatic — specifically pragmatic realist — accounts of the a priori.

If one's goal as a scholar is neither rejection nor embrace, whether piecemeal or wholesale, of a classical text, but rather the clarification of its key concepts, arguments and intellectual context, in order to show where those concepts and arguments lead—possibly to conclusions beyond those made explicit in the text itself—then Arash Abazari's Hegel's Ontology of Power: The Structure of Social Domination in Capitalism leads by example. The general premise of this study is that Hegel's philosophy of the real is grounded in the prima philosophia of the system, the Science of Logic. The specific task of the investigation is the uncovering of the foundations of the philosophy of objective spirit, as embodied in the 1820 Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, in pivotal categories of the Logic's Doctrine of Essence. But the ultimate goal of Abazari's work is to disclose how the radically critical potential of these same categories and their relations finds its actualization in Marx's account of the process of capital as the real bedrock of bourgeois society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft).