This paper investigates Hegel’s thesis that we are, in our practical relation to the world, inherently committed to certain aspects of idealistic metaphysics. For Hegel, our practical attitude is fundamentally at odds with a naïve realism that would take the world to consist ultimately of self-contained, self-sufficient individuals whose relations to one another are fundamentally external to their identities. Hegel contends that our practical attitude is premised upon an overcoming of this mutual externality, and especially the externality which is supposed to hold between individual agent and world. It is shown that his argument hinges on conceiving of external things as inadequately individuated, as compared to living agents, and that it is precisely this ontological deficiency that conditions and motivates our action. Hegel’s discussions of morality and property ownership are appealed to in order to illustrate how we might better understand the nature and practical role of this purported deficiency.

In this paper, I first explore Hegel’s own distinctions between various types of idealism, most of which he explicitly rejects. I discuss his notions of subjective, transcendental and absolute idealism and present the outlines of his criticisms of the first two as well as the motivation behind his commitment to a version of absolute idealism. In particular, I argue that the latter does not share the defining features of what is now commonly called ‘idealism’, as Hegel neither denies the existence of an external world nor even holds that we can only somehow indirectly infer the truth of propositions about the external world from the structure of some given mental material. I give a basic account of what Hegel’s concept of ‘the absolute idea’ is about, which lies behind his absolute idealism. In this context, I maintain that it is crucial for our understanding of Hegel and of his potential relevance for contemporary metaphysics and epistemology that the absolute idea is precisely not a mental or ‘spiritual’ (geistig) entity. Rather, it amounts to a set of methodological assumptions designed to guarantee the overall intelligibility of what there is, regardless of its actual natural, social or more broadly normative structure.

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.

This article is a discussion of Hegel’s conception of the principle ‘omnis determinatio est negatio’, which he attributes to Spinoza. It is argued, however, that Spinoza understood this principle in a very different way from Hegel, which then sets up an interpretative puzzle: if this is so, why did he credit Spinoza with formulating it? This puzzle is resolved by paying attention to the context in which those attributions are made, while it is also shown that the British Idealists (unlike many contemporary commentators) were aware of the complexities in the Spinoza–Hegel relation on this issue. The paper also addresses some of the philosophical debates raised by this question, and the light it sheds on Hegel’s critique of Spinoza as a monist.

In this paper, I explore the question of the reality of God for Hegel. I first consider the contemporary interpretative debate on Hegel’s metaphysics and the implications of this debate for the Hegelian conception of God. I then advocate a ‘qualified revisionist’ approach to Hegel, and, as a further qualification to such an approach, I suggest an interpretation of the objective reality that Hegel attributes to God as mediated objectivity. I analyse how Hegel’s ‘mediated objectivity’ applies to religious representations, suggesting that a figural reading of the kind theorized by philologist Erich Auerbach should be adopted. Finally I reconstruct Hegel’s distinction between the image (Bild) of God, the concept (Begriff) of God, and the Idea (Idee) of God, and I argue that the answer to the question of the objective reality of God in Hegel’s philosophy of religion can be retrieved in the process according to which the concept turns into the Idea.

Hegel draws a distinction between ‘judgements’ (Urteile) and ‘posits’ (Sätze). Judgements serve to explicate a unified subject matter, while posits do not. Because different forms of judgement are marked by specific combinations of logical constants with certain types of predicates, statements combining logical constants with predicates not ‘suited’ for each other cannot express judgements, but only posits. Current accounts of Hegel’s concept of judgement tend either to ignore or reject his conception of posits. This article shows that Hegel’s exclusion of a vast variety of well-formed statements from the realm of judgements contains a valuable insight rather than a flaw. It demonstrates that certain statements, even if correct, cannot contribute to the explication of a non-arbitrarily unified subject matter. Doing justice to Hegel’s notion of posit thus serves to motivate his general conception of judgement as well as his classification of particular types of judgement.

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.

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.

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel critically refers to Hinduism as ‘The Religion of Imagination’ or, in another translation, ‘The Religion of Phantasy’. Hegel’s study of Hinduism came during the period when there was a rapidly growing interest in India, indeed, an Indomania, in the German-speaking world. Hegel meticulously kept up with the most recent publications in the field. This article examines Hegel’s critical assessment of Hinduism in order to determine what specifically he finds objectionable in it. It is argued that his objection ultimately concerns what he takes to be the mistaken conception of what it is to be a human being that underlies the Hindu view. This conception, he claims, undermines the development of subjective freedom that he takes to be so important.

According to Hegel, true freedom consists not just in arbitrariness, but in the free willing of right. Right in turn is fully realised in the laws and institutions of ethical life. The ethical subject, for Hegel, is a practical subject that acts in accordance with ethical laws; yet it is also a theoretical, cognitive subject that recognizes the laws and institutions of ethical life as embodiments of right. Such recognition can be self-conscious and reflective; but it can, and indeed must, also be a felt recognition and as such it takes the form of trust. In Hegel’s view, therefore, the proper stance to adopt towards ethical institutions is that of trust; moreover, there is a distinctive freedom to be found in trust itself. Trust is appropriate, however, only when the institutions of ethical life are themselves worthy of it. Hegel is well aware that not all states and their institutions merit trust, but in his view a life without trust in institutions is a life without true freedom.

Stephen Engstrom has recently offered an excellent account of morality as practical cognition. He emphasizes the formal conditions of practical knowledge, which he finds in Kant. Engstrom also aligns his account with constructivism, claiming that value is constructed through these formal conditions, chiefly universalisability. In this paper, I employ a variant of Hegel’s empty-formalism objection to challenge the moral significance of the mere form of practical knowledge. I hope to show that Engstrom’s constructivism is neither philosophically compelling, nor required by the rest of his position. In its place, I propose a realist understanding of the value of practical knowledge.

This paper offers a response to Hegel’s critique of Hinduism as explicated by Jon Stewart, by drawing on a variety of textual sources which are normative for Hinduism. In a first section, Hegel’s idea that the Hindu conception of the divine is too abstract to provide meaningful content is challenged by explicating the role of the Veda in Hinduism. A second section seeks to question the idea that the kind of naturalism available in Hinduism is necessarily incompatible with subjective freedom in the way that Hegel suggests. A third section engages with the specific empirical question regarding the subjective freedom of women in Hindu society which Hegel provides as one practical illustration of the lack of subjective freedom. Rather than providing a definitive rebuttal, the evidence adduced on all these points suggests a more heterogeneous picture of Hinduism than that which Hegel was able to provide.