The aim of this article is to clarify the critical role of Hegel's early logic, through an assessment of the dialectical process of sublation [Aufhebung] of the determinations of finite thinking at stake within its exposition. I want to show that the dialectical-critical work of logic has a speculative meaning for Hegel, thereby displaying the inward correspondence between critical and speculative aspects of philosophical activity. By pointing out the evidence from fragmentary texts on logic relating to Hegel's teaching activity in 1801–1802, I will first put into question the idea of an introductory role of logic. In so doing I challenge a widespread reading which argues for the presence of a sharp separation between critical logic and speculative metaphysics. I will then focus on the texts on logic in the 1804–1805 Reinschrift, reading them as the worksite wherein the dawning form of a full-fledged dialectical logic is first prepared and elaborated. More generally, if this paves the way for establishing a continuity between Hegel's early and mature logic and his concept of dialectic, it is also paramount for understanding how the activity of systematic philosophy in the mature version of the system essentially constitutes an ongoing work on the forms of the finite.

The current debate surrounding Hegel's logical theory of the concept revolves around Hegel's concept of ‘double shine’. After presenting the relevant positions of the discussants and elucidating their differences, the author tries to advance the current discussion by commenting on these differences. In doing so, the author argues that the essence- and concept-logical background of ‘shine’ and ‘double shine’ respectively is crucial for the understanding of the double shine.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to debate on Hegel's conception of the relationship between religion and philosophy by proposing that it can be a read as a division of labour between Christian religion and speculative philosophy. This reading allows us to understand better Hegel's idea that religion and philosophy have the same content in two different forms. I distinguish between the institutional and the intrapersonal dimensions of Hegel's claim of a division of labour between religion and philosophy. I then turn to a critique of Hegel's philosophy of religion by showing how David Friedrich Strauss's concluding dissertation from The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined can call our attention to some internal tensions within Hegel's conception. Although Strauss's interpretation does not present an insurmountable objection against Hegel's conception of a division of labour, it can help to illuminate to what extent Hegel oversimplified the practical implications that his conception might have for the priest's attempt to continue his instruction to the members of his community.

This essay takes up a challenge recently posed by Graham Oppy: to clearly express, in premise-conclusion form, Hegel's version of the ontological argument. In addition to employing this format, it seeks to supplement existing treatments by locating a core component of Hegel's argument in a slightly different place than is common. Whereas some prominent recent treatments (Williams, Bubbio, Melechar) focus on Hegel's definition of the Absolute as the Concept, from the third part of his Science of Logic (the Doctrine of the Concept), mine focuses on earlier definitions from the first (the Doctrine of Being). As I hope to show, there are even more resources in Hegel's Logic for an ontological argument than those emphasized in recent treatments: the concept, the Idea, etc. Already in the first third of the Logic, we find a compelling response to a famous Kantian counter-argument to the ontological proof. The counter-argument is summed up in the phrase ‘existence [Sein] is not a real predicate’. Hence, Hegel's response as I interpret it will take the form of a competing analysis of Being, a Lehre vom Sein (Doctrine of Being). What do we learn when we put the ontology back into Hegel's ontological argument? That Being is neither predicate, nor subject, nor copula, but a monist (or ‘infinite’) category. The larger importance of this exercise to our understanding of Hegel's thought lies in the way it clarifies his profound debt to even non-idealist conceptions of God, such as the one espoused by Spinoza.

Hegel's Science of Logic tracks the self-contained and self-generated development of what Hegel calls the concept. My question is: can the concept in the Logic surprise itself? I argue that the answer to that question is yes—the concept can surprise itself when it rediscovers itself in a place it did not expect to be. I first clarify the kind of perspective that the Logic asks us as readers to occupy and its difference from the perspective inside the ‘opposition’ of consciousness. I then provide an example of the concept's self-surprise, namely, the transition from subjective to realized purpose in the Subjective Logic. I conclude by drawing out some implications of self-surprise for Hegel's method in the Logic and in the subsequent Realphilosophie.

By highlighting the logico-metaphysical undergirding of Hegel's discussion of the market, this article brings to light certain proto-Marxist or proto-socialist tendencies in Hegel as well as key disagreements with Adam Smith, which have been missed by recent studies like Herzog's Inventing the Market (2013). For Smith, market laws function like an impartial arbiter that rewards honest effort; his main worry is that individuals may fail to display virtues like honesty, probity and frugality, thereby hindering the smooth functioning of the market mechanism. For Hegel, by contrast, the market is a de-personalized player in its own right that imposes its arbitrary rule, a rule that does not reflect in any way the virtues and efforts of market participants. This assessment is easily overlooked, unless one realizes that Hegel believes the market to be functioning according to the structures that he discusses in the ‘Objectivity’ section in his Science of Logic. As a consequence of this assessment Hegel attributes a different role to the state than Smith does: Rather than aiding and shaping individuals, by means of institutions, education and health care, the state needs to address the structural functioning of market laws and, to some extent, inhibit its free-flowing functioning. Individuals need to re-appropriate their own social relations by organizing them along the lines of the logical organism or internal teleology. After outlining Hegel's interpretation and assessment of the market structures with the help of the Logic, I will discuss Hegel's demand for an organic state, that sublates and oversees the market, thereby safeguarding the important personal freedoms enjoyed by market participants.

Interest in The German Ideology has largely focused on the ‘chapter’ on Feuerbach—invariably the focus of the various abridgements in which the work is usually read. But this does not reflect the weighting of the text itself, which is dominated by Marx and Engels's critique of the radical egoist philosopher Max Stirner. Which begs the question: just why did they spend so much time and effort writing about Stirner? In this paper, I will provide an answer—which comes down to three related points. The first concerns the critique of reason; the second, egoistic self-interest. On both of these two points, Stirner makes a novel contribution—contributions which Marx and Engels feel clear affinities with. However, Stirner can ultimately be seen to get these two points, as it were, the wrong way around. This then leads to the third point: Stirner's misunderstanding of the nature of Communism. To clarify the nature of Communism, then, Marx and Engels were compelled to turn Stirner on his head.

I provide a metaphysically realist interpretation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature—one that allows us to make sense of one of the more puzzling references to nature in his Science of Logic. I do so by affording William Maker’s under-appreciated account of Hegel’s realism more of the attention and scrutiny it deserves—not least because it involves a distinctively simple and elegant account of the famously obscure move from logic to nature in Hegel’s system. Though I point out its limitations, I claim that Maker’s arguments can be revised in order to recover more of the rigour and complexity of Hegel’s metaphysics.

In this article I put forward an interpretation of what is at stake in Frantz Fanon's claim that there is a reciprocity at the basis of G. W. F Hegel's master-servant dialectic. I do this by staging a critique of the ‘shared-humanity’ interpretation of Fanon's claim. Fanon's problem, as this interpretation understands it, is that the master-servant dialectic describes a situation in which two human beings knowingly confront one another as such. Such a situation—because human-to-human confrontation is assumed—does not adequately describe a racially divided situation because of racism's dehumanizing force. Fanon's problem would thus be that Hegel assumed shared humanity. I contest this reading by claiming that Fanon's issue is not reciprocal humanity but reciprocal struggle. To get to this point requires demonstrating that the shared-humanity reading is implausible on a variety of grounds. Thanks to the work of Philippe Van Haute it can already be said that in Hegel's text no shared humanity takes place. But Van Haute nevertheless claims that the shared-humanity problem is present in Kojève. Thus, it first needs to be shown that Kojève's text disallows such a reading. With this result in hand, I move to show the textually unsupportable nature of a subset of the shared-humanity reading—the ‘ontological reading’—whose strategy of reading Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks obscures the Sartrean-Beauvoirian commitments which would in fact allow a more accurate reading of Fanon's claims about reciprocity in Hegel to be made. I then seek to show—with reference to these commitments and a broadly Kojèvean emphasis on the centrality of struggle in human subject-formation—that Fanon's comments about reciprocity take aim at the question of mutual struggle in Hegel and Kojève. ‘The French Negro’, Fanon argues, did not get to experience the cost and value of freedom, unlike Hegel's servant.

In this paper, I raise a question concerning the place of ‘Teleology’ in Hegel's system of logic and ask whether ‘Teleology’ as a logical category can and should come immediately before ‘Life’. I offer two main reasons to think that the category of ‘Teleology’ might be misplaced. The first and the indirect reason is inspired by a difference between the logical system and the Philosophy of Nature concerning the immediate precursors and the emergence of life as a logical category and real determinacy. In Hegel's Logic, ‘Teleology’ is interposed between ‘Chemism’ and ‘Life’, while in his Philosophy of Nature, ‘Organics’ immediately follows ‘The Chemical Process’. Although the systematic order of the natural determinacies laid out in the Philosophy of Nature has no authority over the sequence of logical determinacies, and although there does not have to be a one-to-one correspondence between the logical categories and natural determinacies of Hegel's system, I argue that the smooth transition from the chemical process to the self-sustaining totality of the geological organism in the Philosophy of Nature, is an incentive to consider a parallel transition in the logical exposition, which I show to be workable. The second and the direct reason is that Hegel's category of ‘Teleology’ cannot but make a crucial reference to the initial determinacy of the category of ‘Life,’ without which it is inconceivable. By explaining why this reference is untenable and how, by contrast, the initial determinacy of life is conceivable independently of the process in which some subjective end is realized in objectivity through external means, I conclude that the logic of ‘Life’ and internal teleology should precede the logic of external teleology, allowing for a direct passage from ‘Chemism’ to ‘Life’.

In this paper I examine Brandom's account of Hegel's claim that the content of an intention can only be determined retrospectively. While Brandom's account, given in Chapter 11 of A Spirit of Trust, sets a new standard for thinking about this topic, I argue that it is flawed in three important respects. First, Brandom is not able to make sense of a distinction that is central for Hegel, namely, between the consequences of an action that ought to have been foreseen by an acting agent, given the right of objectivity of the action, and unforeseeable consequences that are completely contingent. Second, Brandom incorrectly conceptualizes the disparity and unity that all actions display as temporally successive features of an action, rather than as speculatively identical features. Third, Brandom's account cannot make sense of cases of retrospective determination that involve self-deception, and this demonstrates that he misses something critical about Hegel's account of action, namely, that action is expressive of the logic of essence.

For Heidegger, Hegel understands being, ‘the highest actuality’, as the categories which pervade and thereby form all objects and events. Since, Heidegger argues, the categories are, in Hegel, present-at-hand, Hegel conceives of being as presence-at-hand. This is a problem, for Heidegger, because it entails the full transparency and knowability of being, whereas, in his view, being is partially hidden and unknowable. I consider the objection to this Heideggerian critique of Hegel that Hegelian logic understands being not only as the list of categories but also as their derivation and movement from pure being to the absolute idea, which (derivation and movement) establish being not only as presence but also as implication. Since being-as-implication is (a) not presence-at-hand and (b) necessary to being, it cannot be said that Hegel's account of being turns it into full transparency and knowability. Heidegger's critique should, therefore, be rejected. I argue that this objection is unsuccessful because there is strong evidence in the Logic that Hegel ‘subordinates’ being-as-implication to presence-at-hand. Implication's way of being is, in Hegel, only a collapse into presence-at-hand and hence ‘merely a modification of presence’. Consequently, Heidegger's critique of Hegel should not be rejected based on the objection. I conclude the article with a remark on the relation between language and being-as-implication. I argue that Hegel's account of being-as-implication in language disrespects the autonomy of being-as-implication therein and that Haas's argument for such an autonomy based on the phenomenon of the syntactic ellipsis of ‘is’ fails to undermine Hegel's account.

In this paper I argue that there is textual evidence that the chapter on Teleology in Hegel's Science of Logic, read under certain premises, also discusses something that in contemporary analytic philosophy is called a ‘basic action’. The three moments of Teleology—(a) ‘The Subjective Purpose’, (b) ‘The Means’ and (c) ‘The Realized Purpose’—can be interpreted as (a) a certain intentional content in the mind of a subject, which can be expressed in the form of an imperative, (b) the immediate taking in possession of the body, which can be described as a basic action, and (c) the description of the relation of the event brought about by the basic action with other events in the world, which can be described in the terms of event-causality. This reading reveals an astonishing parallel to Donald Davidson's distinction between proper basic actions and their different descriptions in the form of events. In this way we can make Hegel's, at first glance, confusing identification of subjective purpose (intention), means (basic action) and realized purpose (event) comprehensible. Through that, the actual aim is to show that what I call basic actions are in fact an example of a more general thought that Hegel calls a teleological relation.

With Hegel on Being, Stephen Houlgate presents an impressive philosophical analysis of one of the most obscure, but also most important texts of the whole Western philosophical tradition. Houlgate's book is an in-depth systematic investigation of the entire doctrine of being of Hegel's mature logical system. This work takes up and develops a series of reflections presented in The Opening of Hegel's Logic (2006), which were dedicated to the first two chapters of the section on quality in the Science of Logic, and extends them to the further two sections of the first part of Hegel's mature system. Houlgate's text is thus particularly interesting, especially if one considers that not many Hegel scholars have dealt with the difficulties of the sections dedicated to quantity and measure. This is probably due to the complexity of the dialectic of the categories involved in these sections of the Logic and to the necessity of approaching Hegel's dialogue with the exact and natural sciences of his time. On the interaction of Hegel's philosophy with these scientific contributions, Houlgate offers us particularly significant pages. Suffice to mention the excursus on differential calculus at the end of the section dedicated to quantity, or the analysis of the relevance of Galileo Galilei's and Johannes Kepler's discoveries in the context of the analysis of realized measure.

This article interprets Hegel's hierarchical theory of race as an application of his general views about the metaphysics of classification and explanation. We begin by offering a reconstruction of Hegel's hierarchical theory of race based on the critical edition of relevant lecture transcripts: we argue that Hegel's position on race is appropriately classified as racist, that it postulates innate mental deficits of some races, and that it turns racism from an anthropological into a metaphysical doctrine by claiming that the division of humankind into races (at least in the Old World) is not a brute fact, but follows a ‘higher necessity’. We then summarize our interpretation of the relevant metaphysical background to this theory. On our reading, Hegel postulates an essentialist form of explanation that explains given kinds as stages in a teleological, non-temporal process through which the nature of a superordinate kind is realized. We argue that Hegel's views about a hierarchical and necessary division of humankind into races are an application of this model to the case of human diversity, motivated by explanatory considerations and subject to confirmation bias. By way of conclusion, we address two possible attempts to ‘save’ Hegelian philosophy from its racist baggage.

Hegel's Science of Logic is one of the most challenging books in the philosophical library. Its primary text is a mass of abstract terms, woven into sentences that become quite complex. That text avoids illustrations or examples, but plunges on from paragraph to paragraph as the concepts being discussed subtly change their character, develop associations with contrary terms, become part of a complex network of reciprocal interaction, and then collapse into a new integrated thought which then serves as an immediate beginning for the next discussion.

This article offers a constructive reading of the ‘Teleology’ chapter in Hegel's Science of Logic. I argue that it contains an apparently conclusive case for the abstract concepts of means and end (in the sense of ‘purpose’), which has remained unrecognized in the literature. I then show some implications of the fact that the argument is entirely abstract in Hegel's system.