Chapter 11 reconstructs Hegel's conception of objective spirit, which specifies the kind of being, or reality, characteristic of the social world and distinguishes it from other domains of reality, such as nature and subjective spirit (or mind). It begins by examining what objective spirit means for Vincent Descombes and, to a lesser extent, for Durkheim and John Searle. Four claims associated with Hegel's account of objective spirit are distinguished and defended: 1) there is a form of mindedness that exists outside the consciousness of individual social members; 2) externally existing mind, embodied in social institutions, is metaphysically prior to the minds of the individuals who live within those institutions; 3) social reality depends on a collective acceptance of its institutions' normative rules; and 4) such rules constrain what social members do but also expand their practical possibilities and hence enrich their agency

Hegel’s Groundwork for a Philosophy of Right has become, perhaps, the most widely read of the books he published in his lifetime. Many regard it as a work that stands alongside a handful of others as classics of modern political philosophy. Hegel, of course, did not conceive this work as a stand-alone piece of social and political theorizing, as it was effectively an expansion of the section “Objective Spirit” from the “Philosophy of Spirit”, forming Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. As such, in structure and content, it was meant to be understood as giving further determination to a conceptually articulated edifice presented in Part One of the Encyclopaedia, “The Science of Logic”. But more than this, as the presentation the Encyclopaedia follows a pattern in which subsequent sections reveal the “truth” of earlier ones, the “truth” of the determinations of Objective Spirit should further be illuminated in the later Encyclopaedia sections on “Absolute Spirit”, treating Art, Religion and Philosophy. This chapter attempts to illuminate Hegel’s ideas concerning objective spirit by examining them in this broader context.

In this chapter, Guido Kreis discusses the key concepts and arguments of Cassirer’s philosophy of mind. Kreis argues that for Cassirer, the mind is non-atomistic in the sense that mental occurrences are always already “symbolically pregnant” with significance. This leads to a functionalist model of the mind, which understands the mind as neither a physical body nor a metaphysical substance but rather the system of our representational contents. On the one hand, Cassirer criticizes the attempts at a physicalistic naturalization of the mental. Kreis considers this critique in view of the normative dimension of judging and the representational content of recollection and memory (when directed against Bertrand Russell). On the other hand, when rejecting the Cartesian mentalistic framework, Cassirer argues that thoughts are always bound to their expression in language, and as such have a natural place in the social sphere. According to Kreis, this leads to a notion of nature that leaves room for normativity and representational content, or to Cassirer’s understanding of “objective spirit.”