This article is the preface to a completed book manuscript, United Nations Human Rights Ethics. Based on the indivisibility of human rights, the Four Freedoms Speech, and the Preamble of the Universal Declaration, the book takes freedom of expression as the one human right. Other rights are modes of this one. For example, one exercises freedom of expression (speech) by exercising the right to life, access to courts, etc.. The book argues that human rights are primarily an ethical concept (introduced (...) by Rousseau) rather than a concept of international law. (shrink)

Clark Butler presents an innovative analysis of Hegel's most challenging work in _Hegel's Logic_ -- the first major English-language treatment of Hegel's _Science of Logic_ to appear in nearly fifteen years. Although earlier commentators on the _Logic_ have considered standard analytical philosophy-and with it modern logic-in opposition to Hegel. Butler views it as a legitimate approach in terms of which Hegel needs to be understood. This interpretation allows him to address the rigor of Hegel's thought on several (...) levels as at once an exercise in purely conceptual redefinition and a full-bodied work in metaphysical ontology and even theology. The result is an account of the _Logic_ intelligible to analytical philosophers as well as non-specialists. (shrink)

The annual series of Clio Hegel Studies, which has been published since 1981, is to continue under the title Clio Philosophy Studies. The Hegel series numbers were inaugurated at a time when there was no assurance that the Owl would become a journal. Now that the organ of the HSA is a journal of Hegel studies, Clio can best serve by addressing a wider audience, while continuing to encourage and welcome contributions related to Hegel. For the next two years, beginning (...) July 1, 1986, this series will be edited from the University of Strasbourg. Manuscripts by HSA member members and friends may be submitted either to Clio, Indiana-Purdue, Fort Wayne, Indiana 46805, or to Clark Butler, Indiana-Purdue Foreign Study Program, 1b, Rue de Bouxwiller, 67000 Strasbourg, France. The journal remains interested in testing Hegelian theses through interacton with the most important living currents of thought. (shrink)

This article denies that Hegel upheld the objective truth of any contradictory statements. Yet he did admit objective contradictions in the sense of intersubjectively held contradictory beliefs at the basis of some institutions, most famously lordship and bondage. He also shared the belief of Zeno, the inventor of dialectic, that continuous motion is self-contradictory but is an objective contradiction more widely shared by all institutions presupposing continuants (people and ordinary things).

The article explains my third argument for panpsychism, based on disolving all properties, including dispositional physical properties like mass, energy, and force, into phenomenal properties. I thus reject a dual-property version of panpsychism. I seek to show, contrary to Paul Churchland, that the general panpsychist hypothesis has some explanatory value, and makes a cosmology consisting in comparative psychology possible. The mental life even of so-called physical particles in physics is hypothesized to help explain their behavior.

The concept of the subject, of what Hegel calls absolute negativity, already appears early in the logic of being.1 Absolute negativity, negation of the negation, occurs throughout the logic as identity in difference understood as self-identification under different descriptions. First, the subject refers to itself merely under an incomplete description. Secondly, it refers to something other than itself under a second description which is logically required by the first. (For example, the description of being in general requires some determinate description (...) of being in particular). But this second description is dialectically excluded by the assumption that the first description is complete. Thirdly, the subject negates its negation of the other. It discovers itself in the other, under the other description, and thus comes to refer to itself less incompletely. This is Hegel in the analytic mode. (shrink)

This article compares Freud and Hegel, arguing that Freud independently uncovered and used the Hegelian dialectical method. It is argued that Freud used the method in reconstructing the psycho-sexual development of the individual begining with sense-certainty in the Phenomenology of Spirit and proceeding through the dialectic of self-consciousness. The development in prehistory from food-gathering (oral assimilative stage) through hunting (anal aggressive stage), the pastoral and agricultural stages (lordship and bondage) to the city state (stoici stage), is briefly presented. This article (...) was revised and developed further in the author's The Dialectical Method: A Treatise Hegel Never Wrote (Prometheus Books: 2012), ch. 8. (shrink)

1. Ontological Historical Materialism. The Hegel-Marx relationship remains an issue both for Hegel scholars aware of underlying world historical causes of the recent Hegel Renaissance and Marx scholars attentive to the philosophical roots of Marxism. It may be questioned, however, whether the relation is merely historical and circumstantial or necessary and internal as well. Marx claimed to have overturned the Hegelian system. Yet the classical formula, according to which Marxism shares with Hegelianism its method but not its system, that the (...) Hegelian system contradicts the dialectical methodology it shares with Marxism has exercised wide influence. On numerous issues, e.g., the state, the universal class, the alienation of labor, Hegelian and Marxist doctrines are admittedly not only different but contradictory. To this extent Engels’s classical formula is correct. But surely the more important consideration is method, though doctrine has so overshadowed methodological considerations in both Marxism and Hegelianism that it has been rare to define either school except in terms of specific tenets. Doctrinal definition of any movement resembles a death warrant. If either Marxism or Hegelianism is scientific and thus capable of breaking loose from nineteenth-century chains, it must be defined methodologically, programmatically. Contrary to Engels’s formula, I shall distinguish between Marxist and Hegelian methods, but shall argue that the methods are not only compatible but complementary. (shrink)

740 page life in letters, including all Hegel's available letters at time of publication by Indiana University Press in 1984 tied together by a running commentary by Clark Butler. The volume is in a searchable PDF format. Publication was supported by a Major Grant by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH).

Contends that Hegel's reconstruction of valid logic leads to a conception of indirect proof and syllogisms. Clarification of the concept of indirect proof; Reference to previous papers on the subject; Indirect proof as the natural form of deduction.

A problem is posed by differences between the temporal order of philosophers in the history of philosophy and the rational order in which “definitions of the absolute” upheld by these philosophers appear in Hegel’s Logic. Hegel holds, according to § 88 of the Encyclopedia, both that the Logic reconstructs the history of philosophy on the level of pure thought and that chronological history deviates in places from the rational sequence. A problem is posed for anyone who takes this passage seriously, (...) thus rejecting both a panlogist view of the logic as an autonomous, non-historical self-construction and a neo-Platonic interpretation as approaching but never quite reaching a transdialectical intuition of eternity. It poses a problem for anyone who takes the logic as a hermeneutic key to history as seriously as Hegel himself. (shrink)

This article vindicates human rights, not as natural rights holding wherever human beings are, but as reducible to one historically constructed right to freedom of thought and its universal modes. Universal morality is elicited from international human rights law. To be moral is first to help engender everywhere either mere inner recognition of the validity of rights or mere outer compliance with their requirements; and to engender finally inner recognition expressed in a duty of outer observance. Human rights ethics replaces (...) the rights consciousness common in the West with a duty consciousness. This universal rational morality supersedes utilitarianism, Kantianism, and other rational theories. Yet moralities making no rational claim on all (e.g., Christian, Buddhist) may flourish within human rights ethics as the universal ethical minimum. (shrink)

I have recently been appointed Coeditor of a journal published on my campus, CLIO: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History, with a view to expanding the journal’s philosophy offerings. It is a position I accepted only on the understanding that I would be free to develop the journal as an English-language forum for the study, indisciplinary application and critical evaluation of the Hegelian philosophy.

This article defends linguistic descent in contrast to the possibility of linguistic ascent or the formal mode in metaphysics. We can go both ways, but metaphysics metaphysically defined presupposes metaphysics conceptualstically defined, which presupposes metaphysicas ontologially defined. Predicates implie abstract concepts (categories in metaphysics), and abstract oncepts presuppose the concrete qualities from which they are abstracted. A distinction is made between any quality and that which has the quality. This article contains a refutation of Kant on the ontological argument. Being, (...) conceived as instantiation, is a predicate once we posit universal properties instantiated by whatever is. The article, in the author's subequent work, leads to an explicit nominalism which asserts universals only as practical postulates of theoretical reason, i.e., logical discourse. Qualities are unique, not open to multiple instantiation. (shrink)

Editorial introduction to special journal issue.

A defense of panpyschism based on Ockham's Razor, arguing against the materialistic identity thesis, e.g., J J C Smart.

In Jena Hegel began his philosophical career under the auspices of Schelling’s Spinozism. His declaration of philosophical independence from Schelling, dating from publication of the Phenomenology, was a repudiation of the Spinozistic definition of the absolute as merely substance. Substance without the flux of accidents, he came to see, is nothing at all. Yet in the judgment of history Hegel’s break with Schellingian Spinozism, though clearly embarked upon, was not so clearly consummated. The struggle of monism and pluralism is no (...) longer a burning issue in philosophy, and that is perhaps why Hegel’s monism is rarely mentioned by today’s Hegel scholars. But the belief that Hegel was a one-substance monist — affirming the existence of spirit as an all-encompassing and indivisible substance — was never far from the minds of earlier interpreters. Such interpreters range from K. F. Göschel to C.E.M. Joad in “Outline of Hegel’s Philosophy: Monistic Idealism,” Chapter 15 of his Guide to Philosophy,. By failing to distinguish the absolute idealism of Hegel from that of the British idealists, Whitehead himself lent support to the monistic interpretation of Hegel when he wrote. (shrink)

In Jena Hegel began his philosophical career under the auspices of Schelling’s Spinozism. His declaration of philosophical independence from Schelling, dating from publication of the Phenomenology, was a repudiation of the Spinozistic definition of the absolute as merely substance. Substance without the flux of accidents, he came to see, is nothing at all. Yet in the judgment of history Hegel’s break with Schellingian Spinozism, though clearly embarked upon, was not so clearly consummated. The struggle of monism and pluralism is no (...) longer a burning issue in philosophy, and that is perhaps why Hegel’s monism is rarely mentioned by today’s Hegel scholars. But the belief that Hegel was a one-substance monist — affirming the existence of spirit as an all-encompassing and indivisible substance — was never far from the minds of earlier interpreters. Such interpreters range from K. F. Göschel to C.E.M. Joad in “Outline of Hegel’s Philosophy: Monistic Idealism,” Chapter 15 of his Guide to Philosophy,. By failing to distinguish the absolute idealism of Hegel from that of the British idealists, Whitehead himself lent support to the monistic interpretation of Hegel when he wrote. (shrink)

First Statement of what would become Human Rights Ethics, Purdue University Press, 2008.

The paper analyzes the American counterculture of the 1960s and early '70s, from the New Left through the hippies, revolutionaries and Jesus people, to the counterculture's collapse in artistry and the cynicism of Watergate; this evolution is viewed as a re-enactment of Hegel's dialectic of 'active reason' in the Phenomenology of Spirit , from the critique of 'observation' to 'society as a community of animals'. Secondly, an attempt is made to account for this re-enactment in the twentieth century. The tentative (...) conclusion is that the counterculture was America's discovery of the Hegelian idea of the state, but that, in an age of world economic interdependence and universal (if sometimes unacknowledged) military insecurity, this discovery came too late. The economic and military basis of the only world-history which Hegel knew, the history of nation-states all the way from oriental despotisms to modern 'Germanic' states is, it seems, in the process of disappearance. Section on the dialectic of Observation to Active Reason revised and updated in The Dialectical Method: A Treatise Hegel Never Wrote. Prometheus Books, 2012. (shrink)

This book proposes a treatise on the Hegelian dialectical method as based on dialectical logic. Part One explores sources of dialectical logic before Hegel in ancient thought. Part Two examines dialectical logic and the dialectical method in Hegel, with attention to the relationship between dialectical logic and contemporary formal logic. Part Three concerns the dialectical method after Hegel, in which we seek to show that the method is available for uses other than the one to which the historical Hegel put (...) it. My intention has been constructive. I want to take issue with those who have contested the existence or validity of any dialectical logic, and of the dialectical method as well.1 The payoff for studying dialectical logic is the dialectical method. By using it one can reconstruct, rethink, and relive a historical course of dialectical deduction with the purpose of achieving deeper self-comprehension, i.e., comprehension of oneself by retraveling one’s past path of dialectical assumptions, contradictions, and corrections. Dialectical self-comprehension is possible when one’s present identity has historically constituted itself through such a path. It is possible when the individual is conscious of herself as triumphant over the contradictions of the past. Part Three, treating the dialectical method after Hegel, includes a reconstruction of American history since World War II in chapter 8, according to INTRODUCTION 9 1 0 Introduction the dialectical method. We will see how a Hegelian use of the method can assist in comprehending a post-Hegelian historical standpoint present to us but unknown to Hegel. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to advance responsible rehabilitation of the speculative philosophy of history. It challenges the idea popularized by thinkers such as and Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-François Lyotard that historical meta-mythology and meta-narrative are philosophically obsolete. As long as humanity, viewed anthropologically, lives by over-arching narrative, the quest for a version that survives rational criticism remains vital. Here human rights serve as the key to unlock such a version. Despite the fact that the Hegelian philosophy of history (...) has often been derided, something very similar currently functions as the official ideology of the world community: the idea of history as the story of freedom. This book does not retell the world-historical story of freedom. Rather, it uncovers it, beginning with the current age of human rights and working backward through the great role-model civilizations of history. Its conclusion is that a forward retelling of the story of freedom as the story of human rights can be justified by dewesternizing the story. The book contains critical responses from specialized scholars and re-presentative of selected world cultures. The volume includes illustrations, and a guest Afterword by Donald Phillip Verene. It is a companion-volume to the author's _Hegel's Logic: Between History and Dialectic_ (North-western University Press, 1996). (shrink)

This book manuscript, entitled United Nations Human Rights Ethics: For The Greatest Success of the Greatest Number, critically examines most all major normative ethical theories since Socrates and finds Roman Stoic ethics to be the least deficient. It divides ethical theories into popular ones with little academic support, other popular ones that have had such support, and Kantian ethics standing alone as a philosopher's academic ethical philosophy with limited popular support. It criticizes the appropriation of human rights by the international (...) law profession to the exclusion of moral philosophy, despite the origin of "human rights" in the moral philosopher Rousseau. It blames the inability of moral philosophers to reach a professional consensus on the elements of normative ethics, not the legal profession. It laments both the failure of human rights education to human beings everywhere as requested by the Universal Declaration and the decline in popular support for human rights in favor of nationalism in current history since 2015. It advocates a way of redirecting human right education to people on the ground rather than mainly to law students. Such education has been overtaken by the Rule of Law movement fighting high crimes crimes against humanity unanticipated by the Universal Declaration. It argues for a way for ethicists to get on the same page in teaching elements in ethics and argues forcefully for a positive method for popular human rights education as well as for human rights-based elementary ethical theory. (shrink)

The first English translation of Hegel's important lectures on logic.

Human Rights Ethics makes an important contribution to contemporary philosophical and political debates concerning the advancement of global justice and human rights. Butler's book also lays claim to a significant place in both normative ethics and human rights studies in as much as it seeks to vindicate a universalistic, rational approach to human rights ethics. Butler's innovative approach is not based on murky claims to "natural rights" that supposedly hold wherever human beings exist; nor does it succumb to (...) the traditional problems of justification associated with utilitarianism, Kantianism, and other procedural approaches to human rights studies. Instead, Butler proposes "a dialectical justification of human rights by indirect proof" that claims not to be question begging. Very much in the spirit of Hegel and Habermas, Butler proposes to vindicate a "totally rational account of human rights," but one that depends concretely and historically on a dialectically constructed "right to freedom of thought in its universal modes.". (shrink)

Elder is a Hegel scholar who is well versed in analytic philosophy. His distinctive style is more reminiscent of G. E. Moore than Hegel. Yet the book’s title fails to direct the reader’s attention to the true subject matter. The author’s stated intention is to demonstrate Hegel’s contribution to current discussion of the mind/body problem. The antimaterialist thrust of Hegel’s philosophy is exhibited by showing that conceptual schemes employing materialistic concepts cannot be coherently employed, according to Hegel, without also drawing (...) upon mentalistic concepts. However, the bulk of Elder’s text is an original recreation of the dialectic of Hegel’s Logic. Although this reenactment is undertaken to serve the stated purpose of the book, it has value in its own right as an introduction to the Logic. The distinction between two interpretations of the categories of essence is particularly useful. Elder’s underlying thesis—namely, that concepts of matter arising in the dialectic of Being and Essence transmute themselves within the dialectic of the Notion into concepts of mind—will surely be accepted by anyone adopting a Hegelian standpoint. His real achievement is to have helped make that thesis more understandable and plausible by suggesting as a translation that concepts of matter implicitly function as role players in the goal directed activity of rational agents, that their use conditions the possibility of such activity and is functionless unless embraced within such activity. Matter is resolved into obstacles, raw materials, instruments, products, etc.—all relative to rational activity. Granting that this is a Hegelian thesis, historically it is more distinctively Fichtean than Hegelian, just as in contemporary philosophy it is Sartrean. Elder gives the thesis Hegelian pedigree, in effect highlighting a frequently unnoticed Fichtean theme in the Logic. (shrink)

Jacques D'Hondt, coming from the French Left, has spent a career uncovering the essential, secret Hegel underlying the surface expressions of the philosopher. He is already known in English through Hegel in His Time: Berlin 1818-1831. He writes the present biography as one would write a detective novel. Suspicious of appearances, a keen and politically astute sixth sense finds that remarkably little in Hegel's life is what it first seems. He seeks the truth in what Hegel does not say or (...) do, or through the missing context of what he does say. And yet, despite the hypocrisy and compromise forced on Hegel as the price of professional success at the best German university of the era, D'Hondt finds in Hegel, if not a martyr, at least a hero in the cause of freedom with whom he can identify. But as daring as Hegel's works were in their esoteric content, just as cautious was Hegel the man in the exoteric form given those works. (shrink)

Assessment of radical Third Worldist, French trained psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, advocating the killing of a Frenchmen by each Algerian rebel as his total liberation from colonialism.

Chaim Perelman's article in this volume first set me on the path of human rights ethics. A professor of Rhetoric, he understood the construction of human rights to be the construction of a universal audience, or potential universal audience, for the exercise of freedom of expression.

Commentary on paper by Hector Castaneda.