Hegel: Interpretation of Greek Philosophy

It is widely believed that the ancient Greeks thought that Thales was the first philosopher, and that they therefore maintained that philosophy had a Greek origin. This paper challenges these assumptions, arguing that most ancient Greek thinkers who expressed views about the history and development of philosophy rejected both positions. I argue that not even Aristotle presented Thales as the first philosopher, and that doing so would have undermined his philosophical commitments and interests. Beyond Aristotle, the view that Thales was (...) the first philosopher is attested almost nowhere in antiquity. In the classical, Hellenistic, and post-Hellenistic periods, we witness a marked tendency to locate the beginning of philosophy in a time going back further than Thales. Remarkably, ancient Greek thinkers most often traced the origins of philosophy to earlier non-Greek peoples. Contrary to the received view, then, I argue that (1) vanishingly few Greek writers pronounced Thales the first philosopher; and (2) most Greek thinkers did not even advocate a Greek origin of philosophy. Finally, I show that the view that philosophy originated with Thales (along with its misleading attribution to the Greeks in general) has roots in problematic, and in some cases manifestly racist, eighteenth-century historiography of philosophy. (shrink)

Content: Elena Ficara: Einleitung Marco Ivaldo: Skeptizismus bei Fichte mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Rolle des Zweifels in der »Bestimmung des Menschen« Angelica Nuzzo: A Question of Method: Transcendental Philosophy, Dialectic, and the Problem of Determination Rainer Schäfer: Kombinationen von Fundamentalismus, Kohärentismus und Skepsis bei Kant, Fichte und Hegel als Antworten auf Probleme gegenwärtiger Epistemologie Elena Ficara: Skeptizismus und die Begründung der Philosophie bei Kant und Hegel Lidia Gasperoni: Maimon und der Skeptizismus Jürgen Stahl: Skeptizismus und Kritik – zur Wandlung der (...) Kritikauffassung im transzendentalen Idealismus Fichtes Klaus Vieweg: Moralität, Ironie, Skeptizismus Rezensionen. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Stoicism Skepticism The Unhappy Consciousness References.

Being a subject and being conscious of being one are different realities. According to Hegel, the difference is not only conceptual, but also influences people's experience of the world and of one another. This book aims to explain some basic aspects of Hegel's conception of subjectivity with particular regard to the difference he saw in ancient and modern ways of thinking about and acting as individuals, persons and moral subjects.

This work shows that being must originally be understood as implication. We begin with what Heidegger calls Hegelrsquo;s lsquo;new concept of beingrsquo; in the emPhenomenology of Spirit/em: time as history is the essence of being. This concept however, is not univocalmdash;for supersession means destroying-preserving. Hegel shows himself to be the thinker of truth as essentially ambiguous; and the emPhenomenology/em is onto-heno-chrono-phenomenology, the history of the being and unity, time and aspect, of the conceptrsquo;s ambiguity. For Heidegger however, conceptual ambiguity confirms (...) that Hegelrsquo;s history of being is stuck in a vulgar interpretation of time; and the emPhenomenology/em can explain neither the origin of this time, nor the necessity of negation for the historical determination of beingmdash;for Hegel cannot think the ground of the concept of being, that is, the grounding of the ground. If Heidegger argues however, that the emPhenomenology/em is pre-determined by its ancient point of departure, we must go back to the Greeks, back to Aristotlersquo;s original insight : being and unity emimply/em one anothermdash;for they are essentially implications. Thus the question of the meaning of being becomes the question of the meaning of implication. (shrink)