Journal of the History of Philosophy

Giorgi Lebanidze's book is a welcome contribution to the literature on Hegel's logic and metaphysics. It provides a well-grounded account of the ontologico-metaphysical relevance of Hegel's thought, and locates it within a lucid reconstruction of recent debates. As the [End Page 825] author argues in the introduction, two lines have dominated the English-speaking literature on Hegel in the last thirty years: an epistemological reading that brings Hegel close to Kant, and a metaphysical reading that decouples Hegel from Kant. Paradigmatic for the two readings are for Lebanidze Robert Pippin's groundbreaking Hegel's Idealism (1989) on the one side, and Robert Stern's Hegelian Metaphysics (2009) and Brady Bowman's Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity (2013) on the other. These readings are, for Lebanidze, important contributions to Hegel scholarship. However, they confront us with a false dilemma. Pippin's book had the indisputable merit of discarding the hitherto dominant account of Hegel's philosophy in terms of spiritualistic metaphysics, and paved the way for a genuine dialogue between Hegel and contemporary philosophy by translating Hegel's technical vocabulary into a language accessible to everybody, especially to those schooled in the analytic tradition. Stern and Bowman are closer to more traditionalist readings of Hegel. At the same time, they develop their positions on the background of and in explicit contradistinction to Pippin's Hegel. Perhaps for this reason, they see distancing Hegel from Kant as a necessary condition for their projects. This division into two camps rests, as Lebanidze shows, on the false assumption "that the Kantian and metaphysical reading mutually exclude each other" (xi). The task of the book is thus to unfold a third interpretative hypothesis, showing that Hegel both advances a new kind of ontology and further develops the Kantian transcendental project.

Lebanidze calls the new Hegelian ontology transcendental. Its background is Kant's own ontological project, according to which "a) the basic categories of being are to be traced back to the cognitive constitution of the subject, and b) the scope of these categories is confined to experience" (xix). That the Hegelian ontology is transcendental means, for Lebanidze, that it is a theory of the self-relational activity of thought "that generates and grounds the determinations of thought as well as the actuality as we know it" (xx). Kant conceived of this activity as transcendental apperception; Hegel conceived of it as the basic feature of the Concept. Lebanidze also underlines the main difference between the Kantian and the Hegelian ontological projects: "concepts in Hegel no longer need sensible given in order to have objective purport. The determinations of thought that are generated through the synthetic activity of the Hegelian Concept render reality accessible for us without any external element" (xx).

Since the main determinations of reality (the categories) are, in Kant as well as in Hegel, rooted in the self-relational activity of the Apperception (Kant) or the Concept (Hegel), the Doctrine of the Concept is for Lebanidze the focus of Hegel's new ontology, and its analysis is the specific topic of the book. In the first chapter, Lebanidze introduces Hegel's new approach to ontology by considering the Vorbegriff section of the Encyclopaedia Logic. This section is for Lebanidze important because it helps explain Hegel's project by contrasting it with the ontological models Hegel rejects. The second chapter is about the Kantian roots of Hegel's theory of the Concept in the Doctrine of Essence. The next four chapters are devoted to Hegel's Subjective Logic.

As mentioned earlier, Lebanidze develops his discussion of Hegel's Doctrine of Concept in a dialogue with Pippin, Stern, and Bowman; he also includes other contemporary Englishspeaking interpretations: Béatrice Longuenesse's, Robert Brandom's, and John McDowell's readings of Hegel play an important role in the book. This constant dialogue is, on the one hand, useful as it helps explain Hegel's unquestionably difficult language in the Science of Logic by translating it into categories that are more accessible to...