Abstract

A dozen essays were initially presented at the 1972 conference of the Hegel Society of America. Two themes are treated. In the first three essays there is presentation and criticism of Hegel’s own evaluation of the relation between philosophic positions prior to his own, and philosophic truth; in the last nine there is more detailed discussion of Hegel’s dependence or influence of individual philosophers before and after his time. Of the first, for instance, A. R. Caponigri argues that there is a dilemma within Hegel: either the history of philosophy is irrelevant or redundant, over and above the logical deduction of its stages, or the actual deduction is redundant, because of the well-ordered nature of the history of philosophy. Thus he claims that Hegel is finally committed to moving in the direction of an "absolute historicism." Joseph Flay discusses the vexed problem of relating the history of philosophy to the point of departure for the Logic which Hegel claimed the Phenomenology to be. He argues cogently that a familiarity with the history of philosophy is presupposed by the Phenomenology, in order that it might be recalled; if the history of philosophy is not known, the experience recounted in the Phenomenology would collapse into a series of discrete stances towards truth, external to the philosopher.