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)
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.
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)
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)
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)
Over twenty years after the 1989 General Assembly voted to open the Convention on the Rights of the Child for signature, the United States remains only one of two UN members not to have ratified it. The other is Somalia. This book explores the reasons for this resistance (back cover). The book highlights the priority of ethical human rights over legal human rights. Part One includes contributions by educators and child psychologists who favor and use the Convention even when it (...) is not ratified. Part Two includes two chapters by opponents of the Convention by home-schooling advocates. Part Three examines child rights in the developing world. (shrink)
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)
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)
Earlier in the century, Richard Kroner in Von Kant bis Hegel gave us an orderly reconstruction of the development from Kant to Hegel. He thematized German idealism sympathetically from the inside, aiming to present it in and for itself. But a writer such as Kroner prefers a logical march of concepts, thus paying comparatively less attention to the often strange empirical details of intellectual history. The danger is that with such a writer the school’s self-consciousness, its being-for-itself, might be a (...) false consciousness, a being-outside-itself, a merely posited being-for-self, not a self-positing being-for-self, not a being-in-and-for-itself. Historical scholarship since Kroner has grown increasingly sensitive to the risks of over-schematization and the excessive systematization of history. It has come to be inspired by reverence for the original text, the scholarly thing in itself. (shrink)
World history has been consigned by professional historians to textbooks for the public schools. But people will obtain ideological or mytihcal notions of the meaning of history unless philosophers ofhistory step in to rationally regulate accounts of world history. Despite its dependenc in most cases on secondary sources, world history not an impossible academic research disclipline due to the countless cultures and ethnic groups in history--much as astronomy is not impossible due the countless celestial objects. To understand world history it (...) is enough to distinguish a finite number of role model nations as distinct from nations that follow in their wake. The paper seeks to legitimate the sort of philosophical world history research pursued by 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. (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)
This article distinguishes between dogmatism as usually understood, unconditional dogmatism, and "dogmatism" in good sense, heuristic dogmatism. Reprinted as "Philosophy: What it is and Why" in Statements, edited for classroom use by Kathleen Squadrito, pp. 1-10.
Rosen’s book renews the skeptical attack on Hegelianism. He pursues the attack well - perhaps as well as the case permits - and thus exposes Hegelianism to the discipline of an instructive test. He in fact concedes less to Hegel than his fellow anti-Hegelian in the skeptical tradition, Jacques Derrida. For where Derrida admits that Hegel is rationally impregnable and thus resorts to mockery and jest, Rosen ultimately denies such impregnability. True, Hegelianism cannot be criticized except from a standpoint within (...) the system - which rules out negative criticism of the system. Yet behind this seeming imperviousness to criticism lurks a fatal criticism: the mere existence of internally rational standpoints outside the system refutes its claim - and apparently the claim of any philosophy - to being the universal system of human reason. (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)
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)
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)
Human rights have increasingly come to the center of political and social philosophy since 1945. The have been widely discussed in publications on topical human rights issues, in the work of some of the most notable philosophers of the time like Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, and in volumes on global justice. But, despite Habermas work in Diskurs Ethik, discussion ethics has never clearly been presented as a normative ethical theory in competition with the classical rivals such as utilitarianism and (...) Kantian ethics. This paper makes a clear, concise case recognition of human rights ethics as a contemporary normative ethical theory, and for its inclusion in future elementary textbooks. Universal legal human rights protect the central ethical human right to freedom of expression. Human Rights Ethics supersedes classical theories based on evident first principles because these principles are either merely asserted without justification or are justified by being superseded by the final self-justifying standard of definable ethical discussion. The very refutation of human rights ethics could be sound only through ethical discussion, with all parties exercising the ethical, but not yet universally legal, right to freedom of expression. Hence the refutation of the ethical right to freedom of expression cannot be sound. (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 may flourish within human rights ethics as the universal ethical minimum. (shrink)
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)
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)
