Winfield’s explication of Hegel’s theory of mind, especially Hegel’s theory of intelligence, is, he suggests, important for solving three problems that continue to haunt contemporary work in the philosophy of mind and epistemology: 1) A problem concerning the acquisition of language and its place in an account of consciousness, 2) A problem concerning the objectivity of representations, and 3) A problem concerning the grounds of knowing. I think Winfield is correct in identifying all three problems as having their (...) source in Kantian philosophy. I examine these three problems more carefully through a critical lens aimed at recent work by John McDowell and Robert Brandom. Both philosophers claim certain Hegelian influences. I argue that, in crucial ways, both Brandom and McDowell have each inherited the problems Hegel sought to solve and that are so clearly articulated in Winfield’s essay. (shrink)

In this book, Richard Dien Winfield builds upon Hegel’s Aesthetics to provide a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the individual fine arts, which remedies Hegel's inconsistencies and major omissions. In addition to conceiving the general aesthetics and particular stylistic forms of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature, Winfield determines the fundamental character of the new arts of photography and cinema that the master thinkers of aesthetics never had the opportunity to consider. Winfield’s analysis covers a wide-ranging (...) array of artistic creations from diverse periods and cultures, while engaging in debate with the most important aesthetic theorists of the past and present. (shrink)

This book develops a comprehensive systematic economic theory, conceiving how the dynamic of market relations generates an economy dominated by the competitive process of individual profit-seeking enterprises. The author shows how, contrary to classical political economy and contemporary economics, the theory of capital is an a priori normative account properly belonging to ethics. Exposing and overcoming the limits of the economic conceptions of Hegel and Marx, Rethinking Capital determines how the system of capitals shapes economic freedom, jeopardizing the very rights (...) in whose exercise it consists. Winfield thereby provides the understanding required to guide the private and public interventions with which capitalism can be given a human face. (shrink)

The humanity formulation of Kant's Categorical Imperative demands that we treat humanity as an end in itself. Because this principle resonates with currently influential ideals of human rights and dignity, contemporary readers often find it compelling, even if the rest of Kant's moral philosophy leaves them cold. Moreover, some prominent specialists in Kant's ethics have recently turned to the humanity formulation as the most theoretically central and promising principle of Kant's ethics. Nevertheless, it has received less attention than many other (...) aspects of Kant's ethics. Richard Dean offers the most sustained and systematic examination of the humanity formulation to date. He presents an original analysis of what it means to treat humanity as an end in itself, and examines the implications both for Kant scholarship and for practical guidance on specific moral issues. (shrink)

The Intelligent Mind conceives the psychological reality of thought and language, explaining how intelligence develops from intuition to representation and then to linguistic interaction and thinking. Overcoming the prevailing dogmas regarding how discursive reason emerges, this book secures the psychological possibility of the philosophy of mind.

Winfield (philosophy, U. of Georgia) charges that the self- determination assailed by the postmodern credo is a strawman, and that spurning the autonomy of reason and action is not possible without that very independence.

At a time when the enemies of democracy cannot be dissuaded by appeals to shared values and conventions, nothing is more pressing than a thoroughgoing investigation of what the state should be. Whereas contemporary thinkers have mostly relativized political justice or conceived it as a formal concept lacking institutional detail, The Just State provides a comprehensive theory of self-government, legitimating democracy and concretely conceiving how political institutions should be organized. Carefully and clearly evaluating the fundamental options of normative political theory, (...) philosopher Richard Dien Winfield shows how political self-determination has an exclusive validity independent of any assumptions, enabling democracy to be successfully defended against postmodernists and antimodern fundamentalists. Winfield first examines the household, social, and cultural transformations that enable political emancipation. He then methodically details how self-government should be organized. Uniquely addressing all the central issues embroiling contemporary politics, The Just State determines how political parties should function; resolves controversies between participatory and representative democracy, majoritarian and proportional representation, presidential and parliamentary systems, and federalism and centralization; and examines the ramifications of international relations for political freedom. By tackling all the questions that political philosophers have abandoned to neutral description by political scientists, Winfield reclaims political relevance for normative theory. The Just State will be of key interest to law students, politicians, and citizens at large who wrestle with what a just constitution should mandate, how positive laws should be legislated and enforced, what content they should have, and how their constitutionality should be determined. (shrink)

NOTHING APPEARS LESS PROBLEMATIC than self-consciousness. Without it, no inquiry seems possible, for how can one seek knowledge unless one is aware of undertaking that quest? Moreover, consciousness of anything other than the self is always plagued with knowing something whose existence cannot lie in the consciousness of it. As Descartes observed, whenever one represents an object different from one’s consciousness, it is always doubtful whether that object exists or corresponds with its representation. By contrast, insofar as consciousness of one’s (...) self-consciousness is the very being of self-consciousness, the gap between object and representation here seems uniquely absent. Not only is my representation of myself as self-conscious constitutive of my being self-conscious, but nothing prevents that representation from corresponding to what it is about. (shrink)

This text provides a truly comprehensive guide to one of the most important and challenging works of modern philosophy. The systematic complexity of Hegel's radical project in the Science of Logic prevents many from understanding and appreciating its value. By independently and critically working through Hegel's argument, this book offers an enlightening aid for study and anchors the Science of Logic at a central position in the philosophical canon.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Traditional Dilemma Beyond Mind‐Body Dualisms The Failed Remedies of Spinoza and Materialist Reductions Dilemmas of the Aristotelian Solution Hegel's Conceptual Breakthrough for Comprehending the Nondualist Relation of Mind and Body Limits of Searle's Parallel Proposal The Self‐Development of Embodied Mind.

Through constructive arguments covering the principal topics and controversies in epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, Autonomy and Normativity demonstrates how truth, right and beauty can retain universal validity without succumbing to the mistaken Enlightenment strategy of seeking foundations for rational autonomy. Presenting a compact, yet comprehensive statement of a powerful and provocative alternative to the reigning orthodoxies of current philosophical debate, Richard Winfield employs Hegelian techniques and presents a radical and systematic critique of the work of mainstream thinkers including: (...) Kant, Rawls, Husserl and Habermas. This book offers an invaluable resource for students of both analytic and continental philosophical traditions, and related areas of law, social theory and aesthetics. (shrink)

Recently, a slew of Carl Schmitt’s political writings have been translated into English, making newly available his Concept of the Political, Political Theology, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, and Political Romanticism. Addressing the theory and practice of modern politics, these slim monographs at once tantalize and frustrate with their bold strokes, whose sweeping connections are more intimated than systematically developed. All four studies are united by a critique of liberal political theory and the depoliticization of modern institutions, a critique that (...) has found subsequent resonance among thinkers as diverse as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, and Jürgen Habermas. This dual critique has as its counterpart a positive doctrine of politics that Schmitt traces in reaction to the political crisis of our times. Both in its critique of liberalism and modern politics and in its affirmation of the political, Schmitt’s work lends itself to a confrontation with Hegel, that other modern thinker who repudiated liberalism and its political embodiments in an effort to re-establish the primacy of politics. (shrink)

Recently, a slew of Carl Schmitt’s political writings have been translated into English, making newly available his Concept of the Political, Political Theology, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, and Political Romanticism. Addressing the theory and practice of modern politics, these slim monographs at once tantalize and frustrate with their bold strokes, whose sweeping connections are more intimated than systematically developed. All four studies are united by a critique of liberal political theory and the depoliticization of modern institutions, a critique that (...) has found subsequent resonance among thinkers as diverse as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, and Jürgen Habermas. This dual critique has as its counterpart a positive doctrine of politics that Schmitt traces in reaction to the political crisis of our times. Both in its critique of liberalism and modern politics and in its affirmation of the political, Schmitt’s work lends itself to a confrontation with Hegel, that other modern thinker who repudiated liberalism and its political embodiments in an effort to re-establish the primacy of politics. (shrink)

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Rethinking in Seventeen Lectures provides a clear and philosophically engaging investigation of Hegel’s first masterpiece, perhaps the most revolutionary work of modern philosophy. The book guides the reader on an intellectual adventure that takes up Hegel’s revolutionary strategy of paving the way for doing philosophy without presuppositions by first engaging in a phenomenological investigation of knowing as it appears.

In face of the fashionable dogma that we must choose between procedural ethics and communitarianism, the neglected alternative of an ethics without foundations warrants careful demarcation. George Lucas aims at undermining its distinctiveness, treating the system of right argued for in Reason and Justice as a bastard theory incongruously melding the formalism of procedural ethics with modes of community that should better be conceived as historical conventions.

The proliferation of arts may be a commonplace phenomena, with old arts changing and new arts arising with every novel turn in technology. Yet, just as the diverse experiments of artists demand, rather than render superfluous, an adjudication of the boundary between art and prosaic things, the parade of old, transmuted and newborn arts equally calls into question the identities of the arts that it continually spews forth. The existence of artworks cannot of itself provide any unequivocal guidelines for demarcating (...) one art from another or for establishing their totality. (shrink)

Beauty's joining of meaning and configuration involves a concrete universality exhibiting the logic of self-determination distinguishing the reality of rational agency. Consequently, natural beauty presents a challenge to aesthetics. An examination of the ordering principles commonly ascribed to nature (the abstract universality of efficient causality, the generic universality of species being, and the reciprocal functionality of organic unity) shows that they all lack concrete universality, establishing that aesthetics must be the philosophy of art and that natural beauty has aesthetic value (...) only as a derivative projection of artistic beauty. (shrink)

Introduction Nothing seems more accessible than mind, whose essential subjectivity always reveals mind to itself. Whether feeling its own feeling, ...

Here is a universal biology that draws upon the contributions of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel to unravel the mystery of life and conceive what is essential to living things anywhere they may arise. The book develops a philosopher’s guide to life in the universe, conceiving how nature becomes a biosphere in which life can emerge, what are the basic life processes common to any organism, how evolution can give rise to the different possible forms of life, and what distinguishes the (...) essential life forms from one another. (shrink)

From Concept to Objectivity uncovers the nature and authority of conceptual determination by critically thinking through neglected arguments in Hegel's Science of Logic pivotal for understanding reason and its role in philosophy. Winfield clarifies the logical problems of presuppositionlessness and determinacy that prepare the way for conceiving the concept, examines how universality, particularity, and individuality are determined, investigates how judgment and syllogism are exhaustively differentiated, and, on that basis, explores how objectivity can be categorized without casting thought in irrevocable (...) opposition to reality. Winfield's book will be of interest to readers of Hegel, as well as anyone wondering how thought can be objective. (shrink)

Although Hegel has frequently been granted felicitous insight into the rich detail of known facts, his strategy for conceiving reality has been roundly dismissed as a relic of philosophical hypertrophy. Such dismissal is certainly understandable considering how often Hegel’s theory of reality has been interpreted to be the child of either a leviathan metaphysical construction or a demonically inventive transcendental constitution. Unfortunately, the weight of these interpretations has not just led to the general discrediting of Hegel’s system. It has also (...) virtually banished from view a central strand in Hegel’s argument which suggests an entirely different approach offering a viable, yet ignored strategy for conceiving reality without falling prey to the foundational dilemmas afflicting metaphysical and transcendental argument. There is no better way of comprehending the significance and neglected promise of this strategy than first following in broad outline the path of inquiry which has led to the quagmire in which thought today confronts reality. (shrink)

From the beginnings of philosophical investigation, there has been widespread recognition that reason must be autonomous to think the truth and that philosophy must be the freest of all disciplines. Nonetheless, conceiving how self-determination can be in thought and reality seems to pose insurmountable challenges. The essay shows how these challenges can be met, explaining how the nature of the concept enables reason to be autonomous, how nature can give rise to animal life, providing the enabling conditions for linguistic intelligence, (...) how the psychological and cultural conditions of discourse leave it free, and how conduct can achieve self-determination in the intersubjective exercise of institutionalized rights. (shrink)

Philosophy can begin neither by making claims about the given nor by investigating knowing, since, in either way, unjustified assumptions must be made. In the face of this predicament, Hegel presents his Phenomenology of Spirit as the only viable introduction to philosophy, introducing presuppositionless science by immanently critiquing the construal of knowing which presumes that cognition always has assumptions, always confronts some given. Can the challenge of completing this immanent critique in all its daunting complexity be avoided by alternative shortcuts? (...) The article examines four such options: Hegel’s complementary introductions to the Science of Logic and arguments on how the self-referential inconsistencies of transcendental investigation and foundationalism resolve themselves. All these alternative shortcuts are shown to rest on assumptions that only the full phenomenological investigation can overcome. (shrink)

A rigorously argued and uncompromising presentation of the neo- Hegelian view that a foundation-free philosophy is possible, that normative validity derives only from self-determination, and that justice is tied to reason and consists in ...