_Resumo_ Este artigo tem por objetivo problematizar a ideia de ser a América Latina um espaço do _puro contingente_, como defende o filósofo argentino Enrique Dussel. Recorrendo a um evento extraordinário do século XIX, a Revolução Haitiana, defendemos a ideia que, mesmo no espaço colonial, é possível encontrar a circulação e a defesa de ideias universais. Mais do que isso, essa revolução apresenta um bom exemplo de como podemos refletir sobre a _universalidade hegeliana_, elaborada por dois grandes pensadores contemporâneos: Susan (...) Buck-Morss e Slavoj Žižek. _ _ _Palavras-chave: _Dussel; Buck-Morss; Žižek; universalidade hegeliana. _ _ _Abstract_ _ _ This article aims to problematize the idea of Latin America being a space of _pure contingent_, as defended by the Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel. Using an extraordinary event from the 19th century, the Haitian Revolution, we defend the idea that, even in the colonial space, it is possible to find the circulation and defense of universal ideas. More than that, this revolution presents a good example of how we can reflect on the _Hegelian universality_, elaborated by two great contemporary thinkers: Susan Buck-Morss and Slavoj Žižek. _ _ _Key-words: _Dussel; Buck-Morss; Žižek; hegelian universality. _ _. (shrink)

This article explores the Hegelian ‘night of the world’ that plays such an important role in Žižek’s theorisation of the subject. In the first part, I examine how the themes of the “pre-synthetic imagination” and “abstract negativity" are crucial to understanding Žižek’s theorisation of the Hegelian subject. In the second part, I consider how this Hegelian model of the subject is decisive for understanding Žižek’s conception of Hegelian “concrete universality,” and how the latter concept figures prominently (...) in Žižek’s analysis of the relationship between the abstract negativity of the subject and the political question of confronting global capitalism. Žižek’s unorthodox reading of the Hegelian ‘night of the world’—the radical negativity that haunts subjectivity—is developed further in an explicitly political direction. This Hegelian theme helps explain Žižek’s recent critique of the ‘Fukuyamaian’ consensus, shared both by moral-religious conservatives and libertarian ‘postmodernists’, that global capitalism remains the ‘unsurpassable horizon of our times’. In conclusion I raise some questions about Žižek’s combining of abstract and determinate negation in his ‘romantic’ reading of the negativity of the Hegelian subject. I then critically examine the implications Žižek draws from this analysis in In Defense of Lost Causes , which presents a sustained argument to reclaim the revolutionary tradition of Leftist politics. (shrink)

A Hegelian Liberal Theory of the Penal Law Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 219-224 DOI 10.1007/s11572-011-9119-8 Authors Alfonso Donoso, Pontificia Universidad Cat’olica de Chile, ICP, Santiago, Chile Journal Criminal Law and Philosophy Online ISSN 1871-9805 Print ISSN 1871-9791 Journal Volume Volume 5 Journal Issue Volume 5, Number 2.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 167 they regard as the Standard of every Thing, and which they will not submit to the superior Light of Revelation?" (p. 21) is the Hume we have come to accept, Hume the philosopher, Hume the foe of superstition and enthusiasm. Indeed, upon reading the Letter it seems that one must ask himself if Hume;s desire for this position--and the financial security it would offer--has not (...) affected his response. We know that in his later life Hume flatly refused to debate the multitude of clergymen who attacked his works. Not even so respectable a philosopher as Thomas Reid could elicit a public response from him. Why then did he reply to a philosophical scoundrel such as Wishart? Of course, one could suggest that Courts and Kames and perhaps others may have urged Hume to this reply in his own interest. But that, to me, is precisely the point: Why so unusual a concern in just this case, and why one which seems to undercut some of what are thought to be Hume's most daring and creative analyses? These are not rhetorical questions, but queries of importance to those who wish to see Hume and his work whole. The Letter ]rom a Gentleman does shed important light on the Treatise. Professor Mossner was quite correct in his surmise. But I believe that it raises more questions than it answers--and for this reason too we are fortunate that it has been added to the Hume bibliography. DAVZDFATE NORTON Edinburgh, Scotland THE HEGELIAN DANTE OF WILLIAM TORREY HARRIS William Torrey Harris is remembered as the foremost American exponent of Hegelianism; as founder of the Philosophical Society (1866); as editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy (1867-93); as U.S. Commissioner of Education (1889-1906); and as founder, with Miss Susan E. Blow, of the first permanent public school kindergarten in America. He also gave Melville Dewey the order of the ten subiect classes of his famous book classification system, and was co-founder of the Library Journal. Harris was born in North Killingsly, Connecticut in 1835. He studied at Phillips Andovcr Academy, and at Yale University, from which he withdrew in his junior year to accept a teaching position in St. Louis, Missouri in 1857. In St. Louis he met Henry C. Brockmeyer, a German immigrant and intellectual, and under his influence began a lifelong commitment to the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He states that Hegel's philosophy became the center of all his thinking, but he nevertheless ~vent on to study the works of the other great thinkers, including those of Dante Alighieri. In 1883-84 he gave a series of lectures in St. Louis on Dante, and again in 1886 at the Concord School of Philosophy. These lectures were later expanded and published as The Spiritual Sense o] Dante's Divina Commedia, in Boston, by Houghton in 1889, and reissued in 1896. 168 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The form of the Divina Commedia is a massive triadic structure of written words developed by exhaustive repetition of the terza rima. Structurally it is a development of the concept of The Trinity. The reader who knew not a single word of Italian could not escape having the Trinitarian notion hammered into his consciousness. Harris, however, was more concerned with meaning than form, and so he considered the triadic format a relatively trivial matter. Harris uses the Commedia to illustrate by imaginative representation the dialectic of the Holy Trinity to the American Protestant while explaining it with Hegelian logic. In summary he writes, "The doctrine of the divine form, or the self-activity of the absolute, involves the common nature of man and God, or God as divine human. This is the great central truth (of which the doctrine of the Trinity is the symbol) on which all modern civilization is built, and it is its open secret." Dante's Inferno corresponds with Hegel's logical and ontological level, called "Sein," the realm of abstract-unconscious-being-for-another. The Purgatory corresponds with his level "Wesen," the realm of mediated being in which the self is conscious of its being-in-and-for-another... (shrink)

If we think of recognition as the practical relation consciously enacted by concerned individual subjects as social actors, which allows them to fulfil their intersubjectively valid social roles, this by no means exhausts the significance that recognition is accorded by Hegel. In fact the problem of recognition is central to the understanding and evaluation of Hegel’s metaphysical system. Thus a close scrutiny of the presentation of self-consciousness in Phenomenology of Spirit and the interpretative difficulties it poses leads on to the (...) question of the subject and Hegel’s distinction between finite, accidental individuals and the true subject in his system: the concept of Spirit, understood not as a separate entity but as a system of relations, objectified in the historical forms of the Absolute Spirit. But what is the price of Hegel’s metaphysics of subjectivity? Hegelian recognition signifies the recognition by individuals of recognition in its truth, that is, the self-recognition by finite individuals that they participate in Spirit as the true universal subject to the degree that they recognize their shared world of actions as the world of their own making. Modernity is therefore defined for Hegel as the recognition and realization of ‘conscious freedom’, whose telos lies in the actualization of universal reciprocal recognition that brings the unfreedom of history to an end. The idea of freedom and the thesis of the ‘end of history’ remain, however, the preserve of the thinking few. Hegelian recognition and with it Hegel’s whole metaphysical system founders on the rock of finitude, on the unfreedom of finite human beings. (shrink)

Feminists have long been aware that the notion of women is problematic and using it uncritically without further qualifications leads to exclusions. In the article, I argue that the source of these problems lies in the understanding of concepts as static and clearly defined. I deploy Hegel’s idea of syllogism to define dynamic concepts, which I term ‘fractal concepts’ because of their complexity and constant development. In such structures the balance between the universal, the particular and the individual is maintained (...) and, consequently, every woman is essential for the definition of such a non-essentialist notion of women. I propose that an epistemological interpretation of the Hegelian idea of recognition can be used to describe the development of fractal concepts in the confrontation of different perspectives. It also explains the obstruction of this process by the desire for domination and control, which results in the appropriation of group identities by their privileged members. I situate the logical and political framework developed in the paper in the context of feminist controversies around the concept of woman and argue that it provides us with a comprehensive account of intersectionality as well as an explicative solution to the regress problem. (shrink)

The task of confronting Hegel with the conflicts of our present proves to be indispensable to keep alive the critical scope of dialectics. In a context marked by a new wave of movements that challenge the racist structures that inform our societies, the question of the contribution of Hegelianism to an anti-racist thought takes a significant relevance.The hypothesis of this article argues that it is possible to distinguish two different operations that shape an anti-racist critique with the resources of (...) class='Hi'>Hegelian dialectical thought. The first one is constituted by the exegetical practice aiming to identify, within Hegel’s own discourse, a speculative core that allows the definitive overcoming of all ethno-racial particularisms through the postulation of a normative universal horizon. Such interpretative perspective, shared by numerous scholars, seeks the absorption of Hegel’s racist and Eurocentric assertions in the larger and global scope of his system. Once the limitation of this option is shown, we will examine an alternative operation, namely, the rewritings of the dialectical thought in certain philosophical reflections arising from the concreteness of anti-racist movements. To that extent, we will revisit the proposals of W.E.B Du Bois and Frantz Fanon as peripheral enunciations of the dialectic that enable a new understanding on the subjectivation processes and liberation horizons of racialized communities. (shrink)

pp. 79–103 The idea of utility in Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments Rosen, F.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hegelian RhetoricThora Ilin BayerIntroduction: Rhetoric and DialecticAristotle in the famous first line of his Rhetoric defines the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic: "Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic" (1354a). Both rhetoric and dialectic belong to no definitive science. They treat those things that come within the purview of all human beings. As an antistrophes to dialectic, rhetoric concerns particular cases and "may be defined as the faculty [dynamis] (...) of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" (1355b). Dialectic concerns reasoning on general issues and in its generality it is like deduction. But unlike deductive demonstration, dialectic, as Aristotle says in Topics, "reasons from reputable opinions," rather than from premises that are true and primitive (100a).Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason takes a more extreme view of dialectic than Aristotle. Kant regards dialectic as a logic of illusion (Schein) that occurs when reason takes its powers beyond experience to make claims concerning the nature of the soul, world, and God. When reason attempts to determine the nature of what the soul is in itself, its assertions end in paralogisms; when it does so about the world its claims end in antinomies; and when it does so about God its efforts end in the impossibilities of the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments. Kant regards rhetoric as having no role in the philosophical pursuit of truth. In the Critique of Judgment Kant classifies rhetoric (Beredsamkeit) as belonging [End Page 203] to fine art. He regards ars oratoria as an art of manipulation and deception that achieves its end by a beautiful show (Schein) of speech that plays upon human weaknesses. He says oratory deserves no respect whatsoever—"ist gar keiner Achtung würdig" (1951, 172n50; 1974, 185n).1 Kant's exclusion of rhetoric from Kritik (with which he identifies philosophy) establishes the general exclusion of rhetoric in the development of philosophical idealism.Hegel interpretation for a century and a half presumed that rhetoric was irrelevant to understanding Hegel's thought. It considered Hegel's dialectic as a method independent of any connection to rhetoric. The first book on Hegel in English, James Hutchinson Stirling's The Secret of Hegel, published in 1863, regards the key to Hegel's system as his formulation of the concrete universal (Begriff). He makes no reference to rhetoric as an element in Hegel's thought (1887, xxii). In his preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel mentions Plato's Parmenides as "surely the greatest artistic achievement of the ancient dialectic," but he makes no mention of rhetoric (1952, 57; 1977, 44). A ground for ignoring rhetoric as important for Hegel's philosophy is the fact that Hegel himself ignores it. There is no discussion of rhetoric (Redekunst) in his whole corpus beyond a few pages concerning the differences between poetry and prose in his Lectures on Fine Art (1986, 15:257–68; 1998, 2:986–95).All of the approaches to Hegel in nonrhetorical terms changed with the appearance of Donald Phillip Verene's Hegel's Recollection: A Study of Images in the "Phenomenology of Spirit" (1985) followed by John H. Smith's The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel's Philosophy of "Bildung" (1988).2 Verene's work showed that there is a dialectic between image (Bild) and concept (Begriff) within Hegel's mode of expression that provides the reader with a necessary means of access to the work. Smith's study showed not only that Hegel employs rhetorical principles in the composition of the Phenomenology but that Hegel in his early years studied rhetoric closely and was concerned to master it. Smith's work, although developed independently of Verene's, joined with it to present a new reading of Hegel. This poetical and rhetorical grasp of Hegel's thought has been recently restated in Verene's Hegel's Absolute (2007).My views that follow begin where Verene's and Smith's accounts leave off. I wish to consider two questions that extend what has been broached in their readings of Hegel. (1) In what sense does Hegel's Phenomenology embody a transformation of the Aristotelian conception of rhetoric as an antistrophes to dialectic? (2) To... (shrink)

In a crossed-out section in his Fisk University commencement address on Otto von Bismarck, W. E. B. Du Bois mentions that Hegel was one of the figures that influenced him early on in his intellectual development. I argue that although Du Bois uses Hegelian language and employs a Hegelian conception of history in his address “The Conservation of Races,” he abandons both in his essay “Sociology Hesitant.” He became critical of the teleological conception of history because it rests (...) on determinism, which in his view denies the possibility for social change. With what I call his “mystical holism,” Du Bois is at odds with Hegel’s methodological holism, a distinguishing characteristic of absolute idealism. Du Bois’s dynamic idealism, which grows out of opposition to Hegelian idealism, leaves us with hope for a world without racism or at the very least in a better position to develop idealism as an anti-racist system of philosophical thought. (shrink)

Todd A. Gooch - The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.4 667-668 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Todd Gooch Eastern Kentucky University Douglas Moggach, editor. The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv + 345. Cloth, $75.00. Of the thirteen essays collected in this volume, several of which (...) discuss more than one thinker, approximately three are devoted to Marx, two to Feuerbach, two to Bruno Bauer, two to Max Stirner, and one each to Eduard Gans, Edgar Bauer, and Friedrich Engels. Underlying the diversity of their individual positions, these "New Hegelians" were united by a common interest in exploiting the conceptual resources of Hegelian.. (shrink)

Semën [Simon] Liudvigovich Frank was born in Moscow, the son of a doctor. He studied law at Moscow University, joined a student Marxist group headed by P.B. Struve, and as a result was barred by the Russian authorities from living in any of the Russian “university cities.” He continued his university education at the Universities of Berlin and Munich. His first published work was a critique of Marx’s theory of value. Between 1902 and 1905 he divided his time among Berlin, (...) Munich, and Moscow. In 1902 he published his first philosophical essay, on Nietzsche’s doctrine of Fernstenliebe. He was a contributor—along with Nicolas Berdyaev, S.N. Bulgakov, and Struve—to three influential symposium volumes: Problemy idealizma [Problems of idealism], Vekhi [Signposts], and Iz glubiny [De profundis]. This last work was printed but its release was blocked by Soviet censorship. All of these works were originally published in Moscow; all of them have, in the past three or four years, been republished in Moscow, but for more than seventy years they were banned in the Soviet Union and could be reprinted only abroad. (shrink)

The latest volume of the New Studies in Ethics series, Hegelian Ethics, has recently been published by St. Martin's Press, New York. The author is W. H. Walsh of the University of Edinburgh. The editor of the series, W. D. Hudson of the University of Exeter, says in his preface "Professor Walsh's monograph reintroduces Hegelian ethics to us. With great skill he redeems the vigour of Hegel's thought from the obscurities of its original expression and brings out its (...) main lines very clearly. He also rescues Hegel's view that morality is primarily a social rather than a personal phenomenon from misunderstanding. Showing Hegel's debt to, and divergences from, Kant, he presents an exposition of the former's ethic which is sympathetic but hot uncritical." THE OWL intends to review the book in the fall issue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian ReformationGiving a Hearing to The Parallax ViewAdrian Johnston (bio)Slavoj Žižek. THE PARALLAX VIEW. Cambridge: MIT P, 2006. [PV]Near the end of a two-hour presentation at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 10, 2006, Slavoj Žižek confesses that, in terms of the intellectual ambitions nearest to his heart, “my secret dream is to be Hegel’s Luther” [“Why Only an Atheist Can Believe”]. This confession (...) comes just months after the publication of his latest major work, The Parallax View, a book described as a new magnum opus. There are ample justifications within this text to license retroactively rereading it through the lens of Žižek’s subsequent public admission that he is now preoccupied with rescuing Hegel from the numerous misinterpretations to which this giant of German idealism (who casts such a long shadow over the Continental European philosophical tradition) has been repeatedly subjected over the past two hundred years. The Parallax View, at certain points explicitly and in other places implicitly, can be seen as centered on an effort to confront aggressively the various received versions of Hegel widely accepted as official and orthodox exegetical renditions. The motif of the “parallax gap,” elaborated in a plethora of guises throughout this 2006 tome, condenses and reflects the axiomatic theses of what could be called Žižek’s Hegelian reformation.The critical assessment of The Parallax View offered here seeks to go straight to its theoretical heart by highlighting a single line of argumentation running through the full span of this text’s different moments and phases. Žižek’s own Hegelian-style conceptions of truth (as fiercely partisan rather than calmly neutral) and universality (as immanently concrete rather than transcendently abstract) validate such an interpretive approach—“universal Truth is accessible only from a partial engaged subjective position” [PV 35]. Deliberately extracting particular conceptual constellations and forcing them to link up with each other according to the plan of a certain directed philosophical agenda promises to be much more revealing of the essential features of Žižekian thought than a comprehensive survey of this latest of his major works.The specific argumentative thread to be isolated here is the new extended engagement with the terrain covered by cognitive science and the neurosciences. Apart from the task of denouncing falsifying popular pictures of Hegel, one of Žižek’s other driving ambitions in this book is the desire to formulate a fundamental ontology appropriate to the theory of subjectivity mapped out over the course of his entire intellectual itinerary (a theory informed by Kant and post-Kantian German idealism combined with Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology). And, herein, the articulation of such an ontology appropriately gets entangled, via reflections on the nature of the brain, with the latest instantiations of the perennial philosophical problem of the relationship between mind and [End Page 3] body. Žižek grants that the central nervous system is, in at least several undeniable and important senses, the material, corporeal ground of the subject, the bodily being without which there cannot be the parlêtre (speaking being). But, in the spirit of Schelling and Hegel (especially their philosophies of “productive” nature), the fashions in which Žižek attempts to tie together systematically a materialist ontology with an account of more-than-material, transontological subjectivity illuminate a normally obscured and ignored set of implied consequences flowing from the gesture of dissolving hard-and-fast dualist distinctions between body and mind, nature and spirit.The past few decades of philosophical engagement with the neurosciences, an engagement almost completely monopolized by the Anglo-American Analytic philosophical tradition and neglected by the Continental European philosophical tradition to an equal degree, has emphasized (to put this in the vernacular of German idealism) the naturalization of spirit resulting from the collapse of any strict nature-spirit dichotomy. The materialisms promoted by those Analytic philosophers amenable to grounding the mental on the neuronal simply assume that the outcome of folding mind and matter into each other is a becoming-material of the mind, namely, a naturalization of the spirit (that is, the mind comes to resemble the brain conceived of as just another part... (shrink)

Are normative reasons based in our desires, or are they instead grounded in our rational faculties? A familiar way of approaching this question focuses on the fact that individuals are often motivated by very different concerns. Our desires seem to provide us with operative or motivating reasons that are not shared by others, and the question is whether desires can also provide us with different good or normative reasons. Reasons internalism is the view that an agent’s normative reasons for action (...) must be within the reach of his or her interest and understanding. Many contemporary followers of Hume as well as Kant endorse this view, but their versions of internalism differ in one key respect. The Humean view is that reasons are relative to the particular motivations of individuals and thus not universally shared. In contrast, the Kantian view is that being fully rational involves converging on reasons that all agents share as such. But what is common to both of these versions of reasons internalism is a focus on the relative powers of the faculties of reason and desire. Hegel, however, introduces an interesting and distinctive way of approaching the question of the source or grounding of normative reasons. Instead of focusing exclusively on the relative powers of inner faculties, Hegel proposes that what we have reasons to do depends largely upon how we understand ourselves within an actual social space. We will consider three different versions of this claim, the most plausible of which sheds new light on reasons internalism. We need not think that there are only two possibilities: either reasons are universal or they are relative to subjective motivations. Instead, what distinguishes a Hegelian approach is the contention that what counts as normative depends in part upon fundamental self-conceptions that we share as participants in a complex social world. (shrink)

This paper aims to develop a strong account of recognition. It begins with a Hegel-inspired account of recognition as a fundamental desire that drives humanity. This account establishes recognition as fundamental to the initial subject formation of independent self-consciousnesses as agents. I offer the lord-bondsman dualism to provide a critique of domination as oppositional to securing the means for recognition. This entails that, as history progresses the world ought to move towards universally adopting mutual recognition relationships without domination. I adopt (...) this goal as an ideal form of recognition. In Chapter 2, I apply this recognitional framework to gender. Through analyzing four theories of gender, I find the recognition of identity has a significant role in shaping the self-consciousness’ self-determination. Recognitional dialogue can enable one to learn new parts of the self, but often forms of recognition dominate and constrain what identity can be. Thus, I explore three prominent methods of harmful recognition in Chapter 3: domination, intelligibility, and misrecognition. I view these harmful recognition methods as undermining mutual recognition relationships through examples such as recognizing deprecating self-images of minority groups and overwriting self-determinations through wrongful or lack of recognition. Despite these difficulties, I propose solutions such as an unintelligibility account which focuses on enabling mutual recognition relationships within group identities rather than society. In Chapter 4 I apply this robust recognitional framework to technology, which I understand as a locus for contemporary problems with recognition. I discuss technologies’ recognitional role as mirrors for humans, that often reflect yet threaten to replace us. I turn to understanding data as a technology that enables harmful recognition in the present day. I find technology is not neutral regarding recognition relationships, but can uphold mutual or harmful recognition depending on how it is used. With my account of recognition developed, I return to the goal of universally achieving mutual recognition relationships. I employ Halberstam’s account of failure to offer hope for achieving mutual recognition despite the many forms of harmful recognition. (shrink)

Looking at the emergence recently of a New Hegelianism (Badiou, Bhaskar, Jameson, Žižek), in which Hegel’s dialectic is variously reassessed for its political and philosophical resistance to the prevailing ‘weak nihilisms’ of left and right, I argue with Žižek and Jameson against Badiou and Bhaskar for Hegel as, essentially, a philosopher of the ‘productive return’ and failure. In this sense, what emerges is a picture of Hegel as a profoundly nonlinear historical thinker, in which loss, dissolution, breakdown and the excremental (...) prevail. This means that the received notion of Hegel as a crude historicist is deeply problematic. But, more importantly, it means that Hegelian dialectic can find a renewed anti-teleological and non-synchronistic identity within the Marxist tradition. Content Type Journal Article Category Article Pages 72-98 Authors John Roberts, University of Wolverhampton Journal Journal of Critical Realism Online ISSN 1572-5138 Print ISSN 1476-7430 Journal Volume Volume 12 Journal Issue Volume 12, Number 1 / 2013. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Some Common Misunderstandings How Different Are PGW, FUL, and FLN? The Role of the Universal Law Formulas Issues Regarding the Maxim and its Universal Counterpart The Two Hegelian Objections Contradictions in Conception Contradictions in the Will Three Persistent Problems and One Very Modest Proposal Bibliography.

Karl Theodor Bayrhoffer was born in Marburg Germany on October 14, 1812. Bayrhoffer first taught philosophy at Marburg University, there becoming a Full Professor in 1845. But in 1846, having been suspended from his teaching by reason of his politically free-thinking activities on behalf of the atheistic Lichtfreunde movement, he entered into Hessian politics, becoming - during its last week - the President of the Hesse Electorial Council. To escape political persecution in the period of the 1848 revolution, he, his (...) wife, and their six children emigrated to the United States in 1852. He purchased a farm of 140 acres in Jordan, Green Country, Wisconsin. The following year, his wife died. He soon remarried to a Charlotte Draz, who lived until 1864, being survived not only by her husband but by their two children. (shrink)

This paper introduces America's first women Idealists and discusses their appropriation and reconfiguration of Hegel's public/private distinction. Through their philosophies of education two of these women, Susan E. Blow (1843--1916) and Anna C. Brackett (1836--1911), legitimized women's active involvement in public life. A third, Marietta Kies (1853--1899), put forth a political theory of altruism. Her theory anticipates feminist critiques of male-centered political theory and has important implications for today's ethic of care. Blow and Brackett were associates of William T. Harris (...) (1835--1909) in the St. Louis Philosophical Movement (ca. 1860--1880) and contributors to The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Kies was associated with Harris through the Concord Summer School of Philosophy (1879--1888). She was also a student of John Dewey at the University of Michigan. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the way Williams elaborates, defends, and recommends Hegel’s revision of Christianity, which makes possible a Christianity free from the defects of its pre-modern form without collapsing into atheism and humanism. The essay begins by examining the development of Williams’s case in Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God and in Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God. This examination shows that Williams uses Hegel’s critique of pre-modern Christianity to demonstrate that modernity, in which discourse, practices, (...) and forms of life are regulated by freedom and reason, means the end of orthodox theology, and uses Hegel’s logic of relations and reciprocal determination to interpret the God-world relation and the internal constitution of the divinity so that it preserves divine transcendence and independence. The second section of the essay challenges Williams’s position by showing how reciprocal determination does not just revise and qualify the asymmetrical dependence that is the lynchpin of classical theism, it completely disqualifies it, how the analysis of the Trinity involves the divinity in a complete emptying of itself into the world and its being as the world, so that Williams’s God cannot preserve even a hair’s breadth of the transcendence required for qualifying as a form of Christianity. The essay concludes from this that Williams’s appropriation of Hegel’s revised Christianity is infected with an element that destabilizes its ability to mediate between pre-modern insistence on God’s transcendence and independence and modernity’s insistence on human freedom and the universal status of its rational subjectivity, with a decisive leaning towards the humanistic posture. (shrink)

Hegel conceptualized the capitalist economy as a system of needs, with commodities and money serving as means to human ends. While anticipating Marx’s criticisms of certain tendencies in capitalism, Hegel insisted that higher-order institutions, especially those of the modern state, could put them out of play and establish a reconciliation of universality, particularity, and individuality warranting rational affirmation. Hegel, however, failed to comprehend the emergence of capital as a dominant subject, subordinating human ends under its end. The structural coercion, domination, (...) and exploitation inherent in the capital/wage labor relationship illustrate that point, as does the depoliticization of inherently political matters in capitalist market societies. The reconciliation of universality, particularity, and individuality Hegel endorsed requires a form of socialism incorporating deliberative democracy in local workplaces and communities, conjoined with representative bodies on regional, national, and ultimately global levels. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social TheoryOmar DahbourWarren Breckman. Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory. Modern European Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 335. Cloth, $54.95.In his new book on the Young Hegelians, Warren Breckman claims that the historical origins of Karl Marx's critique of "bourgeois individualism" remain obscure (4). Breckman's book is an attempt to (...) resituate Marx's philosophy within its original context in order to better understand why Marx was so hostile to liberalism—and especially to the concept of civil society that informs much of liberal thinking on the relation of government to the individual.As Breckman notes, concern with the idea of civil society brings one back to Hegel, who was the first philosopher to theorize this idea in depth (3). So Breckman asks: what was the intellectual path that led from the greatest theorist of civil society, Hegel, to the greatest critic of it, Marx?Breckman's account of this historical trajectory from Hegel to Marx is divided into three stages. The first consists of the last years of Hegel's life, during which he spent much of his time in debate with other leading thinkers, such as his former friend Schelling and the conservative jurist Stahl. The second stage is that of the development of the Young Hegelians' thought after Hegel's death, especially in juxtaposition to the "Old Hegelians" and to the Christian "new right" of the day. In the third stage, Marx differentiated his own position from that of other Young Hegelians.According to Breckman, two concerns dominated debates between the various philosophical camps in 1820s and '30s Germany. One concern was to accurately explain the nature of God. The other was to articulate the proper relation between the personal and transpersonal dimensions of experience. In the first case, all factions during Hegel's lifetime espoused some version of religious belief. The issue was whether belief in God [End Page 290] could be based on a direct, personal faith, as Schelling and the anti-Hegelians maintained, or whether belief was a rational affirmation of a divine being, as Hegel and his followers maintained (33). With the development of a critique of Christian faith by Strauss and Feuerbach, the Young Hegelians shifted their attention to how best to account for belief in God, rather than God as such.In the second case, the role of the self became a paramount concern in "Biedermeier" Germany, where I. H. Fichte (the son of J. G. Fichte), famously declared that "everything is personal" (22). This view was anathema to the Young Hegelians, who rejected the personalism of Schelling and the religious right in arguing that it embodied, not an immediate reality that escaped the purview of reason, but an abstract egoism (95). These two philosophical concerns became increasingly political ones as well when conservative jurists such as Stahl espoused a "personalist" theory of sovereignty in which the person of the sovereign was analogized to the person of God (64).Accordingly, the Young Hegelians linked their critique of religious personalism to a critique of political monarchism. It is at this point that the final steps to advocacy of democracy, and eventually, socialism, were made, especially by Arnold Ruge and Marx. But, according to Breckman, it is this rapid transition from the critique of religion to the critique of politics that led Marx, for instance, to a conflation of the liberal toleration of religion with the Prussian restoration's theological justification of the state (294). In the end, "radical social theory" is based on a "category mistake": liberal individualism is not the same as theological personalism (238).Breckman's study of the Young Hegelians has many virtues. It is particularly good on the political and personal relations of philosophers of sometimes punishing abstractness, such as Hegel and Schelling. There are also illuminating portraits of some virtually forgotten thinkers—for instance, Eduard Gans, the editor of Hegel and teacher of Marx.The problems result from the significance that Breckman claims for his study. If the title of the book is meant to describe this significance, it does not. Marx appears... (shrink)

SEDGWICK, Sally. Time and History in Hegelian Thought and Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. x + 194 pp. Cloth, $80.00—This book is a compact, tightly focused, approachable yet subtle interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of history. It dispels the idealist caricature sometimes encountered in histories of philosophy and instead argues for a more empirically minded Hegel who is deeply sensitive to the contingency and finitude of human existence. The book’s central objective is to show that according to Hegel reason (...) is indebted to its past, that it is shaped by, anchored in, bound by the past. This means that all our rational concepts, both theoretical and practical, emerge from and are shaped by contingent forces largely outside our control. In this way, Hegel calls into question a certain (Kantian) conception of rational autonomy in which reason is a priori and wholly independent of empirical reality. Instead, according to Sedgwick, Hegel paves the way for the historical materialism of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, since he acknowledges that our concepts depend upon and change with history. Sedgwick maintains that this does not mean that, for Hegel, reason is reduced to nature. According to Sedgwick, Hegel is not a naturalist, historicist, or positivist. A gap remains between the is and the ought such that reason is, as she says, an “unusual combination” or “hybrid mixture” of the empirical and the a priori (9, 13). . . . (shrink)

1 My first teacher of philosophy, at what is now Rhodes University in South Africa, was Arthur R. Lord, a man who deserves to be well known, though today few people will ever have heard of him. He was himself a pupil of J.A. Smith and E.F. Carritt at Oxford in the early years of this century, during the heyday of British Idealism. In 1911 he won the Green Moral Philosophy Prize with a voluminous dissertation on the passions, which I (...) read in typescript when I was a student, but which was never published and disappeared after his death in 1940. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to offer a Hegelian critique of Quine’s predicate nominalism. I argue that at the core of Hegel’s idealism is not a supernaturalist spirit monism, but a realism about universals, and that while this may contrast to the nominalist naturalism of Quine, Hegel’s position can still be defended over that nominalism in naturalistic terms. I focus on the contrast between Hegel’s and Quine’s respective views on universals, which Quine takes to be definitive of philosophical (...) naturalism. I argue that there is no good reason to think Quine is right to make this nominalism definitive of naturalism in this way – where in fact Hegel offers a reasonably compelling case that science itself requires some commitment to realism about universals, kinds, etc. Furthermore, even if Hegel is wrong about that, at least his case for realism is still a naturalistic one, as it is based on his views on concrete universality, which is an innovative form of in rebus realism about unive.. (shrink)

This paper examines whether Bruno Bauer's critical assessment of Jewish emancipation in Prussia is consistent with his other republican writings in the 1840s. It argues that Bauer's political position is a form of republican rigorism, according to which human emancipation requires identification with universal interests, and not the defence of particular identities. Rigorism involves the elimination of internal as well as external heteronomous influences, and implies shifting the boundaries between the juridical and the moral realms as defined by Kant. Subjects' (...) incentives for adopting the maxims that govern their external action are taken to be relevant to the assessment of the emancipatory potential of their deeds and claims. The paper distinguishes degrees of rigorism, and shows that Bauer's specific conclusions on the Jewish question, while not entirely unfounded by his political logic, are not strictly implied by his premises. Contrasting positions in his work are illustrated. (shrink)

The development and changes in Merleau-Ponty's Marxism are analyzed by an examination of the relationship of his phenomenology to the rationalism and determinism of the Marxist dialectic. From Humanism and Terror to Adventures of the Dialectic Merleau-Ponty made explicit and worked out the philosophical dilemmas in his own Marxism and eventually abandoned the determinism of the Hegelian-Marxist autonomous dialectic of history. This rejection of a determinism "executed behind humanity's back" was the heart of Merleau-Ponty's social thought, and meant that (...) the teleological meaning of history incarnate in the proletariat had to be criticized. Merleau-Ponty put the practical focus of the emancipatory social philosophy on the individual conceived concretely "as a potential participant in a universal history.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:378 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY these churches to deal reasonably with frontier conditions and popular prejudices is common knowledge, but it is often forgotten that their founder and guide during the critical days of growth was also an exponent of the late Scottish Enlightenment. To make this careful analysis of Campbell's philosophy, as an extraordinary specimen of empirical method, is a welcome achievement by an experienced empiricist. The volume also (...) contains a Foreword by President Perry E. Gresham of Bethany College, and a comprehensive bibliography of Campbell's writings compiled by Claude E. Spencer. HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER Claremont, Cali]ornia Hegel's First American Followers, The Ohio Hegelians: J. B. Stallo, Peter Kau]mann, Moncure Conway, August WiUich. By Loyd D. Easton. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1966. Pp. lx + 353. $7.00.) This expansion of the theme outlined in Professor Easton's article of 1962 gives us fulllength accounts of the careers and ideas of four picturesque characters of the Ohio River Valley during the 19th century. The four had little in common except Hegel, and even him they did not really share, for they interpreted him differently and used him for different interests. The author is somewhat generous in calling them "Hegelians" and "followers" of Hegel, for like practically all those Americans who have been influenced by Hegel, they followed him at a safe distance and not very long. But this diversity makes Easton's account all the more fascinating. He portrays not only four characters but also the culture of Cincinati and its environment. J. B. Stallo is better known among American historians and philosophers than the other three, and deservedly so, for he was more philosophical. But he gains in stature here, noteworthy not only for his philosophy of nature but also as a prominent citizen, judge of a Superior Court, and political leader of a large German community. Stallo had two very different careers: the early Catholic student and teacher of Oken's philosophy of nature, mixed liberally with Schelling's similar system and with Hegel's Encyclopedia and his Phenomenology. Emerson was probably right in getting out of Stallo's General Principles an idea of "nature's rhythmic unfolding" rather than an idea of historical dialectic. Then came the later Stallo (after 1855), a convert from Catholicism and transcendentalism to empiricism, and a devoted follower of Ernst Mach. It is this later Stallo, author in 1881 of The Concepts and Theories oJ Modern Physics, who is better known, and who used the term "relativity" to indicate that physics deals not with things-in-themselves but with the data given to observers. Peter Kaufmann is an excellent representative of those pietists who, when they came to the open spaces and free manners of America, made serious attempts to give their religious "perfectionism" a practical social embodiment in utopian, communal economies. He became a teacher in the Rappite "Community of Equality and Social Harmony" and after a few years founded his own "Society of Germans at Teutonia." The members of this society agreed to devote their communal surplus to the education of orphans, the conversion of Indians, the spreading of the Gospel to "the four corners of the earth", and publishing a weekly Herald o] Better Times. After four years of this Society he moved northward to Canton, Ohio, where he settled down comfortably as a publisher and promoter of public education. His major publication, The Temple oJ Truth, incorporated some ideas on dialectic taken from Hegel. He continued his contacts with many utopian communities and urged his fellow citizens to help in making the United States of America "a saviour nation of the rest of mankind." Moncure Conway, a native of Virginia and graduate of Dickinson College, became an itinerant Methodist minister. But in 1853 the Harvard Divinity School made a Unitarian of him and an enthusiast for the higher criticism of Strauss and the transcendentalism of Hegel. In 1858 his wife introduced him to her home town, Cincinnati, and there he became BOOK REVIEWS 379 the minister of a very influential and liberal congregation. In 1860 he began publication in Cincinnati of The Dial, successor to the New England transcendentalist journal, and used its... (shrink)

Professor Walsh, of the University of Edinburgh, has here given us an admirable little book. But the well-informed admirer of Hegel must read it through to the end to be sure it is admirable. For it begins where most of the condescending hacks who squeeze an academic living out of exploitation of Hegel begin - with the assertion that Hegel lacked what the condescending hacks presumably have: mastery of the art of philosophical writing; and also with the suggestion that there (...) may be a kernel of truth in the widespread belief that, as W.D. Hudson phrases it in the "Editor's Preface," "the most repugnant forms of totalitarianism from which our modern world has suffered, and still suffers, owe their inspiration to him." It is a relief to realize, when one has read through his text, that Professor Walsh has not been in the least tempted to acquire anti-Nazi credentials at Hegel's expense. And one may reasonably expect that, if ever he becomes less dependent on translations than he says he is, the author may come to admire Hegel's style - which has the "rebarbative" excellence of permanent intelligibility - perhaps as much as Giovanni Gentile admired it. (shrink)

This new edition of William James’s 1909 classic, A Pluralistic Universe reproduces the original text, only modernizing the spelling. The books has been annotated throughout to clarify James’s points of reference and discussion. There is a new, fuller index, a brief chronology of James’s life, and a new bibliography—chiefly based on James’s own references. The editor, H.G. Callaway, has included a new Introduction which elucidates the legacy of Jamesian pluralism to survey some related questions of contemporary American society. -/- A (...) Pluralistic Universe was the last major book James published during his life time. It is a substantial philosophical work, devoted to a thorough-going criticism of Hegelian monism and Absolutism—and the exploration of philosophical and social-theological alternatives. Our world of some one hundred years on is much the better for James’s contributions; and understanding James’s pluralism deeply contributes even now to America’s self-understanding. At present, we are more certain that American is, and is best, a pluralistic society, than we are of what particular forms our pluralism should take. Keeping an eye out for social interpretations of Jamesian pluralism, this new philosophical reading casts light on our twenty-first century alternatives by reference to prior American experience and developments. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper, we do two things: first, we offer a metaphysical account of what it is to be an individual person through Hegel’s understanding of the concrete universal; and second, we show how this account of an individual can help in thinking about love. The aim is to show that Hegel’s distinctive account of individuality and universality can do justice to two intuitions about love which appear to be in tension: on the one hand, that love can involve a (...) response to properties that an individual possesses; but on the other hand, what it is to love someone is not just to love their properties, but to love them as the distinct individual they are. We claim that Hegel’s conception of the relation between individuals and their properties, which relies on his account of the concrete universal, can resolve this tension and make sense of this aspect of love. (shrink)

In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek argues that the Hegelian concrete universal is not the organic comprehensive totality that it is often assumed to be. Rather, he argues that Hegel's concrete universality is defined in its very concretion by an irreducible rupture, gap, or trauma that not only neither closes it off from otherness nor assimilates otherness within the same, but forever opens it to otherness, constituting it as such exposure. However, by understanding the function of negativity in Hegel's argument (...) in a foundational way, Žižek posits as final what is merely a transitional stage. As a result, he not only misconstrues concrete universality and substitutes for it a particularized universal which, as such, remains abstract, but in doing so he passes by the implications in his own account that could lead to a positive conception of concrete universality above and beyond the strictly negative and empty formality he takes it to be. By avoiding Žižek's foundationalist way of framing the category of universality we can thereby articulate a logic of implications in it that leads us out of the still abstract shape, to which Žižek limits it, to its truly concrete form. Furthermore, the latter contains political implications that are lost in Žižek's version. (shrink)

1 My first teacher of philosophy, at what is now Rhodes University in South Africa, was Arthur R. Lord, a man who deserves to be well known, though today few people will ever have heard of him. He was himself a pupil of J.A. Smith and E.F. Carritt at Oxford in the early years of this century, during the heyday of British Idealism. In 1911 he won the Green Moral Philosophy Prize with a voluminous dissertation on the passions, which I (...) read in typescript when I was a student, but which was never published and disappeared after his death in 1940. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the American counterculture of the 1960s and early '70s, from the New Left through the hippies, revolutionaries and Jesus people, to the counterculture's collapse in artistry and the cynicism of Watergate; this evolution is viewed as a re-enactment of Hegel's dialectic of 'active reason' in the Phenomenology of Spirit , from the critique of 'observation' to 'society as a community of animals'. Secondly, an attempt is made to account for this re-enactment in the twentieth century. The tentative (...) conclusion is that the counterculture was America's discovery of the Hegelian idea of the state, but that, in an age of world economic interdependence and universal (if sometimes unacknowledged) military insecurity, this discovery came too late. The economic and military basis of the only world-history which Hegel knew, the history of nation-states all the way from oriental despotisms to modern 'Germanic' states is, it seems, in the process of disappearance. Section on the dialectic of Observation to Active Reason revised and updated in The Dialectical Method: A Treatise Hegel Never Wrote. Prometheus Books, 2012. (shrink)