The concentration of low‐density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol (C) in plasma is a key determinant of cardiovascular disease risk and human genetic studies have long endeavoured to elucidate the pathways that regulate LDL metabolism. Massive genome‐wide association studies (GWASs) of common genetic variation associated with LDL‐C in the population have implicated SORT1 in LDL metabolism. Using experimental paradigms and standards appropriate for understanding the mechanisms by which common variants alter phenotypic expression, three recent publications have presented divergent and even contradictory findings. (...) Interestingly, although these reports each linked SORT1 to LDL metabolism, they did not agree on a mechanism to explain the association. Here, we review recent mechanistic studies of SORT1 – the first gene identified by GWAS as a determinant of plasma LDL‐C to be evaluated mechanistically. (shrink)

Western Han: A Yangzhou Storyteller’s Script. Edited by Vibeke Børdahl and Liangyan Ge. Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Monographs, vol. 139. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2017. Pp. x + 742. £150, $200.

The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons: A Seventeenth-Century Novel. Translated by Kristin Ingrid Fryklund; introduction by Mark Edward Lewis and Brigitte Baptandier. Seattle: University of Washington press, 2021. Pp. xxiv + 280. $35.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Status of the Person in the Humanism of Giovanni Gentile" A. ROBERT CAPONIGRI THE HUMANISMOf Giovanni Gentile has gradually come to be recognized as one of the major speculative achievements of our time. The great strength and appeal of this position lie chiefly in the manner in which it meets the exigencies of the modem analysis of man and human existence while retaining the basic classical insights (...) of western thought. It achieves a synthesis which possesses at once historical, speculative, and cultural value and which rectifies many of the unilateral analyses so much in evidence. At the same time, serious limitations have been alleged to mar the Gentilean view of man. The most important of these allegations concerns the notion most intimately associated with the humanism of the west: the person. Strangely, it has been charged that the humanism of Gentile not only fails to develop an adequate concept of the person but directly involves the diminution and constriction of this concept as it has developed historically and influenced the western view of man. His, it is asserted, is a humanism without the person, which is but a small remove from the paradoxical assertion that it is a humanism without man? In many ways this charge is most perplexing. Were it correct, it would certainly have the limiting and constrictive effects his critics have pointed out. The real perplexity resides, however, not in spelling out the probable consequences of the allegation, but in determining how it might ever have arisen and gained such credence and championship. The fact is that nothing could be further from Gentile's intention and (what is more important) more alien to the burden of his text than the least diminution of the person. On the contrary, the person constitutes the central and pivotal notion of the entire structure of Gentilean humanism. The constructive effort of his thought is directed principally to the elaboration and validation of this * This paper was read before the Thirteenth International Congress of Philosophy, Mexico City (September, 1963), but has not been included in the Proceedings of the Congress. 1 M. F. Sclacca, II XX Secolo (1947), Vol. I, pp. 400 ft.; R. Holmes, The Idealism of Giovanni Gentile (1957), passim; H. S. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (1960), passim. [6q 62 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY concept of the person. Once established, this concept becomes the cardinal principle upon which all his subsequent explorations and assertions in the areas of art, ethics, social and political theory, and education hinge. Consequently, it seems of utmost importance, for the comprehension of his thought and of its place in the total prospect of contemporary philosophy, to place in clear relief the basic lineaments of the concept of the person as it emerges from the critical stages of Gentile's thought as well as the role it plays in all subsequent constructive efforts. Formation of the Concept of the Person in Gentile's Thought To understand the emergence of the concept of the person in actualism, it is necessary to determine clearly Gentile's basic point of departure. This is established firmly in the history of philosophy: a fact which corroborates Harris's perception that Gentile's thought is essentially an historical enterprise? One of Gentile's chief and most sustained fields of effort is the history of philosophy and his work in this area served a double purpose. The first was the properly historical and critical work of establishing an interpretation of the course of the history of western philosophy; s the second was to locate his own thought in the context of the history of philosophy as thus established and thus to endow it with a firm scientific and "public" character, to assign it a "public" basis. This public basis was the achievement of western philosophy which his analysis had recognized as solid and beyond cavil. This achievement, he reasoned, must constitute the point of departure of any further relevant speculation. Gentile took the philosophical position of Hegel as representing this indubitable achievement of western thought in its most salient features. This statement must be correctly understood to be of any help and importance in approaching his thought. Gentile did not... (shrink)

The Phenomenology of Spirit was Hegel's grandest experiement, changing our vision of the world and the very nature of philosophical enterprise. In this book, Solomon captures the bold and exhilarating spirit, presenting the Phenomenology as a thoroughly personal as well as philosophical work. He begins with a historical introduction, which lays the groundwork for a section-by-section analysis of the Phenomenology. Both the initiated as well as readers unacquainted with the intricacies of German idealism will find this to be an accessible (...) and exciting introduction to this great philosopher's monumental work. (shrink)

In a new retelling of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel's classic The Phenomenology of Spirit, Robert Brandom argues that when our self-conscious recognitive attitudes take Hegel's radical form of magnanimity and trust, we can overcome a troubled modernity and enter a new age of spirit.

The flowering of creative and speculative philosophy that emerged in modern Europe--particularly in Germany--is a thrilling adventure story as well as an essential chapter in the history of philosophy. In this integrative narrative, Solomon provides an accessible introduction to the major authors and movements of modern European philosophy, including the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Rousseau, German Idealism, Kant, Fichte, Schelling and the Romantics, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Max Brentano, Meinong, Frege, Dilthey, Bergson, Nietzsche, Husserl, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, hermeneutics, Sartre, Postmodernism, Structuralism, (...) Foucault, and Derrida. (shrink)

This book shows that the repeated announcements of the death of Hegel's philosophical system have been premature. Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom, Reality, and God brings to light accomplishments for which Hegel is seldom given credit: unique arguments for the reality of freedom, for the reality of knowledge, for the irrationality of egoism, and for the compatibility of key insights from traditional theism and naturalistic atheism. The book responds in a systematic manner to many of the major criticisms leveled at Hegel's (...) system, from Feuerbach and Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Charles Taylor. It provides detailed interpretations of Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit, large parts of his indispensable Science of Logic, and important parts of his Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Right. Unlike many academic books on Hegel, this one treats him very much as a 'live' thinker, whom we can learn from today. (shrink)

This is the most important book on Hegel to have appeared in the past ten years. Robert Pippin offers a completely new interpretation of Hegel's idealism, which focuses on Hegel's appropriation and development of kant's theoretical project. Hegel is presented neither as a precritical metaphysician nor as a social theorist, but as a critical philosopher whose disagreements with Kant, especially on the issue of intuitions, enrich the idealist arguments against empiricism, realism and naturalism. In the face of the dismissal (...) of absolute idealism as either unintelligible or implausible, Pippin explains and defends an original account of the philosophical basis for Hegel's claims about the historical and social nature of selfconsciousness, and so of knowledge itself. (shrink)

This fresh and original book argues that the central questions in Hegel's practical philosophy are the central questions in modern accounts of freedom: What is freedom, or what would it be to act freely? Is it possible so to act? And how important is leading a free life? Robert Pippin argues that the core of Hegel's answers is a social theory of agency, the view that agency is not exclusively a matter of the self-relation and self-determination of an individual (...) but requires the right sort of engagement with and recognition by others. Using a detailed analysis of key Hegelian texts, he develops this interpretation to reveal the bearing of Hegel's claims on many contemporary issues, including much-discussed core problems in the liberal democratic tradition. His important study will be valuable for all readers who are interested in Hegel's philosophy and in the modern problems of agency and freedom. (shrink)

Hegel called world history a court of judgement, a world court, and in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History he took Africans before that court and found them to be barbaric, cannibalistic, preoccupied with fetishes, without history, and without any consciousness of freedom. -/- In this paper, after rehearsing some of the more familiar objections to Hegel's verdict against Africa, I turn the tables and put Hegel on trial. More specifically, given that much of Hegel's account is directed (...) against the Ashanti, I will use what is known about them and especially what Hegel either did know or should have known, to take him before the court of the Ashanti, where the use of evidence can be interrogated. The results of this examination render all the more pressing the need to give an account of how Hegel applied his system of justice to Africa, which I attempt to do in the second part of the paper. In the third part, I return to the interpretation of Hegel's statement about Africa as unhistorical and, having restored it to its context in Hegel's system, show its. (shrink)

Robert Donoghue ABSTRACT: G.W.F Hegel offers a thorough, complex, and unique theory of free will in the Philosophy of Right. In what follows, I argue that Hegel’s conceptualization of free will makes the mistake of collapsing the possibility of organic freedom into the potential for moral freedom ….

Hegel frequently claimed that the heart of his entire system was a book widely regarded as among the most difficult in the history of philosophy, The Science of Logic. This is the book that presents his metaphysics, an enterprise that he insists can only be properly understood as a “logic,” or a “science of pure thinking.” Since he also wrote that the proper object of any such logic is pure thinking itself, it has always been unclear in just what sense (...) such a science could be a “metaphysics.” -/- Robert B. Pippin offers here a bold, original interpretation of Hegel’s claim that only now, after Kant’s critical breakthrough in philosophy, can we understand how logic can be a metaphysics. Pippin addresses Hegel’s deep, constant reliance on Aristotle’s conception of metaphysics, the difference between Hegel’s project and modern rationalist metaphysics, and the links between the “logic as metaphysics” claim and modern developments in the philosophy of logic. Pippin goes on to explore many other facets of Hegel’s thought, including the significance for a philosophical logic of the self-conscious character of thought, the dynamism of reason in Kant and Hegel, life as a logical category, and what Hegel might mean by the unity of the idea of the true and the idea of the good in the “Absolute Idea.” The culmination of Pippin’s work on Hegel and German idealism, no Hegel scholar or historian of philosophy will want to miss this book. (shrink)

In this significant contribution to Hegel scholarship, Robert Williams develops the most comprehensive account to date of Hegel's concept of recognition. Fichte introduced the concept of recognition as a presupposition of both Rousseau's social contract and Kant's ethics. Williams shows that Hegel appropriated the concept of recognition as the general pattern of his concept of ethical life, breaking with natural law theory yet incorporating the Aristotelian view that rights and virtues are possible only within a certain kind of community. (...) He explores Hegel's intersubjective concept of spirit as the product of affirmative mutual recognition and his conception of recognition as the right to have rights. Examining Hegel's Jena manuscripts, his _Philosophy of Right_, the _Phenomenology of Spirit_, and other works, Williams shows how the concept of recognition shapes and illumines Hegel's understandings of crime and punishment, morality, the family, the state, sovereignty, international relations, and war. A concluding chapter on the reception and reworking of the concept of recognition by contemporary thinkers including Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze demonstrates Hegel's continuing centrality to the philosophical concerns of our age. (shrink)

Many readers have suspected that Hegel---in arguing against Kant’s individualistic and critical way of approaching ethics and favoring instead an “ethical life” he associates with custom and habit---is in effect eliminating both individual judgment and any basis for criticism of corrupt or unjust communities. Most specialists reject this view of Hegel’s ethical theory, but they haven’t explained precisely how, on the contrary, ethical life preserves individual judgment and criticism within a new way of thinking about ethics. The goal of this (...) paper is to do that. (shrink)

Many readers have suspected that Hegel---in arguing against Kant’s individualistic and critical way of approaching ethics and favoring instead an “ethical life” he associates with custom and habit---is in effect eliminating both individual judgment and any basis for criticism of corrupt or unjust communities. Most specialists reject this view of Hegel’s ethical theory, but they haven’t explained precisely how, on the contrary, ethical life preserves individual judgment and criticism within a new way of thinking about ethics. The goal of this (...) paper is to do that. (shrink)

In many histories of modern ethics, Kant is supposed to have ushered in an anti-realist or constructivist turn by holding that unless we ourselves 'author' or lay down moral norms and values for ourselves, our autonomy as agents will be threatened. In this book, Robert Stern challenges the cogency of this 'argument from autonomy', and claims that Kant never subscribed to it. Rather, it is not value realism but the apparent obligatoriness of morality that really poses a challenge to (...) our autonomy: how can this be accounted for without taking away our freedom? The debate the book focuses on therefore concerns whether this obligatoriness should be located in ourselves, in others or in God. Stern traces the historical dialectic that drove the development of these respective theories, and clearly and sympathetically considers their merits and disadvantages; he concludes by arguing that the choice between them remains open. (shrink)

In the most influential chapter of his most important philosophical work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel makes the central and disarming assertions that "self-consciousness is desire itself" and that it attains its "satisfaction" only in another self-consciousness. Hegel on Self-Consciousness presents a groundbreaking new interpretation of these revolutionary claims, tracing their roots to Kant's philosophy and demonstrating their continued relevance for contemporary thought. As Robert Pippin shows, Hegel argues that we must understand Kant's account of the self-conscious nature of (...) consciousness as a claim in practical philosophy, and that therefore we need radically different views of human sentience, the conditions of our knowledge of the world, and the social nature of subjectivity and normativity. Pippin explains why this chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology should be seen as the basis of much later continental philosophy and the Marxist, neo-Marxist, and critical-theory traditions. He also contrasts his own interpretation of Hegel's assertions with influential interpretations of the chapter put forward by philosophers John McDowell and Robert Brandom. (shrink)

Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism:Negotiation and Administration in Hegel’sAccount of the Structure and Content ofConceptual NormsRobert B. BrandomThis paper could equally well have been titled ‘Some Idealist Themes in Hegel’sPragmatism’. Both idealism and pragmatism are capacious concepts, encompassingmany distinguishable theses. I will focus on one pragmatist thesis and one ideal-ist thesis (though we will come within sight of some others). The pragmatistthesis (what I will call ‘the semantic pragmatist thesis’) is that the use of conceptsdetermines their content, that is, (...) that concepts can have no content apart from thatconferred on them by their use. The idealist thesis is that the structure and unityof the concept is the same as the structure and unity of the self. The semantic prag-matist thesis is a commonplace of our Wittgensteinean philosophical world. Theidealist thesis is, to say the least, not. I don’t believe there is any serious contem-porary semantic thinker who is pursuing the thought that concepts might best beunderstood by modelling them on selves. Indeed, from the point of view ofcontemporary semantics it is hard to know even what one could mean by such athought: what relatively unproblematic features of selves are supposed to illumi-nate what relatively problematic features of concepts? Why should we think thatunderstanding something about, say, personal identity would help us under-stand issues concerning the identity and individuation of concepts? From acontemporary point of view, the idealist semantic thesis is bound to appearinitially as something between unpromising and crazy.My interpretive claim here will be that the idealist thesis is Hegel’s way of makingthe pragmatist thesis workable, in the context of several other commitments andinsights. My philosophical claim here will be that we actually have a lot to learn fromthis strategy about contemporary semantic issues that we by no means see our wayto the bottom of otherwise. In the space of this essay, I cannot properly justify thefirst claim textually, nor the second argumentatively. I will confine myself of neces-sity to sketching the outlines and motivations for the complex, sophisticated, andinteresting view on the topic I find Hegel putting forward. (shrink)

In this highly innovative book Robert Fine compares three great studies of modern political life: Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Marx's Capital and Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, and argues that they are all profoundly radical texts, which jointly contribute to our understanding of the modern world. Fine maintains that these works are far more revealing when read together than in opposition, and draws a direct parallel between Hegel's critique of social forms of right and Marx's critique (...) of social forms of value. Fine shows how fruitfully their work can and should be combined. Hannah Arendt was in turn critical of what she saw as the historicism of both Hegel and Marx, but Fine argues that her study of the origins of totalitarianism directly picks up on their insights into the modern potential for fanaticism and destructiveness. Arendt never disavowed any of the nineteenth century thinkers who prefigured the catastrophes to come, but Fine shows her indebtedness to Hegel and Marx. This fascinating book offers a re-reading of these texts as three pivotal moments in the construction of a critical humanist tradition. (shrink)

The purpose of Plato’s investigation of justice in the ideal polis of the Republic is neither to formulate an abstract conception of justice in itself nor to work out a blueprint for the perfectly just state. Rather, through the contemplation of an ideal social/political order where justice might be found “writ large,” Plato intends to bring about the actualization of justice in the “polity” of the individual soul. It must be kept in mind, of course, that, while possessing a notion (...) of the individual, the Greeks lacked our modern, Cartesian conception of subjectivity, burdened as it is with the existential task of creating and sustaining a meaningful cosmos. But precisely for this reason the ancients had a clearer perspective of the synergistic and mutually determinative dialectic that conjoins the individual and the state, a conjunction grounded in the ethical. This can be seen, Hegel suggests, in terms of the “unwritten and infallible law” that Antigone takes to be the “law of the gods” which “is right because it is what is right,” placing the individual “within the ethical substance; and this substance is thus the essence of self-consciousness.”. (shrink)

[INTRODUCTION] Like the terms 'dialectic', 'Aufhebung' (or 'sublation'), and 'Geist', the term 'concrete universal' has a distinctively Hegelian ring to it. But unlike these others, it is particularly associated with the British strand in Hegel's reception history, as having been brought to prominence by some of the central British Idealists. It is therefore perhaps inevitable that, as their star has waned, so too has any use of the term, while an appreciation of the problematic that lay behind it has seemingly (...) vanished: if the British Idealists get any sort of mention in a contemporary metaphysics book (which is rarely), it will be Bradley's view of relations or truth that is discussed, not their theory of universals, so that the term has a rather antique air, buried in the dusty volumes of Mind from the turn of the nineteenth century. This is not surprising: the episode known as British Idealism can appear to be a period that is lost to us, in its language, points of historical reference (Lotze, Sigwart, Jevons), and central preoccupations (the Absolute). Even while interest in Hegel continues to grow, interest in his Logic has grown more slowly than in the rest of his work, with Book III of the Logic remaining as the daunting peak of that challenging text - while it is here that the British Idealists focussed their attention and claimed to have uncovered that 'exotic' but 'vanished specimen', the concrete universal. Finally, as the trend of reading Hegel pushes ever further in a non-metaphysical direction, it might be thought that the future of the concrete universal is hardly likely to be brighter than its recent past - for it may seem hard to imagine how a conception championed by the British Idealists, who were apparently shameless in their metaphysical commitments, can find favour in these more austere and responsible times. In this paper, however, I want to make a case for holding that there is something enlightening to be found in how some of the British Idealists approached the 'concrete universal', both interpretatively and philosophically. At the interpretative level, I will argue that while not everything these Idealists are taken to mean by the term is properly to be found in Hegel, their work nonetheless relates to a crucial and genuine strand in Hegel's position, so that their discussion of this issue is an important moment in the reception history of his thought. At a philosophical level, I think that the question that concerned Hegel and these British Idealists retains much of its interest, as does their shared approach to it: namely, how far does our thought involve a mere abstraction from reality, and what are the metaphysical and epistemological implications if it turns out it does not? As such, I will suggest, taking seriously what these British Idealists have to say about the concrete universal can help us both in our understanding of Hegel, and in our appreciation of the contribution Hegel's position can make to our thinking on the issues that surround this topic. (shrink)

: This paper offers a distinctive interpretation of Hegel's Doppelsatz from the Preface to the Philosophy of Right: 'What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational'. This has usually been interpreted either conservatively (as claiming that everything that is, is right or good) or progressively (that if the world were actual, it would be right or good, but that there is a distinction that can be drawn between existence and actuality). My aim in this paper is to (...) argue against both interpretations, so that the position I offer is neutral between the two. My claim is that when Hegel identifies what is actual with what is rational in the Doppelsatz, his intention is not to offer a normative assessment of what is actual; rather, it is to suggest that genuine philosophy must be committed to reason in its methods of inquiry, if it is to properly undertake an investigation into the "spiritual universe" as well as the "natural" one. The Doppelsatz is thus a defence of philosophical rationalism, rather than a normative claim about "was ist wirklich". (shrink)

Robert R. Williams offers a bold new account of divergences and convergences in the work of Hegel and Nietzsche. He explores four themes - the philosophy of tragedy; recognition and community; critique of Kant; and the death of God - and explicates both thinkers' critiques of traditional theology and metaphysics.

This edition of a recently discovered manuscript provides the first full look at Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. The lectures of 1827 go far beyond Hegel's previously published Encyclopedia outline, and provide a new introduction to the Philosophy of Spirit. Robert Williams's translation will stimulate interest in a neglected area in Hegel scholarship, but one to which Hegel himself attached special importance and significance.

This book provides a lucid commentary on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and on Hegel’s other major writings on ethics and politics. Since it is the only commentary in English that covers the Philosophy of Right almost section by section, from start to finish, and it also carries on an instructive dialogue with many of the other commentaries published in recent years, it will be very useful to students and to scholars who aren’t specialists in Hegel. Although Franco can’t, of course, (...) afford to go into great detail on all of the many issues that he deals with, his judiciousness and wide reading in Hegel enable him to clarify a remarkable number of them, especially in the domain of “ethical life”. His discussions of Hegel’s conceptions of the state and of war and international relations are especially well balanced, neither avoiding difficulties nor abandoning Hegel to his legions of critics. His treatments of Hegel’s earlier works—especially the Jena lectures and the relevant portions of the Phenomenology of Spirit—are also quite helpful. Only readers who have themselves attempted to reconcile these disparate and dense texts and to reconstruct some of Hegel’s major arguments in ordinary language will fully appreciate how much Franco has accomplished. (shrink)

_The Phenomenology of Spirit_ is Hegel's most important and famous work. It is essential to understanding Hegel's philosophical system and why he remains a major figure in Western Philosophy. This _GuideBook_ introduces and assesses: * Hegel's life and the background to the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ * the ideas and the text of the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ * the continuing importance of Hegel's work to philosophy.

This paper considers the prospects for the current revival of interest in Hegel, and the direction it might take. Looking back to Richard J. Bernstein's paper from 1977, on ‘Why Hegel Now?’, it contrasts his optimistic assessment of a rapprochement between Hegel and analytic philosophy with Sebastian Gardner's more pessimistic view, where Gardner argues that Hegel's idealist account of value makes any such rapprochement impossible. The paper explores Hegel's account of value further, arguing for a middle way between these extremes (...) of optimism and pessimism, proposing an Aristotelian reading which is more metaphysical than Bernstein recognizes, but not as at odds with thinking in current analytic philosophy as Gardner suggests, as it finds a counterpart in the work of Philippa Foot, Michael Thompson, Rosalind Hursthouse and others. (shrink)

Robert Pippin reviews Slavoj Žižek’s Less than Nothing, a serious attempt to re-actualize Hegel in the light of Lacanian metapsychology. But does Žižek’s attempt to think Hegel with Lacan produce, as Žižek hopes, a political figuration adequate to the present? Or does it land us rather in the Hegelian zoo, along with such well-known specimens as the Beautiful Soul, the Unhappy Consciousness, and The Knight of Virtue?

There has recently been a considerable amount of research into the influence of 18th century British philosophy--particularly into the thinking of David Hume on Continental philosophy and Kant. The aim of this collection is to provide some of the key texts which illustrate the impact of Kant's thought together with two important 20th century monographs on aspects of Kant's early reception and his influence on philosophical thought. Contents: Immanuel Kant in England 1793-1838 [1931] Rene Wellek 328 pp The Early Reception (...) of Kant's Thought in England 1785-1805 [1990] Giuseppe Micheli 114 pp A General and Introductory view of Professor Kant's Principles [1796] F. A. Nitsch 234 pp Text-Book to Kant [1881] (with a biographical sketch) James Hutchison Stirling 576 pp The Development from Kant to Hegel [1882] Andrew Seth 178 pp Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant [1890] Thomas Hill Green 155 pp On the Philosophy of Kant [1879] Robert Adamson 270pp A Sketch of Kant's Life and Writings [1854] H. G. Henderson 80 pp Inquisitio Philosophica [1866], An Examination on the Principles of Kant and Hamilton M. P. W. Bolton 286 pp Philosophy of the Unconditioned [1829] William Hamilton 38 pp On the Philosophy of Kant [1856] Henry L. Mansel 45 pp The aim of this collection is to provide some of the key texts which illustrate the impact of Kant's thought together with two important 20th century monographs on aspects of Kant's early reception and his influence on philosophical thought. (shrink)

The following is a chapter of a book and I should say something at the outset about the content of the book. The topic is Hegel’s “social theory of agency,” and that topic, given how the problem of agency is usually understood, raises the immediate question of why anyone would think that “sociality” would have anything at all to do with the “problem of agency.” That problem is understood in a number of ways; most generally – what distinguishes naturally occurring (...) events from actions (if anything)? (Sometimes the question is: what, if anything, distinguishes responsible human doings from what animals do?) The most prominent approach has it that actions are things done intentionally by individuals, purposely, for a purpose. This is sometimes said to mean: acting from or on or because of an intention, although as we shall see this nominalization can be quite misleading. Or, of the many possible descriptions of some occurrence, it is an action is there is a true description which is intentional. This is often taken to mean simply that if you ask a person why he is doing something he can express this intention to explain himself, most often in the form of a reason. He does not (except in extraordinary circumstances) describe why he is acting in the way he might describe what caused his.. (shrink)

The project defended in this article is a forty-plus year attempt to argue for the continuing philosophical importance of the positions in theoretical and practical and aesthetic philosophy defended in what has come to be known as ‘German Idealism’ (or ‘post-Kantian German philosophy.’) For the most part this has concerned Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and the relations among them, with most of the attention focused on Hegel. The Hegel interpretation has been criticized for its claim about the influence of Kant (...) on Hegel’s account of apperceptive judgment, for the nature of the idealism ascribed to Hegel, and for the Kantian-Hegelian insistence on the autonomy and self-grounding authority of pure reason. The interpretation of Hegel’s practical philosophy has been criticized for defending an excessively social theory of agency, and the theory of modernization ascribed to Hegel has been criticized for claiming that philosophy could and should have a historically diagnostic task. The interpretation of Hegel’s theory of art argues that elements of Hegel’s basic philosophical position puts one in the best position to understand the meaning and importance of post-Hegelian pictorial modernism, that his general approach can be of great value in understanding his claim that great art had become ‘a thing of the past.’ A clarification of these positions, and a brief case for their philosophical importance comprises the substance of this recapitulation. (shrink)

'Modernity' has come to refer both to a contested historical category and to an even more contested philosophical and civilisational ideal. In this important collection of essays Robert Pippin takes issue with some prominent assessments of what is or is not philosophically at stake in the idea of a modern revolution in Western civilisation, and presents an alternative view. Professor Pippin disputes many traditional characterisations of the distinctiveness of modern philosophy. In their place he defends claims about agency, freedom, (...) ethical life and modernity itself, all of which are central to the German idealist philosophical tradition, and in particular, to the writings of Hegel. Having considered the Hegelian version of these issues the author explores other accounts as found in Habermas, Strauss, Blumenberg, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. (shrink)

During the last decade of his life, Rorty emphasized the anti-authoritarian credentials of his pragmatism. He came to see pragmatism as the fighting faith of a second phase of the Enlightenment. The first stage, as Rorty construed it, concerns our emancipation from nonhuman authority in practical matters: issues of what we ought to do and how things ought to be. The envisaged second stage addresses rather our emancipation from nonhuman authority in theoretical matters. Pragmatism moves beyond the traditional model of (...) reality as authoritative over our cognitive representations of it in language and thought to a new conception of how discursive practices help us cope with the vicissitudes of life. Hegel anticipates the challenge to the very idea of objective reality as providing norms for thought that Rorty thought required us to enact a second phase of the Enlightenment. Unlike Rorty, Hegel presents a detailed, constructive, anti-authoritarian, nonfetishistic, social pragmatist account of the representational dimension of conceptual content. At its heart is an account of the social dimension of discursive normativity in terms of reciprocal recognition, and an account of the historical dimension of discursive normativity in terms of a distinctive new conception of reason: the recollective rationality that turns a past into a tradition. His idealism thereby offers a concrete pragmatist alternative to Rorty’s global semantic and epistemological anti-representationalism. (shrink)

In this paper I will examine one way of developing Kant's suggestion that one is free just insofar as he acts according to the dictates of norms or principles. and of his distinction between the Realm of Nature, governed by causes, and the Realm of Freedom, governed by norms and principles. Kant's transcendental machinery—the distinction between Understanding and Reason, the free noumenal self expressed somehow as a causally constrained phenomenal self, and so on—can no longer secure this distinction for us. (...) It is just too mysterious to serve as an explanation of freedom. Yet some distinction between the realm of facts and the realm of norms must be established if the notion of freedom as normative rather than causal constraint is to be redeemed. In this paper I will present a version of this distinction which was not envisioned by Kant, and show how a novel response to the dispute between naturalists and non-naturalists concerning the relation of fact to norm can be developed out of that rendering. I will then argue that the account of human freedom which results from this story needs to be supplemented in just the ways which Hegel claimed Kant's account needed to be supplemented, and will recommend an Hegelian self-expressive successor. (shrink)

THE IDEA OF A "PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCE," something of a Fata Morgana in the West for several centuries, underwent a well-known revolutionary change when Kant argued that in all philosophical speculation about the nature of things, reason is really "occupied only with itself." Indeed, Kant argued convincingly that the possibility of any cognitive relation to objects presupposed an original and constitutive "relation to self." Thereafter, instead of an a priori science of substance, a science of "how the world must be", a (...) putative philosophical science was directed to the topic of how any subject must "for itself" take or construe or judge the world to be. The nature and forms of such a self-conscious or even self-determining activity assumed center stage in later German philosophy, and, as many commentators have noted, was the decisive presupposition for Hegel's central, deeply obscure position on "the Absolute" as some sort of complete "self-consciousness.". (shrink)

The volume concludes by examining a critique of Hegel's metaphysical position from the perspective of the "continental" tradition, and in particular Gilles ...

The new German edition of these lectures will constitute four volumes of the Felix Meiner Verlag series: G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen: Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte. The editors of these volumes, Pierre Garniron and Walter Jaeschke, chose the Berlin lectures of 1825–1826 to represent the history of philosophy lectures in this series. The University of California Press is publishing all of the series in English, including translations of the Religionsphilosophie and of the lectures on Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft, on Kunst, and on Logik. (...) The same group that did the Philosophy of Religion is continuing with the History of Philosophy, with some shifting of roles: Robert F. Brown, J. Michael Stewart, H.S. Harris, Peter C. Hodgson. This brief report outlines the nature of the project on the history of philosophy and the plans for its completion. (shrink)

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The nature of Hegel’s idealism has been much disputed, and this chapter offers an account of it that is distinctive. Against recent commentators such as Robert Pippin, it is argued that Hegel was not a Kantian or transcendental idealist; it is also argued that Hegel was not a mentalistic idealist, offering a kind of ‘spirit monism’ that reduced the world to mind. It is argued instead that Hegel understood idealism to be the view that ‘the finite has no veritable (...) being’, where this leads to a position according to which thought cannot grasp what truly exists through experience but only through a kind of rationalist theorizing, and that this in turn requires us to accept a form of realism about concepts. It is therefore argued that this conceptual realism makes up the core of Hegel’s idealism, understood as the anti-nominalist doctrine that reality is structured by concepts that render it accessible to thought. (shrink)

Although William James formed his philosophical views in direct reaction to the Hegelianism then dominant in American and British institutions, modern critics have tended to reject James’s criticism of G. W. F. Hegel as superficial and outdated. This is in part due to James’s energetic rhetorical style, but also because James at his most polemical tends to present his pluralistic and pragmatist empiricism as diametrically opposed to Hegel’s monistic and intellectualistic idealism, so that it is not clear how the two (...) theories could engage in any meaningful dialogue. This chapter presents a different interpretation of the engagement between James and Hegel. On this interpretation, James’s criticisms of Hegel emerge from what he perceives to be a common starting point: the attempt to find the world to be “a home.” As such, James’s criticisms of Hegel should be understood as offering a kind of internal critique. According to James, Hegel offers too narrow an account of what it is for beings like us to “feel at home” in the world. This is a unique and internal criticism of Hegel which deserves to be taken seriously. (shrink)