This essay offers an introduction to Hegel's philosophy of sound as elaborated in the 1830 Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. The first section begins with essential context for interpreting the a priori status of nature and sound in Hegel's Philosophy of Nature. Next, I develop a general account of the Aristotelian character of Hegel's ‘Physics’, and a commentary on the categories of specific gravity and cohesion leading up to sound (and heat) in the ‘Physics of Particular Individuality’. (...) The second section provides an exegetical portrait of Hegel's metaphysics of sound. I first reconstruct Hegel's ontology of sound from the subsection on ‘Sound’ (Der Klang), and then outline his theory of auditory perception. The third section compares Hegel's philosophy of sound to leading views in contemporary philosophy of sound. I argue that Hegel offers a hylomorphic version of a located event theory of sound, which I suggest is more phenomenologically adequate than the modern acoustic view, and more metaphysically consistent than other distal event theories of sound. (shrink)

This essay discusses how, for Hegel, freedom can be realized in nature in a rudimentary fashion in solar systems. This solves a problem in Kant’s account of freedom, namely, the problem that Kant only gives a negative argument for why freedom is not impossible but does not give a positive account of how freedom is real. I give a novel account of Kant’s negative argument. Then, I show how, according to Hegel, solar systems can be considered as exhibiting freedom in (...) a rudimentary fashion. Finally, I lay out how Hegel systematically develops this point about the freedom of solar systems in the ‘Mechanism’-chapter of the Science of Logic. In doing so, he uses Kant’s negative argument in a ‘purified’ form to arrive at an account of an ‘intimate token-type relation’ between the planets in a solar system and the law that governs their motion. The essay as a whole provides a concrete example of how Hegel is an inheritor and radicalizer of Kant, both with respect to freedom’s reality and with respect to philosophical method. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 778-792, June 2022.

In his Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (2008), entitled ‘The Puzzling Hegel Renaissance’, Frederick Beiser, the editor of the volume, claims that Anglophone Hegel research has been in the main deeply problematic and proceeds to offer a program of research for its rejuvenation. The paper argues that the reasons based on which he exercises his critique (antiquarianism and anachronism) fail on internal grounds and that, therefore, Hegelforschung should not be reduced to his proposed research program (...) (Konstellationsforschung). The argument is built around four Hegelian themes: (a) the nature of the Hegelian categories, (b) Hegel’s philosophy of nature, (c) the relation between antiquarianism and our culture, and (d) Hegel’s methodology. (shrink)