In the young Henrik Ibsen's intellectual quarters, abroad as well as in his native Norway, Hegelianism was very much the philosophical systemde rigueur. Hegel's student Marcus Jacob Monrad taught phenomenology and aesthetics at the University of Christiania throughout the 1850s, and promoted a wider Hegelian way of thinking through frequent book reviews and newspaper articles. In Italy, soon to be his home away from home, Ibsen socialised with the art-historian Lorentz Dietrichson, whose views on the history of art were outspokenly (...) Hegelian. Ibsen was also in touch with the Hegelian circle gathering around the painter I. C. Dahl at the Academy of Art in Dresden. While Ibsen rarely engages in explicit philosophical discussion, he makes a significant exception when responding to the Danish translation of John Stuart Mill'sUtilitarianism. He admits that he has no professional expertise in this area but continues to observe that, insofar as ‘there are writers [like Mill] who lay down the law about philosophy without any knowledge of Hegel or German thought in general,’ it seems to him that ‘anything is allowed.’ To think philosophically without Hegel appears to Ibsen as tantamount to thinking without a reference point or standard. (shrink)

This paper argues that the relative stability of ancient Egyptian society during the Middle Kingdom (c.2055 – 1650 BC) can in part be explained by referring to the phenomenon of hermeneutical injustice, i.e., the manner in which imbalances in socio‐economic power are causally correlated with imbalances in the conceptual scheme through which people attempt to interpret their social reality and assert their interests in light of their interpretations. The court literature of the Middle Kingdom is analyzed using the concepts of (...) hermeneutical injustice and ideology. It is argued that while it is true that there was room for maneuver and for internal critique, the efficacy of internal critique was hindered by the structure of the intellectual discourse of Middle Kingdom Egypt. This intellectual discourse was suitable for the interpretation of social reality in a way that allowed the elites to assert their interests, but it was not suitable for the interpretation of social reality in a way that accorded with the interests of the exploited peasantry. (shrink)