Hegel famously criticizes Kant’s resolution of the antinomies. According to Sedgwick, Hegel primarily chastises Kant’s resolution for presupposing that concepts are ‘one-sided’, rather than identical to their opposites. If Kant had accepted the dialectical nature of concepts, then (according to Sedgwick) Kant would not have needed to resolve the antinomies. However, as Ameriks has noted, any such interpretation faces a serious challenge. Namely, Kant’s first antinomy concerns the universe’s physical dimensions. Even if we grant that the concept of the finite (...) is necessarily related to that of the infinite, the physical universe cannot both have and lack a temporal beginning. I argue that Hegel neither adopts Sedgwick’s view that Kant’s antinomies require no resolution nor absurdly accepts that the physical universe both has and lacks a temporal beginning. Instead, Hegel proposes a sophisticated resolution of Kant’s first antinomy (including its physical aspect) that depends on Hegel’s theory of the Absolute. (shrink)

For many reasons mainstream Hegel scholarship has disregarded Hegel's interests in epistemology, hence also his response to scepticism. From the points of view of defenders and critics alike, it seems that 'Hegel' and 'epistemology' have nothing to do with one another. Despite this widespread conviction, Hegel was a very sophisticated epistemologist whose views merit contemporary interest. This article highlights several key features and innovations of Hegel's epistemology-including his anti-Cartesianism, fallibilism, realism (sic) and externalism both about mental content and about justification-by (...) considering his systematic responses to Pyrrhonian, Humean, Cartesian and Kantian scepticism. (shrink)

There has been a tendency in some of the most influential recent interpretations of Hegel to downplay the theological characterizations that Hegel gives to the subject-matter of logic, and to emphasize, instead, certain continuities taken to exist between Hegel’s conception of logic and that of Kant. In the work of Robert Pippin and others, this has led to an ‘apperception’-oriented interpretation of Hegel’s logic, according to which Hegel follows Kant in taking logic to be primarily concerned with the nature of (...) human self-conscious subjectivity. Here I put pressure on this interpretation—first, by foregrounding textual and systematic evidence for taking the theological characterizations to accurately convey Hegel’s considered position on logic, as the science of the ‘absolute idea’, and then, secondly, by showing how Hegel’s arguments for the absolute formality and universality of logic point instead to a more fully-fledged rejection of Kant’s conception as too specifically psychological. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider Charles Taylor's classic article ‘The Opening Arguments of thePhenomenology’, in which Taylor presents an account of the Consciousness chapter of thePhenomenologyas a transcendental argument. I set Taylor's discussion in context and present its main themes. I then consider a recent objection to Taylor's approach put forward by Stephen Houlgate: namely, that to see Hegel as using transcendental arguments would be to violate Hegel's requirement that his method in thePhenomenologyneeds to bepresuppositionless. I concede that Houlgate's criticism (...) of Taylor has some force, but argue that nonetheless Taylor can suggest instead that although Hegel is not offering transcendentalargumentshere, he can plausibly be read as making transcendentalclaims, so that perhaps Houlgate and Taylor are not so far apart after all, notwithstanding this disagreement. (shrink)

That something is profoundly wrong with the way in which enlightenment has unfolded has widely been taken to be the main thrust of Dialectic of Enlightenment. In this paper, I propose to defend that to understand the book and shed light on some of its most puzzling features, one should rather take Horkheimer and Adorno's critical claim at face value: through their criticism they contend to have prepared a positive concept of enlightenment. How this can be so is the question (...) I want to answer. I defend that what we need is an account that works out the conceptual grounds on which their critique can operate. The focus of my attempt will consist in understanding what they mean when they assert that rationality is intrinsically social and how they conceive of rationality as being reflective at its core. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhile Hegel’s concept of second nature has now received substantial attention from commentators, relatively little has been said about the place of this concept in the Phenomenology of Spirit. This neglect is understandable, since Hegel does not explicitly use the phrase ‘second nature’ in this text. Nonetheless, several closely related phrases reveal the centrality of this concept to the Phenomenology’s structure. In this paper, I develop new interpretations of the figures ‘natural consciousness’, ‘natural notion’, and ‘inorganic nature’, in order to (...) elucidate the distinctive concept of second nature at work in the Phenomenology. I will argue that this concept of second nature supplements the ‘official’ version, developed in the Encyclopedia, with an ‘unofficial’ version that prefigures its use in critical theory. At the same time, this reconstruction will allow us to see how the Phenomenology essentially documents spirit’s acquisition of a ‘second nature’. (shrink)

While Hegel's discussion of the ‘speculative sentence’ occurs in the ‘Preface’ to the Phenomenology of Spirit, commentators rarely link it to the larger program of this text. Instead, this discussion has typically been received as a guide to the Science of Logic's presentation, as an independent theory of judgment, or as a reflection on the constraints and capacities of language generally. In this paper I argue that the speculative sentence can and should be linked to the Phenomenology itself. Specifically, I (...) show that Hegel's discussion both mirrors and supplements the ‘Introduction's’ explication of immanent phenomenological method. Establishing this parallel in turn allows us to identify a class of sentences throughout the Phenomenology as properly speculative and methodologically substantive. At the same time, this interpretation helps clarify several characteristics that Hegel ascribes to the speculative sentence, but which have gone unaddressed by commentators. (shrink)

To assert the primacy of objective spirit is to claim that certain distinctively human capacities, such as thinking and acting, are not capacities we have as individuals considered singly but are in some way dependent on shared public norms or social institutions. In this essay, I provide a brief history of arguments for the primacy of objective spirit from Hegel to the present, identifying three distinct strategies for defending this thesis: the teleological argument, the sociological argument and the quasi-transcendental argument. (...) Although it has now become quite common to read Hegel as advancing a quasi-transcendental argument, one similar to the argument found in Wittgenstein’s famous remarks about ‘rule-following’, I show that Hegel’s most interesting claims about the social dimensions of human mindedness are incompatible with this strategy and can only be vindicated if he is read as offering a teleological argument. (shrink)