Until their recent Anglo-American rehabilitation or reinvention, metaphysics, perhaps since Kant, have tended to be either philosophically avoided or rejected wholesale. The word itself has been taken as virtually synonymous with ideology and unscientific religiosity. Systematic metaphysical coherence has even been portrayed as harboring incipient totalitarianism. Epistemologically and politically, metaphysics have been reproached for their pernicious disregard for something called "reality."In both the Continental and analytic traditions, Hegel's philosophy has been seen as embodying all that is wrong with metaphysical endeavors. (...) From Feuerbach to Foucault, from Great Britain to North America and beyond, the... (shrink)

Speight has recently raised the question, which he himself leaves unanswered, how naturalism relates to spirit in Hegel’s philosophy of art. ‘Naturalism’ denotes an explanation that invokes aspects of nature that are (allegedly) irreducible or resistant to thought. I call nature ‘stubborn’ insofar as it evinces resistance to its being formed by thought and hence to its being united with it. This paper argues that §§556, 558 and 560 of Hegel’s Encyclopedia answer Speight’s question by specifying three elements of nature (...) that, first, are present in art and, second, are resistant to thought. These are materiality, natural form, and genius. They exhibit nature’s stubbornness in art. This stubbornness, I argue, is what justifies Hegel’s claim that art is absolute spirt only implicitly (§556), which leads to the claim that art needs to be superseded by religion and philosophy. In this way, Speight’s question receives a precise answer. (shrink)

In her book Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher, Ann Hartle argues that Montaigne’s thought is dialectical in the Hegelian sense. Unlike Hegel’s progressive dialectic, however, Montaigne’s thought is, according to Hartle, circular in that the reconciliation of opposed terms comes not in the form of a newly emergent term, but in a return to the first term, where the meaning of the first is transformed as a result of its dialectical interaction with the second. This analysis motivates Hartle’s claim that (...) Montaigne is not a skeptic at all, let alone a Pyrrhonian skeptic. In this paper, I argue that Hartle’s circular-dialectical interpretation of Montaigne is not only compatible with Pyrrhonism, but is in fact an ideal model for understanding Sextus Empiricus’s skeptical therapy. (shrink)

In his Science of Logic Hegel purports to give an account of a dialectical logic that generates the totality of being’s fundamental structures. This totality does not exhaust the richness of being, but it exhausts the basis of this richness. Any phenomenon, whether cognitive, scientific, social or political, is based upon some or all of those structures. The paper presents and examines the logic of a structure which pervades each and every phenomenon: the border(die Grenze). It is analyzed as an (...) advanced manifestation of “determinateness,” an even more primitive structure of being, which makes explicit its intrinsic connection with not-being. What is distinctive about Hegel’s analysis is that it establishes a logical character concerning the concept of “border” that precedes empirical observation and a connection with space. The aim of the paper is to reconstruct Hegel’s dialectic of the border in such a way as to make this logical character apparent and convincing to contemporary audience, who begin from the assumption that all discourse about border has an empirical basis and presupposes reference to space. It will be argued that, contrary to received opinion, the very phenomenon of “border” has certain universal and necessary features which explain its very possibility, are completely a priori and are established prior to any reference to space. A discussion about “borders” that excludes any a priori investigation into this phenomenon from its domain simply fails to illuminate its most important dimension: its logical core or, if you will, its universal and necessary attributes. (shrink)

Recent research has defended the surprising thesis that in many cases the search for truth is better off if the information exchanged between the members of an epistemic community is limited. This is what one may call the limited information thesis. There is, however, the possibility of an even more radical position than this: the thesis that any communication between peers has zero epistemic value and that the search for truth is better off if the truth-inquirer does not take into (...) consideration the truth-claims of her peers. This can be called the solitude thesis. The paper defends the claim that Descartes is a supporter of the solitude thesis with respect to metaphysical inquiry. The defense is facilitated by means of interpreting textual evidence found in Descartes’ essays Discourse on the Method, The Search for Truth and the Meditations on First Philosophy. (shrink)

O objetivo específico do presente artigo é explicar por que a quarta figura do silogismo do ser aí na doutrina do conceito da Ciência da Lógica de Hegel é denominada “silogismo matemático”. Para esse fim, pretendo proceder em três passos principais. Em primeiro lugar, elucidarei o conceito de silogismo a partir do qual o alcance e o limite do silogismo matemático devem ser avaliados. Em segundo lugar, apresentarei uma tradução e um comentário analítico do texto hegeliano sobre o silogismo matemático, (...) procurando explicitar em que consiste a necessidade de reduzir o silogismo qualitativo ao silogismo quantitativo. Em terceiro lugar, mostrarei que a matemática, com efeito, constitui um âmbito legítimo dentro do qual o silogismo da quarta figura é capaz de gerar conhecimento, mas justamente a delimitação desse âmbito torna necessária a crítica de qualquer formalização matemático-simbólica da lógica dialética. (shrink)

Early in the Logic of Essence, the second main part of Hegelian Logic, Hegel identifies a logical structure, seeming (Schein), with “the phenomenon of scepticism.” The present paper has two aims: first, to flesh this identification out by describing the argument that leads up to it; and, second, to argue that it is mistaken. I will proceed as follows. Section 1 deciphers the opening statement of the Logic of Essence, “the truth of being is essence,” by specifying the meaning of (...) each of its composing terms. The discussion opens the way for deliberation on the meaning of the notion of seeming, since seeming proves to be what remains of being in the structure of essence. This is done in section 2. It is also shown therein that seeming takes two logical forms, dualistic seeming and monistic seeming. Section 3 argues that Hegel identifies scepticism only with dualistic seeming, and that the scepticism he has in mind is what one may call “subjective scepticism,” namely a scepticism grounded in the subject of cognition. The section concludes that Hegel, judged by his own standards, is mistaken in this identification. Finally, section 4 considers Robert Pippin’s objection to the above conclusion and offers a rejoinder. (shrink)

Resumo O objetivo de meu trabalho é o esclarecimento de quatro características distintivas do sistema hegeliano como projeto de uma filosofia livre de pressuposições. Para tanto, pretendo reconstruir a conexão entre os seguintes traços constitutivos do conceito operativo de Voraussetzungslosigkeit : em primeiro lugar, a imanência do real ao pensar objetivo; em segundo, a integração do ceticismo pirrônico ou antigo ao modo de apresentação científica do pensar; em terceiro lugar, a configuração do elemento lógico em termos de um movimento de (...) circulação de si mesmo; em quarto, a subversão da compreensão ordinária da dupla conceitual "abstrato-concreto". A reconstrução assim oferecida permite argumentar sobre conclusões relevantes para compreender adequadamente a ambição do projeto especulativo de Hegel: em primeiro lugar, a ausência de pressuposições só pode confirmar-se enquanto prova científica por meio da subversão das certezas arraigadas no senso comum; em segundo, a prova da imanência é científica na medida em que mostra o necessário entrelaçamento do aspecto ontológico com o aspecto epistemológico do sistema, tornando-o invulnerável a objeções céticas de tipo radical; em terceiro, o sistema não é de modo algum reduzível à estrutura da Enciclopédia, pois essa é apenas um auxílio didático para a apresentação do sistema, cujo significado verdadeiro pode ser atingido unicamente pela organização cada vez mais concreta dos silogismos da ideia da filosofia.The aim of my article is the clarification of four distinctive characters of Hegel's system as a project of a presuppositionless philosophy. For this purpose, I will reconstruct the connection among the following features of the operative concept of presuppositionlessness: in the first place, the immanence of the real in the objective thinking; in the second place, the integration of pyrrhonian or ancient skepticism into the scientific way of presentation of thinking; in the third place, the configuration of the logical element in terms of an inner circulation; in the fourth place, the subversion of the ordinary understanding of the couple 'abstract-concrete'. This reconstruction allows me to argue for some conclusions relevant for the understanding of the ambitions of the Hegelian speculative project. In the first place, presuppositionlessness can be confirmed as a scientific proof only if the subversion of the commonsensical distinctions between abstract and concrete succeeds. In the second place, the proof of the immanence is scientific insofar as it shows the necessary intertwinement of the ontological aspect with the epistemological aspect of the system, making it invulnerable to radical skeptical objections. In the third place, the system is by no means reducible to the structure of the Encyclopedia, since this is only a didactic support for the presentation of the system, whose true meaning can be attained only by the more and more concrete organization of the syllogisms of the idea of philosophy. (shrink)

In his article “Hegelian Identity,” Trisokkas examines the dialectic of identity and difference in the second chapter of Section One of Book Two of Hegel’s Science of Logic, “The Determinations of Reflection.” Trisokkas initially shows that Hegel understands identity as having its truth in contradiction. He then explains that Hegel understands contradiction in two ways. Ordinarily, a contradiction occurs when a quality or quantity (F) and its contradictory (not F) are predicated of the same thing (A). However, for Hegel, contradiction (...) has a more fundamental sense. It is a structure where the very thing (A) is in its own minimal self continuously both affirmed (A) and denied (not A). It is thereby shown that Hegelian identity is not merely the thing’s distinguishing from another thing but also, and more fundamentally, a process of self-negation and self-unification within the thing itself. As such a process, the identity of a thing is equally its non-identity. (shrink)

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)