Abstract

This dissertation is dedicated to Hegel's epistemology and, in particular, to the concept of sensation (Empfindung) as it is systematically thematized in the Encyclopedia Anthropology – that is, the first part of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. The methodological approach is neither philological nor merely exegetical. Rather it is guided by a specific argumentative thread: the reconstruction of Hegel's theory of sensation will be drawn starting from McDowell's position of the problem of the relation between mind and world. In order to frame my analysis of Hegel's theory of sensation, I explicit in Chapter 1 the background issues of my reconstruction. My aim is to read Hegel's epistemology as an attempt to find a sound reconciliation between empirical-realism (which corresponds to a bottom-up explanatory direction) and idealism (which corresponds to a top-down explanatory direction). If considered as reciprocally exclusive, these philosophical attitudes lead – according to Hegel – to unilateral and mistaken theories. This is the reason why Hegel adopts both explanatory directions. I maintain that Hegel's criticism regarding the one-sidedness of those one-directional epistemological perspectives specular to McDowell's criticism of the Myth of the Given on the one hand and of coherentism on the other. In this picture, sensation emerges as a decisive aspect in order to test Hegel's absolute idealism and its ambition to reconcile empirical-realism and idealism. I consider sensation in Hegel's system as having the same role an appealing theory of perception has for McDowell's goal to exorcise the anxieties cause by modern philosophy. Chapter 2 is a sort of pars destruens voted to prepare the ground for the analysis of Hegel's account of sensation. Here I try to show that Hegel's epistemology is not reducible to bottom-up approaches (according to which knowing emerges starting from an independent external world) as well as to top-down approaches (which consider knowing as an activity rooted in our freedom as thinking and speaking-beings and, moving from here then try to account for reality and experience). In Chapter 3 I reconstruct Hegel's theory of sensation as an attempt to amend and make compatible the explanatory direction discussed in Chapter 2. In Chapter 4, in the end, I return to the analogy between the hegelian account and McDowell's proposal. Here I make a comparison between McDowell's and Hegel's accounts in order to show that – beyond all the similarities which can be finded between the two authors – Hegel has problematical ontological commitments that McDowell would never endorse