Abstract

Hegel has often been held by his critics to have failed in his efforts to achieve his professed goal to make of philosophy a science. Some of the major objections have been that he overlooked problems of finite, embodied existence, that he ignored the constitutive power of language, and that he did not make allowance for a creative unconscious. Wilfried Ver Eecke has written an oddly-titled work which traces the role of negation in the realms of child development, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and Hegelian thought. In the course of his complex, nuanced study, he provides ample material for defending Hegel from these charges, even where he himself seems ambivalent about their validity.