This international collection of essays from the 2014 Hegel Society of America Meeting addresses three major stances in the decades-long controversy on the topic: Hegel as a full-blooded pre-critical metaphysician; Hegel as a thinker without metaphysics; and Hegel as a neo-Aristotelian metaphysician par excellence. This work successfully overcomes the stalemates between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’, ‘anti-metaphysical’ and ‘metaphysical’ Hegel.

The article expresses skepticism on the alleged affinity between Hegel’s theory of conceptuality and conceptual pragmatism. Despite the intriguing philosophical impetus underlying the latter, the author formulates doubts about its compatibility with logical and metaphysical principles of absolute idealism. The criticism is articulated in four theses: (1) pragmatism’s concerns with (ultimately empirical) concept-acquisition and concept-application are largely alien to Hegel’s logical-metaphysical theory of conceptuality; (2) the interchangeability of ‘word’ and ‘concept’ in the pragmatist discussion is incompatible with Hegel’s notion of (...) thinking; (3) the distinction of Vertsandesbestimmung and Vernunftbegriff, while ignored in practice in the pragmatist approach, is pivotal to Hegel’s understanding of the nature of conceptuality; (4) finally, pragmatism’s use of the recognition-thesis from the Phenomenology of Spirit ignores the noncontractarian, non-negotiative function of the same in Hegel’s work. (shrink)

The article opens with the analysis of a 2013 legal memorandum of the U.S. Department of Justice that sanctions state ordered killings of citizens on foreign soil, as well as the violation of foreign sovereignty that may have to accompany such killings. This document, together with arguments of contemporary juridical pragmatist like M. Ignatieff, functions in the article as a prototype of the kind of juridical thinking that has been explicitly countered in classical philosophies of right. Section I outlines Kant’s (...) theory of the common ethical ground of morals and politics, his criticism of Christian Garve, and his distinction of politics from pseudopolitics. Section II presents Hegel’s scrutiny of the central role of public hypocrisy and its casuistry, especially with regards to the concealment of crimes against humanity under the philanthropic veil. (shrink)