The first English translation of Hegel's important lectures on logic.

This article is the preface to a completed book manuscript, United Nations Human Rights Ethics. Based on the indivisibility of human rights, the Four Freedoms Speech, and the Preamble of the Universal Declaration, the book takes freedom of expression as the one human right. Other rights are modes of this one. For example, one exercises freedom of expression (speech) by exercising the right to life, access to courts, etc.. The book argues that human rights are primarily an ethical concept (introduced (...) by Rousseau) rather than a concept of international law. (shrink)

This article denies that Hegel upheld the objective truth of any contradictory statements. Yet he did admit objective contradictions in the sense of intersubjectively held contradictory beliefs at the basis of some institutions, most famously lordship and bondage. He also shared the belief of Zeno, the inventor of dialectic, that continuous motion is self-contradictory but is an objective contradiction more widely shared by all institutions presupposing continuants (people and ordinary things).

The article explains my third argument for panpsychism, based on disolving all properties, including dispositional physical properties like mass, energy, and force, into phenomenal properties. I thus reject a dual-property version of panpsychism. I seek to show, contrary to Paul Churchland, that the general panpsychist hypothesis has some explanatory value, and makes a cosmology consisting in comparative psychology possible. The mental life even of so-called physical particles in physics is hypothesized to help explain their behavior.

This book proposes a treatise on the Hegelian dialectical method as based on dialectical logic. Part One explores sources of dialectical logic before Hegel in ancient thought. Part Two examines dialectical logic and the dialectical method in Hegel, with attention to the relationship between dialectical logic and contemporary formal logic. Part Three concerns the dialectical method after Hegel, in which we seek to show that the method is available for uses other than the one to which the historical Hegel put (...) it. My intention has been constructive. I want to take issue with those who have contested the existence or validity of any dialectical logic, and of the dialectical method as well.1 The payoff for studying dialectical logic is the dialectical method. By using it one can reconstruct, rethink, and relive a historical course of dialectical deduction with the purpose of achieving deeper self-comprehension, i.e., comprehension of oneself by retraveling one’s past path of dialectical assumptions, contradictions, and corrections. Dialectical self-comprehension is possible when one’s present identity has historically constituted itself through such a path. It is possible when the individual is conscious of herself as triumphant over the contradictions of the past. Part Three, treating the dialectical method after Hegel, includes a reconstruction of American history since World War II in chapter 8, according to INTRODUCTION 9 1 0 Introduction the dialectical method. We will see how a Hegelian use of the method can assist in comprehending a post-Hegelian historical standpoint present to us but unknown to Hegel. (shrink)

Rosen’s book renews the skeptical attack on Hegelianism. He pursues the attack well - perhaps as well as the case permits - and thus exposes Hegelianism to the discipline of an instructive test. He in fact concedes less to Hegel than his fellow anti-Hegelian in the skeptical tradition, Jacques Derrida. For where Derrida admits that Hegel is rationally impregnable and thus resorts to mockery and jest, Rosen ultimately denies such impregnability. True, Hegelianism cannot be criticized except from a standpoint within (...) the system - which rules out negative criticism of the system. Yet behind this seeming imperviousness to criticism lurks a fatal criticism: the mere existence of internally rational standpoints outside the system refutes its claim - and apparently the claim of any philosophy - to being the universal system of human reason. (shrink)

Earlier in the century, Richard Kroner in Von Kant bis Hegel gave us an orderly reconstruction of the development from Kant to Hegel. He thematized German idealism sympathetically from the inside, aiming to present it in and for itself. But a writer such as Kroner prefers a logical march of concepts, thus paying comparatively less attention to the often strange empirical details of intellectual history. The danger is that with such a writer the school’s self-consciousness, its being-for-itself, might be a (...) false consciousness, a being-outside-itself, a merely posited being-for-self, not a self-positing being-for-self, not a being-in-and-for-itself. Historical scholarship since Kroner has grown increasingly sensitive to the risks of over-schematization and the excessive systematization of history. It has come to be inspired by reverence for the original text, the scholarly thing in itself. (shrink)

The concept of the subject, of what Hegel calls absolute negativity, already appears early in the logic of being.1 Absolute negativity, negation of the negation, occurs throughout the logic as identity in difference understood as self-identification under different descriptions. First, the subject refers to itself merely under an incomplete description. Secondly, it refers to something other than itself under a second description which is logically required by the first. (For example, the description of being in general requires some determinate description (...) of being in particular). But this second description is dialectically excluded by the assumption that the first description is complete. Thirdly, the subject negates its negation of the other. It discovers itself in the other, under the other description, and thus comes to refer to itself less incompletely. This is Hegel in the analytic mode. (shrink)

This volume argues that the Hegel system is not closed, but open to the future. The conclusion is convincing, although it may not have required as arduous an exposition as Hoffmeyer gives it. His prose as well as the usually solid substance of what he says is reminiscent of Hegel’s Logic, whose sections bearing on his conclusion he analyzes closely. One of the interesting aspects of his book is that Hoffmeyer argues against Hegel’s own explicit exposition to establish his conclusion. (...) Hegel, we know, asserts the Logic to be God’s eternal essence before the creation of nature and history as deployed in time. The essence of the absolute is what has been, but precisely for that reason it is a temporal process withdrawn into itself. But this essence is also the power or potential for such process unfurling itself anew and in unforeseen ways. I take this to be the apparent meaning of Hegel, not a revision of him as Hoffmeyer suggests. Newly appearing self-determined attainments manifest ever more fully an essence that has always been. Yet if we reject determinism, there are countless possible past essences of countless possibly different presents. If the absolute essence which has been expresses itself in World War II, it acquires posthumously the property of always having been capable of doing so. The indetermination of the present results in a change of the essential past into the potential for this rather than that. (shrink)

1. Ontological Historical Materialism. The Hegel-Marx relationship remains an issue both for Hegel scholars aware of underlying world historical causes of the recent Hegel Renaissance and Marx scholars attentive to the philosophical roots of Marxism. It may be questioned, however, whether the relation is merely historical and circumstantial or necessary and internal as well. Marx claimed to have overturned the Hegelian system. Yet the classical formula, according to which Marxism shares with Hegelianism its method but not its system, that the (...) Hegelian system contradicts the dialectical methodology it shares with Marxism has exercised wide influence. On numerous issues, e.g., the state, the universal class, the alienation of labor, Hegelian and Marxist doctrines are admittedly not only different but contradictory. To this extent Engels’s classical formula is correct. But surely the more important consideration is method, though doctrine has so overshadowed methodological considerations in both Marxism and Hegelianism that it has been rare to define either school except in terms of specific tenets. Doctrinal definition of any movement resembles a death warrant. If either Marxism or Hegelianism is scientific and thus capable of breaking loose from nineteenth-century chains, it must be defined methodologically, programmatically. Contrary to Engels’s formula, I shall distinguish between Marxist and Hegelian methods, but shall argue that the methods are not only compatible but complementary. (shrink)

This article distinguishes between dogmatism as usually understood, unconditional dogmatism, and "dogmatism" in good sense, heuristic dogmatism. Reprinted as "Philosophy: What it is and Why" in Statements, edited for classroom use by Kathleen Squadrito, pp. 1-10.

Over twenty years after the 1989 General Assembly voted to open the Convention on the Rights of the Child for signature, the United States remains only one of two UN members not to have ratified it. The other is Somalia. This book explores the reasons for this resistance (back cover). The book highlights the priority of ethical human rights over legal human rights. Part One includes contributions by educators and child psychologists who favor and use the Convention even when it (...) is not ratified. Part Two includes two chapters by opponents of the Convention by home-schooling advocates. Part Three examines child rights in the developing world. (shrink)

First Statement of what would become Human Rights Ethics, Purdue University Press, 2008.

The annual series of Clio Hegel Studies, which has been published since 1981, is to continue under the title Clio Philosophy Studies. The Hegel series numbers were inaugurated at a time when there was no assurance that the Owl would become a journal. Now that the organ of the HSA is a journal of Hegel studies, Clio can best serve by addressing a wider audience, while continuing to encourage and welcome contributions related to Hegel. For the next two years, beginning (...) July 1, 1986, this series will be edited from the University of Strasbourg. Manuscripts by HSA member members and friends may be submitted either to Clio, Indiana-Purdue, Fort Wayne, Indiana 46805, or to Clark Butler, Indiana-Purdue Foreign Study Program, 1b, Rue de Bouxwiller, 67000 Strasbourg, France. The journal remains interested in testing Hegelian theses through interacton with the most important living currents of thought. (shrink)

In Jena Hegel began his philosophical career under the auspices of Schelling’s Spinozism. His declaration of philosophical independence from Schelling, dating from publication of the Phenomenology, was a repudiation of the Spinozistic definition of the absolute as merely substance. Substance without the flux of accidents, he came to see, is nothing at all. Yet in the judgment of history Hegel’s break with Schellingian Spinozism, though clearly embarked upon, was not so clearly consummated. The struggle of monism and pluralism is no (...) longer a burning issue in philosophy, and that is perhaps why Hegel’s monism is rarely mentioned by today’s Hegel scholars. But the belief that Hegel was a one-substance monist — affirming the existence of spirit as an all-encompassing and indivisible substance — was never far from the minds of earlier interpreters. Such interpreters range from K. F. Göschel to C.E.M. Joad in “Outline of Hegel’s Philosophy: Monistic Idealism,” Chapter 15 of his Guide to Philosophy,. By failing to distinguish the absolute idealism of Hegel from that of the British idealists, Whitehead himself lent support to the monistic interpretation of Hegel when he wrote. (shrink)

Contends that Hegel's reconstruction of valid logic leads to a conception of indirect proof and syllogisms. Clarification of the concept of indirect proof; Reference to previous papers on the subject; Indirect proof as the natural form of deduction.

The purpose of this book is to advance responsible rehabilitation of the speculative philosophy of history. It challenges the idea popularized by thinkers such as and Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-François Lyotard that historical meta-mythology and meta-narrative are philosophically obsolete. As long as humanity, viewed anthropologically, lives by over-arching narrative, the quest for a version that survives rational criticism remains vital. Here human rights serve as the key to unlock such a version. Despite the fact that the Hegelian philosophy of history (...) has often been derided, something very similar currently functions as the official ideology of the world community: the idea of history as the story of freedom. This book does not retell the world-historical story of freedom. Rather, it uncovers it, beginning with the current age of human rights and working backward through the great role-model civilizations of history. Its conclusion is that a forward retelling of the story of freedom as the story of human rights can be justified by dewesternizing the story. The book contains critical responses from specialized scholars and re-presentative of selected world cultures. The volume includes illustrations, and a guest Afterword by Donald Phillip Verene. It is a companion-volume to the author's Hegel's Logic: Between History and Dialectic. (shrink)

Clark Butler presents an innovative analysis of Hegel's most challenging work in _Hegel's Logic_ -- the first major English-language treatment of Hegel's _Science of Logic_ to appear in nearly fifteen years. Although earlier commentators on the _Logic_ have considered standard analytical philosophy-and with it modern logic-in opposition to Hegel. Butler views it as a legitimate approach in terms of which Hegel needs to be understood. This interpretation allows him to address the rigor of Hegel's thought on several levels as at (...) once an exercise in purely conceptual redefinition and a full-bodied work in metaphysical ontology and even theology. The result is an account of the _Logic_ intelligible to analytical philosophers as well as non-specialists. (shrink)

This book manuscript, entitled United Nations Human Rights Ethics: For The Greatest Success of the Greatest Number, critically examines most all major normative ethical theories since Socrates and finds Roman Stoic ethics to be the least deficient. It divides ethical theories into popular ones with little academic support, other popular ones that have had such support, and Kantian ethics standing alone as a philosopher's academic ethical philosophy with limited popular support. It criticizes the appropriation of human rights by the international (...) law profession to the exclusion of moral philosophy, despite the origin of "human rights" in the moral philosopher Rousseau. It blames the inability of moral philosophers to reach a professional consensus on the elements of normative ethics, not the legal profession. It laments both the failure of human rights education to human beings everywhere as requested by the Universal Declaration and the decline in popular support for human rights in favor of nationalism in current history since 2015. It advocates a way of redirecting human right education to people on the ground rather than mainly to law students. Such education has been overtaken by the Rule of Law movement fighting high crimes crimes against humanity unanticipated by the Universal Declaration. It argues for a way for ethicists to get on the same page in teaching elements in ethics and argues forcefully for a positive method for popular human rights education as well as for human rights-based elementary ethical theory. (shrink)

This article defends linguistic descent in contrast to the possibility of linguistic ascent or the formal mode in metaphysics. We can go both ways, but metaphysics metaphysically defined presupposes metaphysics conceptualstically defined, which presupposes metaphysicas ontologially defined. Predicates implie abstract concepts (categories in metaphysics), and abstract oncepts presuppose the concrete qualities from which they are abstracted. A distinction is made between any quality and that which has the quality. This article contains a refutation of Kant on the ontological argument. Being, (...) conceived as instantiation, is a predicate once we posit universal properties instantiated by whatever is. The article, in the author's subequent work, leads to an explicit nominalism which asserts universals only as practical postulates of theoretical reason, i.e., logical discourse. Qualities are unique, not open to multiple instantiation. (shrink)

The usual version of the genetic argument for panpsychism is not difficult to refute. The version is based on the principle of biological continuity according to which the various species differ in degree rather than in kind. It is then asserted that if there is some point in the evolution of life out of inanimate matter, or of higher out of lower life, such that before this point minds did not exist while thereafter they do exist, then the principle of (...) continuity is violated. The argument, as Paul Edwards points out, is based on the Scholastic principle that a cause must contain its effect in actuality, since otherwise it could not communicate the effect and thus could not operate as its cause. Just as what causes a body to heat up must itself be hot, so what causes human minds to come into existence must already possess mentality. Ultimately, the inanimate world of, say, six billion years ago caused human minds to come into existence. Therefore, the constituents of even the so-called “inanimate world” are psychic. Yet Edwards’ refutation of this particular argument is unassailable. The argument fails, first, because the Scholastic principle on which it is based is highly dubious. But it fails even granting this principle. The emergence of high-level minds from low-level minds would create just as great a problem as an original emergence of the mental from the nonmental. There would still be the problem of how an entity with given capacities and characteristics could be caused by entities without those capacities and characteristics. And, finally, if we grant the emergence of high-level from low-level minds, it is not clear why the mental itself may not emerge from the nonmental. (shrink)

Jacques D'Hondt, coming from the French Left, has spent a career uncovering the essential, secret Hegel underlying the surface expressions of the philosopher. He is already known in English through Hegel in His Time: Berlin 1818-1831. He writes the present biography as one would write a detective novel. Suspicious of appearances, a keen and politically astute sixth sense finds that remarkably little in Hegel's life is what it first seems. He seeks the truth in what Hegel does not say or (...) do, or through the missing context of what he does say. And yet, despite the hypocrisy and compromise forced on Hegel as the price of professional success at the best German university of the era, D'Hondt finds in Hegel, if not a martyr, at least a hero in the cause of freedom with whom he can identify. But as daring as Hegel's works were in their esoteric content, just as cautious was Hegel the man in the exoteric form given those works. (shrink)

A problem is posed by differences between the temporal order of philosophers in the history of philosophy and the rational order in which “definitions of the absolute” upheld by these philosophers appear in Hegel’s Logic. Hegel holds, according to § 88 of the Encyclopedia, both that the Logic reconstructs the history of philosophy on the level of pure thought and that chronological history deviates in places from the rational sequence. A problem is posed for anyone who takes this passage seriously, (...) thus rejecting both a panlogist view of the logic as an autonomous, non-historical self-construction and a neo-Platonic interpretation as approaching but never quite reaching a transdialectical intuition of eternity. It poses a problem for anyone who takes the logic as a hermeneutic key to history as seriously as Hegel himself. (shrink)

A defense of panpyschism based on Ockham's Razor, arguing against the materialistic identity thesis, e.g., J J C Smart.

This article vindicates human rights, not as natural rights holding wherever human beings are, but as reducible to one historically constructed right to freedom of thought and its universal modes. Universal morality is elicited from international human rights law. To be moral is first to help engender everywhere either mere inner recognition of the validity of rights or mere outer compliance with their requirements; and to engender finally inner recognition expressed in a duty of outer observance. Human rights ethics replaces (...) the rights consciousness common in the West with a duty consciousness. This universal rational morality supersedes utilitarianism, Kantianism, and other rational theories. Yet moralities making no rational claim on all (e.g., Christian, Buddhist) may flourish within human rights ethics as the universal ethical minimum. (shrink)

I have recently been appointed Coeditor of a journal published on my campus, CLIO: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History, with a view to expanding the journal’s philosophy offerings. It is a position I accepted only on the understanding that I would be free to develop the journal as an English-language forum for the study, indisciplinary application and critical evaluation of the Hegelian philosophy.

Commentary on paper by Hector Castaneda.

Neither journalistic nor sensationalistic eye-witness accounts, this is the first book of serious reflection on the moral background and issues of internal legality surrounding the events of Guantanamo Bay.

The usual version of the genetic argument for panpsychism is not difficult to refute. The version is based on the principle of biological continuity according to which the various species differ in degree rather than in kind. It is then asserted that if there is some point in the evolution of life out of inanimate matter, or of higher out of lower life, such that before this point minds did not exist while thereafter they do exist, then the principle of (...) continuity is violated. The argument, as Paul Edwards points out, is based on the Scholastic principle that a cause must contain its effect in actuality, since otherwise it could not communicate the effect and thus could not operate as its cause. Just as what causes a body to heat up must itself be hot, so what causes human minds to come into existence must already possess mentality. Ultimately, the inanimate world of, say, six billion years ago caused human minds to come into existence. Therefore, the constituents of even the so-called “inanimate world” are psychic. Yet Edwards’ refutation of this particular argument is unassailable. The argument fails, first, because the Scholastic principle on which it is based is highly dubious. But it fails even granting this principle. The emergence of high-level minds from low-level minds would create just as great a problem as an original emergence of the mental from the nonmental. There would still be the problem of how an entity with given capacities and characteristics could be caused by entities without those capacities and characteristics. And, finally, if we grant the emergence of high-level from low-level minds, it is not clear why the mental itself may not emerge from the nonmental. (shrink)

Human Rights Ethics makes an important contribution to contemporary philosophical and political debates concerning the advancement of global justice and human rights. Butler's book also lays claim to a significant place in both normative ethics and human rights studies in as much as it seeks to vindicate a universalistic, rational approach to human rights ethics. Butler's innovative approach is not based on murky claims to "natural rights" that supposedly hold wherever human beings exist; nor does it succumb to the traditional (...) problems of justification associated with utilitarianism, Kantianism, and other procedural approaches to human rights studies. Instead, Butler proposes "a dialectical justification of human rights by indirect proof" that claims not to be question begging. Very much in the spirit of Hegel and Habermas, Butler proposes to vindicate a "totally rational account of human rights," but one that depends concretely and historically on a dialectically constructed "right to freedom of thought in its universal modes.". (shrink)