Hegel introduced the Phenomenology of Mind as a work on the problem of knowledge. In the first chapter, entitled “Sense Certainty, or the This and Meaning,” he concluded that knowledge cannot consist of an immediate awareness of particulars ). The tradition discusses sense certainty in terms of this failure of immediate knowledge without, however, specifically addressing the problem of reference. Yet reference is distinct from knowledge in the sense that while there can be no knowledge of objects without reference, there (...) may be reference without knowledge. If that is the case, then the failure of immediate knowledge does not entitle us to conclude anything about the success or failure of reference. It is not surprising, then, that a few scholars have begun to examine sense certainty primarily as a thesis about reference. (shrink)

The reviewer’s task is a fairly straightforward one for these two volumes, since each of them is an excellent example of what it sets out to be. I shall first simply describe what is in each of them and then move on to certain more general questions they raise.

In this slim book Professor Karelis combines the first ninety pages of Sir Malcolm Knox’s twelve-hundred-page translation - Hegel’s introduction to the subject in the composite text used by Knox - with some introductory remarks of his own, presumably a selection from his 1972 D. Phil. thesis at Oxford. Karelis’ announced purpose is to make Hegel’s aesthetics more accessible to those, particularly students, who lack the time or the courage to take on the whole of the Knox translation. In this, (...) in my opinion, Karelis suceeds handsomely. (shrink)