This text provides a truly comprehensive guide to one of the most important and challenging works of modern philosophy. The systematic complexity of Hegel's radical project in the Science of Logic prevents many from understanding and appreciating its value. By independently and critically working through Hegel's argument, this book offers an enlightening aid for study and anchors the Science of Logic at a central position in the philosophical canon.

Here is a universal biology that draws upon the contributions of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel to unravel the mystery of life and conceive what is essential to living things anywhere they may arise. The book develops a philosopher’s guide to life in the universe, conceiving how nature becomes a biosphere in which life can emerge, what are the basic life processes common to any organism, how evolution can give rise to the different possible forms of life, and what distinguishes the (...) essential life forms from one another. (shrink)

Winfield (philosophy, U. of Georgia) charges that the self- determination assailed by the postmodern credo is a strawman, and that spurning the autonomy of reason and action is not possible without that very independence.

States that the war on terror cannot be truly understood without investigating the legitimacy of modernity, the challenge that religion presents to modernization, and the post-colonial predicament from which Islamist reaction arises. This book illuminates the war on terror in light of these issues.

Introduction Nothing seems more accessible than mind, whose essential subjectivity always reveals mind to itself. Whether feeling its own feeling, ...

Recently, a slew of Carl Schmitt’s political writings have been translated into English, making newly available his Concept of the Political, Political Theology, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, and Political Romanticism. Addressing the theory and practice of modern politics, these slim monographs at once tantalize and frustrate with their bold strokes, whose sweeping connections are more intimated than systematically developed. All four studies are united by a critique of liberal political theory and the depoliticization of modern institutions, a critique that (...) has found subsequent resonance among thinkers as diverse as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, and Jürgen Habermas. This dual critique has as its counterpart a positive doctrine of politics that Schmitt traces in reaction to the political crisis of our times. Both in its critique of liberalism and modern politics and in its affirmation of the political, Schmitt’s work lends itself to a confrontation with Hegel, that other modern thinker who repudiated liberalism and its political embodiments in an effort to re-establish the primacy of politics. (shrink)

Recently, a slew of Carl Schmitt’s political writings have been translated into English, making newly available his Concept of the Political, Political Theology, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, and Political Romanticism. Addressing the theory and practice of modern politics, these slim monographs at once tantalize and frustrate with their bold strokes, whose sweeping connections are more intimated than systematically developed. All four studies are united by a critique of liberal political theory and the depoliticization of modern institutions, a critique that (...) has found subsequent resonance among thinkers as diverse as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, and Jürgen Habermas. This dual critique has as its counterpart a positive doctrine of politics that Schmitt traces in reaction to the political crisis of our times. Both in its critique of liberalism and modern politics and in its affirmation of the political, Schmitt’s work lends itself to a confrontation with Hegel, that other modern thinker who repudiated liberalism and its political embodiments in an effort to re-establish the primacy of politics. (shrink)

For politics to measure up to reason, two requirements have long been acknowledged: first, that the ends of political action be universal, and second, that the pursuit of such universal ends consist in political self-determination, that is, in self-government.Aristotle set the stage for all further political inquiry by distinguishing political association through the universality of its end or good, while identifying the end of politics with political activity itself, an activity in which citizens rule over one another while presiding over (...) all other associations, which fall under political dominion owing to the particularity of their pursuits. Aristotle joined the universality of politics with the activity of self-rule by recognising political activity to be an end in itself that is also a master end for the sake of which all other conduct is to be pursued. As such, politics was itself the highest good, making ethics possible by overcoming the hegemony of instrumental action, whose every end is devoid of intrinsic value, leaving conduct ultimately pointless.Two corollary difficulties, however, undermine Aristotle's enterprise. On the one hand, he is unable to give the universal end of political association a non-arbitrary content. Politics may claim universality by being both an end in itself and a master end, but this is just a recipe for ‘might makes right’, where any prevailing rule would be identical with the highest good. Appeal to a distinctly human function or to forms of rule that pursue the common good rather than the particular interests of some ruler can provide no remedy. (shrink)

Through constructive arguments covering the principal topics and controversies in epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, Autonomy and Normativity demonstrates how truth, right and beauty can retain universal validity without succumbing to the mistaken Enlightenment strategy of seeking foundations for rational autonomy. Presenting a compact, yet comprehensive statement of a powerful and provocative alternative to the reigning orthodoxies of current philosophical debate, Richard Winfield employs Hegelian techniques and presents a radical and systematic critique of the work of mainstream thinkers including: Kant, Rawls, (...) Husserl and Habermas. This book offers an invaluable resource for students of both analytic and continental philosophical traditions, and related areas of law, social theory and aesthetics. (shrink)

In face of the fashionable dogma that we must choose between procedural ethics and communitarianism, the neglected alternative of an ethics without foundations warrants careful demarcation. George Lucas aims at undermining its distinctiveness, treating the system of right argued for in Reason and Justice as a bastard theory incongruously melding the formalism of procedural ethics with modes of community that should better be conceived as historical conventions.

Tony Smith’s criticisms of The Just Economy in The Owl, 22, 1 : 103–114, revolve around disputing several central objections to Marx’s political economy. Although this focus ignores much of the argument of The Just Economy, Smith’s defense of Marx does raise issues crucial for conceiving economic justice.

Although Hegel has frequently been granted felicitous insight into the rich detail of known facts, his strategy for conceiving reality has been roundly dismissed as a relic of philosophical hypertrophy. Such dismissal is certainly understandable considering how often Hegel’s theory of reality has been interpreted to be the child of either a leviathan metaphysical construction or a demonically inventive transcendental constitution. Unfortunately, the weight of these interpretations has not just led to the general discrediting of Hegel’s system. It has also (...) virtually banished from view a central strand in Hegel’s argument which suggests an entirely different approach offering a viable, yet ignored strategy for conceiving reality without falling prey to the foundational dilemmas afflicting metaphysical and transcendental argument. There is no better way of comprehending the significance and neglected promise of this strategy than first following in broad outline the path of inquiry which has led to the quagmire in which thought today confronts reality. (shrink)

What it is to be determinate, to have quality, to be something, hardly appears to be a problem worthy of thought. How could anything be more self-evident or familiar or resistant to questioning? It seems virtually impossible to be unacquainted with the category of something, whether in reality or in thought or speech. To encounter anything real at all is to encounter something, whereas to think or speak any intelligible content is already to refer to something thought or spoken. Indeed, (...) it is unimaginable how one could fail to understand something, since if one did lack all notion of something there would be nothing determinate to understand or encounter. (shrink)

The proliferation of arts may be a commonplace phenomena, with old arts changing and new arts arising with every novel turn in technology. Yet, just as the diverse experiments of artists demand, rather than render superfluous, an adjudication of the boundary between art and prosaic things, the parade of old, transmuted and newborn arts equally calls into question the identities of the arts that it continually spews forth. The existence of artworks cannot of itself provide any unequivocal guidelines for demarcating (...) one art from another or for establishing their totality. (shrink)

RésuméLa doctrine hégélienne du concept et du jugementpermet une approche à la fois non circulaire et non formelle, capable de légitimer lew rôle privilégié comme véhicules de la vérité. Pour le voir, ilfaut d'abord clarifier le rapport intrinsèque entre le concept, l'autodétermination et les catégories d'universalité, de particularité et d'individualité. Au cœur de ce rapport se trouve la manière dont l'universalité, la particularité et l'individualité sont elles-mêmes interreliées. Cette interconnexion peut sembler prendre tour à tour deux formes différentes, l'une qui (...) se manifeste dans les jugements où l'individu opère comme universel particularisé, et l'autre qui apparait lorsque l'individu englobe l'universel particularisé. Ces caractéristiques ne sont pas exclusives l'une de l'autre; mais c'est plutôt que I'individualité comme universel particularisé sous-tend l'individualité comme particulier différencié et entraine ainsi la détermination du jugement dans lequel ce dernier se trouve contenu. La compréhension de ces rapports fournit la clé pour concevoir de manière non arbitraire la relation qu'ily a entre le concept et le jugement. (shrink)

From Concept to Objectivity uncovers the nature and authority of conceptual determination by critically thinking through neglected arguments in Hegel's Science of Logic pivotal for understanding reason and its role in philosophy. Winfield clarifies the logical problems of presuppositionlessness and determinacy that prepare the way for conceiving the concept, examines how universality, particularity, and individuality are determined, investigates how judgment and syllogism are exhaustively differentiated, and, on that basis, explores how objectivity can be categorized without casting thought in irrevocable opposition (...) to reality. Winfield's book will be of interest to readers of Hegel, as well as anyone wondering how thought can be objective. (shrink)

Winfield’s explication of Hegel’s theory of mind, especially Hegel’s theory of intelligence, is, he suggests, important for solving three problems that continue to haunt contemporary work in the philosophy of mind and epistemology: 1) A problem concerning the acquisition of language and its place in an account of consciousness, 2) A problem concerning the objectivity of representations, and 3) A problem concerning the grounds of knowing. I think Winfield is correct in identifying all three problems as having their source in (...) Kantian philosophy. I examine these three problems more carefully through a critical lens aimed at recent work by John McDowell and Robert Brandom. Both philosophers claim certain Hegelian influences. I argue that, in crucial ways, both Brandom and McDowell have each inherited the problems Hegel sought to solve and that are so clearly articulated in Winfield’s essay. (shrink)

Exploring Hegels philosophical psychology to uncover viable remedies to the chief dilemmas plaguing contemporary philosophy of mind, Hegel and Mind exposes why mind cannot be an epistemological foundation nor reduced to discursive consciousness not modelled after computing machines"--Provided by publisher.

Hegel and the Future of Systematic Philosophy critically rethinks and extends Hegel's project for systematic philosophy without foundations, engaging the most important contemporary debates concerning logic, epistemology, metaphysics, nature, mind, economic justice, political freedom, globalization, and literary theory.

The rise of computers and robots, heralded in science fiction and pervading ever more daily experience, has fostered a rampant temptation to model mind as a mechanism and expect machines one day to simulate all mental reality. This temptation reflects more than technological developments, however. It arises from the perennial dilemma of two complementary approaches to mind that proceed from the assumption of a mind/body duality: one conceiving mind to be wholly immaterial and the other reducing mind to inanimate matter. (...) Exploring the difficulties of these views puts us in a position to evaluate the relation of mind and machine, helped along the way by key insights from Hegel.The notion that mind cannot be material seems confirmed in every moment of self-consciousness, whose purely temporal flow of mental content testifies to the apparent nonspatial existence of mind. Yet so long as mind is construed as immaterial, it lacks the resources to have any temporal ordering, possess any unity, or retain any specifically mental character. Deprived of materiality, mental life is hardly distinguishable from a succession of logical categories that exhibit determinacy in general rather than anything particular to mind. The possibilities of any non-logical content are excluded. Lacking any embodiment, mind has nothing with which passively to receive content in the manner of sensibility, or to retrieve and refashion any such sensible content in images. Mind could perhaps generate conceptual content, but this would be indistinguishable from the thoughts that logic produces in its thinking of thinking. (shrink)

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Rethinking in Seventeen Lectures provides a clear and philosophically engaging investigation of Hegel’s first masterpiece, perhaps the most revolutionary work of modern philosophy. The book guides the reader on an intellectual adventure that takes up Hegel’s revolutionary strategy of paving the way for doing philosophy without presuppositions by first engaging in a phenomenological investigation of knowing as it appears.

With the rise and global expansion of modernity, art has increasingly become a problem. Cast adrift from the fixed bearings of traditional shape and meaning while enduring the pressures of market necessity and public subsidy, art has confronted a dilemma internal to its own aspirations, calling into question the very significance of its enterprise. Through the crucibles of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, capitalism, the American and French Revolutions, and social democracy, a world has begun to come into being recognizing no (...) other authority than the autonomy of reason and will. The rights to property, moral accountability, a free household, equal economic opportunity, and self-government have become ever more acknowledged as universal principles revoking legitimacy from any particular factors given independently of self-determination, such as hereditary rank, race, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. Through the widening struggles over erecting free households, civil societies, and political democracies, the divide between the modern and the pre-modern has been drawn by a normative agenda in which the universality of free agency is to be realized in a self-sustaining system of institutions of freedom. (shrink)

Hegel presents two very different accounts of the initial categorization of essence in his Science of Logic and his later Encyclopedia Logic, thereby raising the question of whether this discrepancy undermines the univocal necessity of systematic logic. A close examination of these arguments reveals that the Science of Logic account captures a necessary ordering that is incompletely presented in the Encyclopedia. The details are provided for comprehending why the logic of essence must begin with a contrast of the essential and (...) the unessential, how this reverts to illusory being, and why identity depends upon the transformation of refl ection from being positing to being external to being determining in character. Significantly, the self-developing nature of these logical developments calls into question the foundationalism entailed by any privileging of the categories of essence. (shrink)

Philosophy can begin neither by making claims about the given nor by investigating knowing, since, in either way, unjustified assumptions must be made. In the face of this predicament, Hegel presents his Phenomenology of Spirit as the only viable introduction to philosophy, introducing presuppositionless science by immanently critiquing the construal of knowing which presumes that cognition always has assumptions, always confronts some given. Can the challenge of completing this immanent critique in all its daunting complexity be avoided by alternative shortcuts? (...) The article examines four such options: Hegel’s complementary introductions to the Science of Logic and arguments on how the self-referential inconsistencies of transcendental investigation and foundationalism resolve themselves. All these alternative shortcuts are shown to rest on assumptions that only the full phenomenological investigation can overcome. (shrink)

Law in Civil Society advances a new and comprehensive theory of how legal institutions should be reformed to uphold the property, family, and economic rights of individuals in civil society. In so doing, it offers a powerful challenge to the dominant legal theories and practices espoused by liberalism, positivism, natural law, and critical legal thought. Winfield argues against the prevailing assumptions of legal philosophers who dogmatically embrace formal or historical conceptions of law. True law, he contends, must be constructed within (...) the context of the different spheres of rights and ultimately can only exist within a civil society committed to self-determination and community. Working from these fundamental premises, he analyzes in detail a rich array of important legal issues: fair access to legal representation, the rationale for jury trials, appropriate distinctions between civil and criminal legal procedures, the controversies pitting common law versus codification and adversarial versus inquisitorial systems of trial, and the relationship between civil society and the state. Much inspired by Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Winfield's study offers the most convincing critique yet of that renowned philosopher's work and, in the process, provides a more complete and coherent conception of law than Hegel himself articulated. Provocative and highly instructive, the book should attract scholars, teachers, and students in legal and political philosophy and anyone else with an abiding interest in the foundations of Western law. (shrink)

There is hardly any feature of Hegel’s philosophy whose current significance is greater, or more neglected, than the unique place given the analysis of thought. Unlike any other thinker before or after, Hegel begins his philosophical system with a logic conceiving categories without regard for their reference to reality or how a given knower might think them. He allows thinking itself to figure as an object of investigation only within the subsequent theory of reality comprising the philosophies of nature and (...) spirit. There Hegel treats thinking as a real activity of living individuals, inhabiting a common world of which they are conscious and able to speak. Consequently, thought becomes something properly analyzable only after not just categories, but nature and such worldly features of mind as consciousness, representation, and language have been determined. As unsurprising as this ordering may appear, it represents a fundamental break from ordinary philosophical practice, a break bearing crucial importance for the nonmetaphysical, antifoundational character of Hegel’s philosophy, as well as signaling the genuine alternative he provides to the dilemmas plaguing so much contemporary thought. (shrink)

Beauty's joining of meaning and configuration involves a concrete universality exhibiting the logic of self-determination distinguishing the reality of rational agency. Consequently, natural beauty presents a challenge to aesthetics. An examination of the ordering principles commonly ascribed to nature (the abstract universality of efficient causality, the generic universality of species being, and the reciprocal functionality of organic unity) shows that they all lack concrete universality, establishing that aesthetics must be the philosophy of art and that natural beauty has aesthetic value (...) only as a derivative projection of artistic beauty. (shrink)

Thinkers have never been able to deny the centrality of negation and contradiction in everything human, despite all their efforts to banish both from the domains of truth, right, and beauty. Unless we properly understand the fundamental significance of negation and contradiction, we cannot free ourselves from bondage to opinion, arbitrary convention, and subjective taste. Of all philosophers, Hegel has most resolutely confronted the role of negation and contradiction in the most essential strivings of humanity, and it is high time (...) to put his comprehension to work. The essay does just this, showing how negation and contradiction operate in the different levels of logical determinacy and how their role in self-determination allows for truth, right, and beauty to be and to be conceived. (shrink)