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.

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.

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)

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)

This discrepancy between form and content or method and subject matter equally applies to the “philosophy of science,” even if the latter’s metatheory of science purports to be an empirical knowing like its subject matter. Although the reduction of the philosophy of science to a positive science seems to render it a positive science of positive science, whose knowing and object become equivalent, so long as the positive sciences under its scrutiny have particular contents distinguishing them from that defining the (...) philosophy of science, the topic of the philosophy of science diverges from its subject matter. This divergence is generic to any “metatheory,” for if the difference between the science and its object is eliminated, the metalevel collapses, together with any preconception of either method or topic. Neither can then retain a given character, for if the investigation and its subject matter become identical, their predetermination leaves nothing to investigate. (shrink)

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)

The logical investigation of thinking must not be confused with inquiry into the mental reality of thought, which properly falls within the philosophy of mind. Hegel provides an important, but much neglected contribution towards accounting for the psychological conditions of reason by detailing in his Philosophy of Subjective Spirit how intelligence can progress from representation to thought. By thinking through Hegel’s argument, we can comprehend why thinking is a matter of intelligence rather than consciousness, why representation cannot provide the universality (...) of conceptualization, and how semiotic imagination enables intelligence to leave representation behind and enter the domain of thought, unencumbered by the opposition of consciousness. Through this result, the philosophy of mind can account for the psychological conditions of its own theorizing. (shrink)

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.

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.

Ever since Plato, philosophers have recognized the relationship of truth and the good to be of central importance. Nevertheless, what that relationship is has been a source of ongoing controversy. At one extreme, truth has been identified with the good, whereas at the other, truth and the good have been kept apart as irreconcilably separate. How the relationship between truth and the good is construed has decisive ramifications for what each is conceived to be and for how theory and practice (...) are related. Three figures play a seminal role in exploring the relation of truth and the good: Plato, Kant, and Hegel. Through considering their respective investigations, we will find that so long as truth and the good are held apart, not only will theory and practice be devoid of any unity, but theory will be just as unable to attain truth as practice will be unable to realize the good. (shrink)

The philosophy of nature has become virtually an oxymoron for the prevailing philosophical consensus. Reason, we are told, is powerless to conceive what nature is in itself but must instead hand over all understanding of physical reality to empirical science. Philosophy may reflect upon how natural science models its data, scrutinizing the consistency of scientific theories and the way research projects are framed, but reason must never go beyond its frail limits to provide a priori ampliative, synthetic knowledge of what (...) holds universally and necessarily of nature. Insofar as the problems of knowing nature a priori apply to any extension of a priori knowledge beyond reason’s knowledge of itself, philosophy should .. (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)

Although logic’s thinking of thinking overcomes the difference between subject and object of knowing, subjectivity and objectivity have distinct logical determinations presupposed by objectivity in nature and subjectivity in rational agency. An analysis of Hegel’s account of subjectivity and objectivity in his Logic of the Concept shows how both can be differentiated without relying upon any contents of nature and spirit. This logical distinction of subjectivity and objectivity is then employed to clarify how objectivity in nature can be irreducible to (...) objectivity in logic, independently of any empirical material, an insight bearing upon the whole relation between logic and reality and its formulation by Burbidge, Maker, and Halper. (shrink)

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)

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)

From the beginnings of philosophical investigation, there has been widespread recognition that reason must be autonomous to think the truth and that philosophy must be the freest of all disciplines. Nonetheless, conceiving how self-determination can be in thought and reality seems to pose insurmountable challenges. The essay shows how these challenges can be met, explaining how the nature of the concept enables reason to be autonomous, how nature can give rise to animal life, providing the enabling conditions for linguistic intelligence, (...) how the psychological and cultural conditions of discourse leave it free, and how conduct can achieve self-determination in the intersubjective exercise of institutionalized rights. (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)

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)

Machine generated contents note: AcknowledgmentsIntroductionHegels Challenge to the Philosophy of MindHegels Solution to the Mind-Body ProblemHegel, Mind and Mechanism: Why Machines Have No Psyche, Consciousness, Nor Intelligence Self-Consciousness and Intersubjectivity From Representation to Thought: Reflections on Hegels Determination of Intelligence The Psychology of Will and the Deduction of Right: Rethinking Hegels Theory of Practical Intelligence Beyond the Sociality of Reason: From Davidson to HegelReferencesIndex AcknowledgmentsIntroductionHegels Challenge to the Philosophy of MindHegels Solution to the Mind-Body ProblemHegel, Mind and Mechanism: Why Machines (...) Have No Psyche, Consciousness, Nor Intelligence Self-Consciousness and Intersubjectivity From Representation to Thought: Reflections on Hegels Determination of Intelligence The Psychology of Will and the Deduction of Right: Rethinking Hegels Theory of Practical Intelligence Beyond the Sociality of Reason: From Davidson to HegelReferencesIndex. (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.

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)

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.

A rigorously argued and uncompromising presentation of the neo- Hegelian view that a foundation-free philosophy is possible, that normative validity derives only from self-determination, and that justice is tied to reason and consists in ...

Presents a systematic theory of the artforms (symbolic, classical, and romantic), providing a way of addressing contemporary art and sketching a theory of the individual arts.

Provides a comprehensive and systematic family ethic, addressing major issues fueling the family values debate.

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)

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)

Maker’s Philosophy Without Foundations is that rare work which deserves to shift the entire direction of philosophical debate by posing a bold alternative that contemporary discussion has all but ignored. In eleven tightly argued, interconnected essays, Philosophy Without Foundations presents a radical challenge to current thought first, by defending the option of a non-foundational philosophy that does not abandon objective truth, secondly, by arguing how such a non-foundational philosophy can provide modernity with its only adequate justification, and thirdly, by showing (...) how Hegel’s system can be most coherently understood as providing just such a philosophy without foundations. Maker makes these arguments in critical dialogue with an imposing range of thinkers covering modern epistemology from Descartes through Fichte and culminating in the contrast between Hegel’s overcoming of foundationalism and contemporary trends from Rorty and Davidson to Gadamer and Derrida. If Maker’s arguments succeed, he has not only refuted the prevailing directions in Hegel interpretation, but, more importantly, rehabilitated the project of systematic, yet foundation-free philosophy, breaking the back of the emerging consensus of analytical and continental theory, and undermining the philosophical basis of the traditional and postmodern opposition to modernity from which a resurgent fascism draws ideological support. (shrink)

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)

NOTHING APPEARS LESS PROBLEMATIC than self-consciousness. Without it, no inquiry seems possible, for how can one seek knowledge unless one is aware of undertaking that quest? Moreover, consciousness of anything other than the self is always plagued with knowing something whose existence cannot lie in the consciousness of it. As Descartes observed, whenever one represents an object different from one’s consciousness, it is always doubtful whether that object exists or corresponds with its representation. By contrast, insofar as consciousness of one’s (...) self-consciousness is the very being of self-consciousness, the gap between object and representation here seems uniquely absent. Not only is my representation of myself as self-conscious constitutive of my being self-conscious, but nothing prevents that representation from corresponding to what it is about. (shrink)

At a time when the enemies of democracy cannot be dissuaded by appeals to shared values and conventions, nothing is more pressing than a thoroughgoing investigation of what the state should be. Whereas contemporary thinkers have mostly relativized political justice or conceived it as a formal concept lacking institutional detail, The Just State provides a comprehensive theory of self-government, legitimating democracy and concretely conceiving how political institutions should be organized. Carefully and clearly evaluating the fundamental options of normative political theory, (...) philosopher Richard Dien Winfield shows how political self-determination has an exclusive validity independent of any assumptions, enabling democracy to be successfully defended against postmodernists and antimodern fundamentalists. Winfield first examines the household, social, and cultural transformations that enable political emancipation. He then methodically details how self-government should be organized. Uniquely addressing all the central issues embroiling contemporary politics, The Just State determines how political parties should function; resolves controversies between participatory and representative democracy, majoritarian and proportional representation, presidential and parliamentary systems, and federalism and centralization; and examines the ramifications of international relations for political freedom. By tackling all the questions that political philosophers have abandoned to neutral description by political scientists, Winfield reclaims political relevance for normative theory. The Just State will be of key interest to law students, politicians, and citizens at large who wrestle with what a just constitution should mandate, how positive laws should be legislated and enforced, what content they should have, and how their constitutionality should be determined. (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)

Logic, as a thinking of thinking, in which method and subject matter are indistinguishable, cannot begin with any determinate form or content without question begging. The essay examines how logic can proceed from such an indeterminate starting point and achieve closure as a valid thinking of valid thinking. Drawing upon the final chapter of Hegel’s Science of Logic, the essay examines the nature of the end of logic and the significance this termination has for both philosophical method, the difference between (...) truth and correctness, and the possibility of thinking what is other than thought. (shrink)

Systematic aesthetics, as initiated by Hegel, begins by determining the universal features of the actuality of beauty in the work of art, artistic creation, and the reception of art. As such, these features are ingredient in all further forms of art and every individual art. Yet, as merely universal determinations of art, they themselves do not differentiate whatever particular artforms and individual arts there may be. Indeed, if any candidate for a universal constituent of art were peculiar to a particular (...) form or individual branch of art, it would disqualify itself as an element in the account of art in general. Conversely, a particular mode of artistic creation may necessarily incorporate those general desiderata that make something an object of art, but an artform's particularity must reside in something more, just as what distinguishes one individual art from another must lie beyond the constitutive elements common to every work of art, every artistic creation, and every aesthetic awareness. (shrink)