Stephen Houlgate

Hegel, Derrida, and Restricted Economy: The Case of Mechanical Memory STEPHEN HOULGA'FE A GLANCE AT THE TEXTS OF Jacques Derrida and at the texts and lectures of G. W. F. Hegel indicates that Hegel and Derrida are extraordi- narily different thinkers. Hegel is clearly what Derrida would regard as a philosopher of presence, working toward the point "where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself," where con- sciousness is present to itself as it is in itself. 1 Derrida, on the other hand, suggests that everything that is present, here, now, at this moment, bears within it, as constitutive features of itself, the marks or traces of what is irredeemably past, and that, consequently, we can never talk of entities such as ourselves being simply or wholly present to themselves. ~ Derrida claims in Positions that he tries hard to distinguish "diff6rance" from tlegelian "differ- ence," indeed that "diff~rance" might well be defined precisely as "the inter- ruption, the destruction of Hegelian sublation [relive] wherever it operates"; and, to judge at least from the look of his texts, he would seem to have G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwamag B~inden, edited by E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel, 20 vols. and Index , Ill [Phi~nomenologie des Geistes], 74. For the English translation, see Hegel, Phenomenolog) of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller, with analysis of the..

In this paper I wish to consider the following sentence from Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history: “World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom, — a progress whose necessity it is our business to comprehend.” I wish to consider this sentence because it seems to me to lie at the heart of two important misunderstandings of Hegel’s philosophy of history. On the one hand, the statement that world history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom has led some — notably Marxists — to argue that Hegel’s is a one-sided, idealist view of history, which, for all its dialectical subtlety, ignores the important role played by material, economic factors in historical development. On the other hand, the statement that this progress must be comprehended as necessary has led others — Nietzsche, for example — to see Hegel as denying the importance of human agency in history and as positing some kind of mysterious world-spirit as the cosmic puppet-master of historical change. Both of these criticisms, in my view, are based on misinterpretations of Hegel’s project in the philosophy of history, and both, I believe, can be avoided if we pay close attention to what Hegel actually means by the sentence cited above.

That aesthetics is central to Hegel's philosophical enterprise is not widely acknowledged, nor has his significant contribution to the discipline been truly appreciated. Some may be familiar with his theory of tragedy and his doctrine of the "end of art," but many philosophers and writers on art pay little or no attention to his lectures on aesthetics. The essays in this collection, all but one written specifically for this volume, aim to raise the profile of Hegel's aesthetic theory by showing in detail precisely why that theory is so powerful. Writing from various perspectives and not necessarily aligned with Hegel's position, the contributors demonstrate that Hegel's lectures on aesthetics constitute one of the richest reservoirs of ideas about the arts, their history, and their future that we possess. Addressing a range of important topics, the essays examine the conceptual bases of Hegel's organization of his aesthetics, his treatment of various specific arts, and several of the most famous issues in the literature--including the "end of art" thesis, the relation between art and religion, and the vexed relationship between Hegel and the romantics. Together they shed light on the profound reflections on art contained in Hegel's philosophy and also suggest ways in which his aesthetics might resonate well beyond the field of philosophical aesthetics, perhaps beyond philosophy itself

This study of Hegel and Nietzsche evaluates and compares their work through their common criticism of the metaphysics for operating with conceptual oppositions such as being/becoming and egoism/altruism. Dr Houlgate exposes Nietzsche's critique as employing the distinction of Life and Thought, which itself constitutes a metaphysical dualism of the kind Nietzsche attacks. By comparison Hegel is shown to provide a more profound critique of metaphysical dualism by applying his philosophy of the dialectic, which sees such alleged opposites as defining components of a dynamic. In choosing to study a theme so fundamental to both philosophers' work, Houlgate has established a framework within which to evaluate the Hegel-Nietzsche debate; to make the first full study of Nietzsche's view of Hegel's work; and to compare Nietzsche's Dionysic philosophy with Hegel's dialectical philosophy by focusing on tragedy, a subject central to the philosophy of both.

The publication in the mid-1980s of the new critical edition of Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion is widely recognized to have been one of the most important events in the history of modern Hegel scholarship. By differentiating between Hegel’s own manuscript and the individual transcripts of the lectures made by his students, this edition enabled a wider philosophical public to trace for the first time the development of Hegel’s philosophy of religion throughout the 1820s. In view of the great importance of this new version of Hegel’s lectures, Jaeschke’s Reason in Religion, originally published in 1986 as Die Vernunft in der Religion: Studien zur Grundlegung der Religionsphilosophie Hegels, deserves particular attention and respect, because it is the first comprehensive study of Hegel’s philosophy of religion to be based on the new edition, and because Jaeschke himself was the person primarily responsible for preparing that edition.

The "logic of essence" is arguably the most important part of Hegel's Science of Logic, since it is where he offers his distinctive account of the fundamental concepts of metaphysics, such as form, substance, and causality. Yet, by Hegel's own admission, the "logic of essence" is by far "the most difficult part of the Logic" ; indeed, it is regarded by some as quite impenetrable. What Gerhard Martin Wölfle tries to do in this ambitious and remarkably lucid book is remove some of the difficulty of Hegel's notoriously dense text by elucidating what he takes to be the speculative method employed by Hegel in the "logic of essence."

This volume focuses on Hegel's philosophy of action in connection to current concerns. Including key papers by Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John McDowell, as well as eleven especially commissioned contributions by leading scholars in the field, it aims to readdress the dialogue between Hegel and contemporary philosophy of action. Topics include: the nature of action, reasons and causes; explanation and justification of action; social and narrative aspects of agency; the inner and the outer; the relation between intention, planning, and purposeful behaviour; freedom and responsibility; and self-actualisation. This book will appeal alike to Hegel scholars and philosophers of action. List of Contributors: Katerina Deligiorgi, Stephen Houlgate, Dudley Knowles, Arto Laitinen, Alasdair Macintyre, John Mcdowell, Francesca Menegoni, Dean Moyar, Terry Pinkard, Robert B. Pippin, Michael Quante, Constantine Sandis, Hans-Christoph Schmidt Am Busch, Allen Speight, Charles Taylor, Allen W. Wood

In this essay I challenge John McDowell’s controversial claim that “the real topic” of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic is the relation between “two aspects of the consciousness of a single individual.” I first consider McDowell’s interpretation of Kant, and then, by analysing briefly Hegel’s account of self-consciousness prior to the master/slave dialectic, I defend the more traditional view that that dialectic describes the relation between two separate individuals. I also criticize McDowell’s conception of absolute knowing, which, as I understand it, underlies his contention that the master/slave dialectic examines the relation between apperceptive spontaneit y and empirical consciousness within a single self

It is a commonplace among certain recent philosophers that there is no such thing as the essence of anything. Nietzsche, for example, asserts that things have no essence of their own, because they are nothing but ceaselessly changing ways of acting on, and reacting to, other things. Wittgenstein, famously, rejects the idea that there is an essence to language and thought – at least if we mean by that some a priori logical structure underlying our everyday utterances. Finally, Richard Rorty urges that we ‘abandon … the notion of “essence” altogether’, along with ‘the notion that man's essence is to be a knower of essences’.