Stephen Houlgate

In this response, I accept some of McDowell’s criticisms of my presentation of his views in my essay, but argue that his understanding of Hegel remains problematic. In particular, I claim that he fails to see that, for Kant, intuitional unit y is inseparable from judging; that his understanding of Hegelian absolute knowing is wrong as it stands ; that he fails to see that self-consciousness aims, not to overcome the specific antithesis between self-consciousness and the empirical world, but to achieve explicit consciousness of itself in its relation to what is other, and that this requires it to relate to another self-consciousness; and that the implications of his idea that Hegel’s account of the life and death struggle and the master/slave relation is “allegorical” remain unclear

Brandom's interpretation of Hegel in Tales of the Mighty Dead is subtle, tightly argued and hugely impressive. It takes no account, however, of Hegel's distinctive conception of phenomenology and as a result - for all its subtlety - offers a somewhat distorted picture of Hegel. In the opening chapters of Hegel's Phenomenology we learn that perception is committed as much to the unity of differences as to exclusive difference, that neither perception nor understanding is committed to holism as Brandom understands it, and that the understanding is not governed by the law of non-contradiction but in fact understands the world to be a thoroughly contradictory place. All of this, however, gets lost sight of in Brandom's de re interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology.

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..

The Eighth Annual Conference of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, a joint conference of the Society and the Hegel-Archiv in Bochum, was held in Pembroke College, Oxford, on September 11–13, 1986. The theme of the conference was “History-Philosophy-Politics” and the papers examined Hegel’s ideas in the context of his philosophical system, contemporary German thought, and the writings of Karl Marx. It was deeply regretted that Professor W. H. Walsh, who had taken an active part in the organization of the conference up to the last few days before his death, could not participate in it.

In this essay I argue that Hegel criticizes Kant for failing to carry out a thorough critique of the categories of thought. In Hegel's view, Kant merely limits the validity of the categories to objects of possible experience, but he does not challenge the way in which the ‘understanding’ conceives of those categories and other concepts. Indeed, for Hegel, Kant's limitation of the validity of the categories itself presupposes the sharp distinctions, drawn by understanding, between concepts such as ‘form’ and ‘matter’ or ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. I note that Hegel does not do complete justice to Kant's concept of the ‘thing in itself’ or to his conception of ‘critique’, but I argue that his criticism of Kant is none the less correct.

Errol Harris’s new book is an impressive and bold attempt to call into question the presuppostions of modern thought and to argue that a dialectical conception of logic and metaphysics is what is required by present-day science and culture. Whether Harris will convince his readers of the validity of Hegelian dialectical logic, I am not sure. What is certain, however, is that this book poses a challenge to contemporary philosophy that deserves to be taken seriously. Harris has produced a highly stimulating book that will be of interest to students of logic, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science and ethics, of any philosophical persuasion.

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’.