Stephen Houlgate

The view that Hegel’s logic is a metaphysical logic has come under criticism in recent years from a number of commentators. Richard Winfield, for example, states unequivocally in Reason and Justice that Hegel’s “foundation-free theory of determinacy … turns out to be a theory of self-determined determinacy with no immediate ontological or epistemological application … It is no more an ontological theory demonstrating that the fundamental structure of reality is something self-determined, than it is an epistemological doctrine ordaining the manner in which reason can arrive at each and every truth”. The view that Hegel’s is a non-foundational, presuppositionless logic is one that I accept. It is clear that Hegel’s logic does not constitute a traditional metaphysics of the kind put forward by, say, Leibniz or Spinoza. Hegel is not offering us metaphysical propositions about presupposed metaphysical entities. He is not therefore presupposing that there is an absolute and then enquiring into what it is.

This is a rich and thought-provoking study of Hegel’s all-too-often neglected masterpiece, the Science of Logic. Zambrana draws on commentators, such as Robert Pippin, Robert Brandom and Karin de Boer, to construct a highly original and challenging interpretation of the Logic. Her principal thesis is that, for Hegel, our conceptions of nature, self, and society are not simply given to us but are the “product of reason”. More precisely, such conceptions, through which we render the world and ourselves intelligible, are norms that have to be authorized by reason within a specific historical context or shape of “spirit.” Zambrana’s Hegel thus follows Kant in identifying reason as the source of authority...

Rosen’s book renews the skeptical attack on Hegelianism. He pursues the attack well - perhaps as well as the case permits - and thus exposes Hegelianism to the discipline of an instructive test. He in fact concedes less to Hegel than his fellow anti-Hegelian in the skeptical tradition, Jacques Derrida. For where Derrida admits that Hegel is rationally impregnable and thus resorts to mockery and jest, Rosen ultimately denies such impregnability. True, Hegelianism cannot be criticized except from a standpoint within the system - which rules out negative criticism of the system. Yet behind this seeming imperviousness to criticism lurks a fatal criticism: the mere existence of internally rational standpoints outside the system refutes its claim - and apparently the claim of any philosophy - to being the universal system of human reason.

The aim of this article is to explain why, in Hegel's view, art's history brings it to the point at which it can no longer afford the highest satisfaction of our spiritual needs and so fulfill its own highest calling, and why, nevertheless, we moderns still need art and still need it to create beauty. I argue that Hegel advocates a modern art of beauty because he believes that what has to be given aesthetic expression in the modern world is concrete human freedom and life and that the aesthetic expression of such concrete human freedom entails beauty

In this essay I propose to examine Hegel’s account of necessity and contingency in the Science of Logic. Anyone who dares to take Hegel’s Logic seriously in public risks being accused by legions of formal logicians of “elementary logical fallacies”. Nevertheless, John Burbidge, Dieter Henrich, and others have demonstrated that it is possible to discuss the Logic with clarity and intelligibility, and I shall endeavor to emulate their example as best as I can. One should take heed, however; even Hegel admits that “the concept of necessity is very difficult,” and rendering the concept of necessity intelligible will not eliminate that difficulty. All I can hope to do, therefore, is take us from the point at which we are not even sure what the difficulty is supposed to be to the point at which the nature of the difficulty itself becomes clear.

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.