Stephen Houlgate

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.

G.W.F. Hegel's aesthetics, or philosophy of art, forms part of the extraordinarily rich German aesthetic tradition that stretches from J.J. Winckelmann's Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks and G.E. Lessing's Laocoon through Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment and Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man to Friedrich Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and Martin Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art and T.W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. Hegel was influenced in particular by Winckelmann, Kant and Schiller, and his own thesis of the “end of art” has itself been the focus of close attention by Heidegger and Adorno. Hegel's philosophy of art is a wide ranging account of beauty in art, the historical development of art, and the individual arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry. It contains distinctive and influential analyses of Egyptian art, Greek sculpture, and ancient and modern tragedy, and is regarded by many as one of the greatest aesthetic theories to have been produced since Aristotle's Poetics

In this essay I argue that Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature combines four elements. Hegel develops (1) an a priori account of the logical determinations immanent in and peculiar to nature—determinations that incorporate (but are not reducible to) (2) the determinations set out in the Logic. Hegel then points to (3) the empirical phenomena corresponding to each determination and so proves indirectly that such phenomena are necessary. Finally, he draws attention to (4) those aspects of nature that cannot be explained by nature’s immanent logic and so are contingent. In this way, I argue, Hegel demonstrates a priori that certain natural processes are made necessary by the distinctive logic of nature, but he also recognizes that there are contingencies in nature that only empirical science can discover.

The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1771-1831) is now recognized to be one of the most important modern thinkers. His influence is to be found in Marx's conception of historical dialectic, Kierkegaard's existentialism, Dewey's pragmatism and Gadamer's hermeneutics and Derrida's deconstruction. Until now, however, it has been difficult for the non-specialist to find a reasonably comprehensive introduction to this important, yet at times almost impenetrable philosopher. With this book Stephen Houlgate offers just such an introduction. His book is written in an accessible style and covers a range of topics: the philosophy of history, logic and phenomenology, political philosophy, aesthetics and the philosophy of religion. In the course of the book the author relates Hegel's ideas to those of many other thinkers, including Luther, Descartes, Kant and Thomas Kuhn.

Alan White’s review in The Owl, 22, 1 : 91–96, of my book, Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Criticism of Metaphysics, offers a generous appraisal of what he considers to be the book’s merits and faults. White is clearly not satisfied that the book has successfully accomplished what it set out to achieve. However, after having been told by one reviewer that what “plainly” lay closest to my heart was a full-blooded defense of Hegel, and after having been scolded by another reviewer for not having “engaged” with Nietzsche in the manner of Heidegger and for daring to suggest that Nietzsche might have been misguided in his thinking, it it pleasing to read a review - there have fortunately been one or two others as well - which considers worthwhile not only the project of the book itself, but also to explain in some detail what the book is actually about. For that I am very grateful.

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.

IN HIS PROVOCATIVE AND HIGHLY READABLE BOOK, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy, Andrew Bowie argues that “Schelling... helps define key structures in modern philosophy by revealing the flaws in Hegel in ways which help set the agenda for philosophy even today.” The claim that Schelling’s critique of Hegel has exercised considerable influence on subsequent generations of philosophers is undeniably true. Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, and Engels all heard Schelling lecture in the years after Hegel’s death in 1831 and were receptive to his critique of the Hegelian system. Furthermore, many leading twentieth-century continental philosophers, including especially Heidegger and Habermas, studied Schelling closely and have taken up positions vis-à-vis Hegel which are recognizably Schellingian in origin and which have influenced other philosophers in turn. Schelling’s critique of Hegel is thus by no means merely of local interest to students of German idealism, but is of interest to all students of the continental tradition in post-Kantian philosophy for the simple reason that his critique is one of the most important sources of that very tradition.

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

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..

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.