Stephen Houlgate

In this essay, I examine Robert Williams’s account of Hegel’s concept of divine “personhood.” I endorse Williams’s claims that God, for Hegel, is not a person but exhibits only personhood, and that divine personhood realises itself in a human community based on mutual recognition. I take issue, however, with Williams’s further claim that Hegel also takes God and humanity to stand in a relation of mutual recognition to one another, since this claim, in my view, risks turning God into a person after all. To conclude, I briefly consider a difference between Williams and myself concerning the relation of right to mutual recognition.

RESUMEN Largamente desatendida o malinterpretada, la noción de caos en la filosofía de Nietzsche es una pieza constitutiva de la particular concepción del ser que este autor habría dejado apenas esbozada. El artículo se propone elaborar este concepto en la obra nietzscheana, siguiendo algunas de las metáforas que lo iluminan. Desde allí se busca plantear los rasgos centrales de una ontologia del caos, de sesgo no metafísico, que, al afirmar el carácter acontecimental de la realidad, puede verse como precursora de la ontología hermenéutica contemporánea. ABSTRACT The notion of chaos, which has long been neglected or misinterpreted, is a constitutive element of a peculiar conception of being that the philosopher only had time to outline. The objective of this article is to elaborate on this concept in Nietzschean philosophy, guided by some of the metaphors that shed light on it. This serves as the basis to set forth the main characteristics of a non-metaphysical ontology of chaos that asserts the eventful nature of reality and can thus be seen as a precursor of contemporary hermeneutic ontology.

In his excellent recent book, Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other, Robert Williams argues that, contrary to what many commentators claim, Hegel’s philosophy does not seek to swallow up individuality and difference in an all-embracing and all-consuming absolute, but rather takes individuality and differentiation seriously as essential features of the society and the world in which we live. Williams defends this interpretation by arguing that Hegel understands all forms of genuine human community and interaction - including not just civil society and the state, but also family relations and forgiveness - as modes of reciprocal recognition between individuals.

The Fifth Annual Conference of the Hegel Society of Great Britain took place on September 15–16, 1983 in the delightful setting of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. The theme of this year’s conference - “Hegel’s Dialectic” - was approached in a variety of ways by the contributors and provoked several lively and interesting discussions. The first paper of the conference was to have been given by Howard Williams, but unfortunately he had found his way to Pembroke College instead of St. Edmund Hall and so was unable to begin the proceedings. The conference started therefore with a paper by John Llewelyn entitled “The Development of Dialectic from Kant to Hegel.”

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’.

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

Frederick Beiser’s study, Schiller as Philosopher, is a work of outstanding philosophical intelligence and exemplary scholarship. This is good news for the student of Schiller. It is, however, somewhat less good news for the aspiring critic of Beiser—at least for this aspiring critic, for there is little that I disagree with, and a very great deal that I admire, in Beiser’s book. Particularly valuable—to mention just one of the book’s many merits—is Beiser’s subtle and illuminating account of the relation between grace and dignity in Schiller’s text On Grace and Dignity (Uber Anmut und Wurde). Beiser points out that grace and dignity are not different kinds of virtue or disposition for Schiller, but different instances of a single moral virtue—a virtue that finds expression as dignity in tragic circumstances and grace in non-tragic ones. Grace and dignity are thus not at odds with one another, as it has seemed to some, but belong to one and the same Schillerian ideal of humanity. [...]

William Desmond maintains that preserving the difference between God and humanity means retaining the transcendent otherness of God. In this article, by contrast, I argue that Hegel is right to maintain that insisting on God’s transcendent otherness actually turns God into a finite divinity and so eliminates the very difference Desmond wishes to retain. The only way to preserve the genuine difference between God and humanity, therefore, is to give up the idea that God is a transcendent other and to understand him to be immanent in humanity itself. I argue that this Hegelian position is closer to the orthodox Christian understanding of God than Desmond allows.