Stephen Houlgate

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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

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 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.