Stephen Houlgate

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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..