Edward Halper

This paper uses self-relation to reconstruct Hegel's reasoning in the Logic. In the sphere of "being," selfrelation is self-predication, and the predicate is the active, participial form of the category. Examining the first three and the last category in this sphere, I explain how Hegel argues that each category is itself engaged in the activity that it signifies. However, this self-predication adds new content to the category transforming it into a new category. Ultimately, this process leads to the collapse of "being" into "essence." Categories in this later sphere exhibit a different kind of self-relation : each contains its relation to itself as an activity that negates itself and then, negating this negation, returns to itself. Hegel's analysis at the beginning of "essence" is, I argue, parallel to Kant's "Transcendental Deduction," but relations among categories replace the transcendental ego. The significance of self-relation is that it (1) effects transitions to new categories by an internal mechanism, thereby (2) allowing the Logic to be a self-exposition of the categories that (3) avoids an external (Kantian) transcendental ground.

Pangle’s thesis is that Aristotle’s account of friendship in Nicomachean Ethics 8 and 9 addresses multiple audiences. For his ostensible audience, statesmen and other men of action, Aristotle paints an enticing picture of friendship that is based on moral virtue and issues in acts of benevolence. However, he embeds within this analysis subtle “tensions” designed to signal to thoughtful readers the limits of moral virtue and so to provoke them to pursue a philosophical life as well as to provide them the material for philosophical contemplation. Pangle thinks that this second group, potential philosophers, is Aristotle’s principal audience, even if unannounced.

This paper explores two issues: (1) how our thought about nature could reflect natural processes, and (2) how our thoughts about nature are connected with each other. It argues, first, that the standard ways philosophers try to make sense of the notion that thought is separate from nature cannot be made intelligible and, second, that the conceptual schemes used to grasp nature fall broadly into two groups each of which presupposes the other, even though the two are incompatible. Although these conclusions pose obstacles to the rationality of nature, the paper concludes by arguing for some significant degree of rationality of nature and explaining what this means for science. In brief, our ability to have an experience of nature and, especially, to connect disparate features of that experience with each other presupposes some intrinsic connections within nature itself, even if these are inaccessible to us.