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313Insight and the Enlightenment: Why Einsicht_ in Chapter Six of Hegel’s _Phenomenology of Spirit?Hegel Bulletin (2): 1-23. 2016.Hegel uses the term Einsicht (‘insight’) throughout several key subsections of Chapter Six of the Phenomenology of Spirit (notably in ‘Faith and Pure Insight’ and ‘The Struggle of the Enlightenment with Superstition’). Nowhere else in his work does the term enjoy such a sustained treatment. Commentators generally accept Hegel’s use of the term in the Phenomenology as simply referring to the type of counter-religious reasoning found in the French Enlightenment. I show how Hegel derives the term, …Read more
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358Ful-filling the Copula, Determining Nature: The Grammatical Ontology of Hegel's MetaphysicsJournal of Speculative Philosophy 31 (4): 575-593. 2017.Both continental and analytic traditions have tended to associate Hegel’s idealism with metaphysics and therefore as divorced from and even pernicious to reality. Hence, contemporary Hegel studies have tended to concentrate on discrete elements of his philosophy while attempting to avoid its metaphysical dimensions and their systematic pretensions. I seek to show that rather than dwelling in abstraction, Hegel’s metaphysics, as presented in his Logics, recount the thought determinations th…Read more
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625How the Dreaming Soul Became the Feeling Soul, between the 1827 and 1830 Editions of Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective SpiritIn Eric von der Luft (ed.), Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit, . pp. 37-54. 1987.Why does Hegel change “Dreaming Soul” to “Feeling Soul” in the 1830 edition of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit? By tracing the content of the Dreaming Soul section, through Hegel’s 1794 manuscript on psychology, to sources such as C.P. Moritz’s Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, the paper shows how the section embraces a late Enlightenment mission: combating supposedly supernatural expressions of spiritual enthrallment by explaining them as pathological conditions of the soul. Responding to …Read more
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357Reason and Revelation: Absolute Agency and the Limits of Actuality in HegelSymposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale 21 (1): 182-202. 2017.Contemporary reluctance to consider any complicity between philosophy and religion has led to an inability to consider, in Hegel studies, how the revelatory agency of the Absolute necessarily complements the narrative of human reason. According to Hegel, reason alone can do no more than end in the endless limitations of actuality, in the infinite approximations of a moral summum bonum and in the ad infinitum strivings for concrete political freedom. Recognizing where revelatory agency occurs in …Read more
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Hegel, critique de Solger. Le problème de la communication scientifiqueArchives de Philosophie 60 (2): 255. 1997.The paper examines Hegel's review of Solger's posthumous writing and correspondence, which had recently been published. While Hegel appreciates Solger's absolute dialectic, he is critical of the un-scientific linguistic form his thought must take (literary dialogues), as revelatory of the missing middle between the infinite and the finite: the province that Hegel calls Geist.
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191Galvanism and excitability in Friedrich Schlegel's Theory of the FragmentClio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 38 (1): 1-15. 2008.Friedrich Schlegel's theory of irony is examined with reference to his theory of the literary fragment. Both are informed not only by Fichte's I = I but by Ritter's theory of galvanism as well as by John Brown's theory of medicine. In Ritter, electrical energy is created through the compression of opposite chemical elements in a closed (fragmentary) space. Brown's theory of excitability presents the compressive "other" as actually soliciting the energetic sparks that Schlegel associates with Wit…Read more
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352The Hobbesian Ethics of Hegel's Sense-CertaintyEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (2): 421-438. 2014.In this paper, I explore the largely ignored ethical dimension in the first section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Sense-certainty, which tends to be understood exclusively as an epistemological critique of sense-data empiricism. I approach the ethical aspect of the chapter through Hegel’s analysis of language, there, as unable to refer to individual things. I then show that the position Hegel analyses is akin to the one presented by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, as well as in his De Corp…Read more
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37Music and Monosyllables: The Language of Pleasure and Necessity in HegelIn Real Words: Language and System in Hegel, University of Toronto Press. pp. 85-95. 2007.The paper examines the "Pleasure and Necessity" section of the Reason chapter in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The temporality of sexual pleasure and satisfaction is best iterated, for Hegel, in the Mozart's Don Giovanni, rather than in Goethe's early Faust fragment, as is usually supposed. In the figure of Don Giovanni, Hegel finds an expression of the futile punctuality of the pleasure-seeker's pursuits and his ultimate destiny in the uncompromising necessity of natural death.
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11Great Philosophers: A Brief HistoryBroadview Press. 2008.Great Philosophers tells the story of Western philosophy through the thought of its main protagonists, the great philosophers. The narrative begins with the Presocratic philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides and ends in recent times, as each philosopher wrestles with the problems and solutions of his or her predecessors. Along the way, Jeffrey Reid provides an engaging introduction to many of the principal ideas of luminaries such as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Sartre. Gre…Read more
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411Objective Language and Scientific Truth in HegelIn Jere O'Neill Surber (ed.), Hegel and Language, State University of New York Press. pp. 95-110. 2006.The paper explores Hegel's theory of language, from the Subjective Spirit book of his Encyclopedia. Hegel distinguishes between linguistic signs, as arbitrary signifiers and words, which occur when the signs are filled with thought or meaning. Words have greater objectivity than signs. The words of the positive, empirical sciences are taken up into Hegelian Science (system), affording it greater objectivity, which it, reciprocally re-confers on its linguistic contents.
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446Hegel's Ontological Grasp of Judgement and the Original Dividing of Identity into DifferenceDialogue 45 (1): 29-43. 2006.Within Hegel's system of science, judgement(Urteil)is thought's original dividing from identity into difference. In the same context, judgement is also an act of predication where “subject” must be understood in both a grammatical and psychical sense. Thus, judgement expresses a language act that is a self-positing into the difference of being. This article looks at two examples where Hegel's ontological notion of judgement obtains, then finds, the roots of this notion in Hölderlin and Fichte.
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242How Reinhold Helped Hegel Understand the German Enlightenment and Grasp the Pantheism ControversyIn George Digiovanni (ed.), Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment, Springer. 2010.The paper examines Hegel's views on Reinhold, from his earliest appreciation to his final remarks in the Encyclopedia. Ultimately, Reinhold's theory of representation helps Hegel see that the Late Enlightenment opposition between faith and reasoning is anchored in the language of representation. The speculative language of Hegelian Science is necessary in order to overcome the modern dilemma.
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28Why Hegel Didn’t Join the ‘Kant-Klub’: Reason and Speculative DiscourseIn Real Words: Language and System in Hegel, University of Toronto Press. pp. 29-39. 2007.The paper explores Hegel's earlier-than-supposed encounter with Kant's thought, at the Tuebingen Stift, where a reading group formed around the "radical" Kantian, C.I. Diez. The paper argues that Hegel avoided this group and its interpretation because its strictly anthropological interpretation of Kant and its eschewal of any reference to divine (absolute) revelation left it anchored in empirical understanding, leaving aside the speculative elements of Kantian philosophy, notably, the ideal agen…Read more
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8NotesIn Real Words: Language and System in Hegel, University of Toronto Press. pp. 121-158. 2007.
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322Hegel and the State UniversityThe Owl of Minerva 32 (1): 5-19. 2000.The creation of the University of Berlin in 1810 was the result of interaction between the state and philosophy, two human expressions whose relationship, at least since Socrates' death and Aristotle's exile, has tended to be problematical. That university, which became an important model for North American institutions of higher learning, was from the outset a state university; it was designed and run by the state, as opposed to what was previously the rule: institutions dependent on the Church…Read more
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45Real Words: Language and System in HegelUniversity of Toronto Press. 2007.There exists a very particular grasp of the relation between language and objectivity in the work of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), one that rejects the idea of truth as the reflection between words and what they represent.Jeffrey Reid's Real ...
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74Hegel’s Theory of Imagination (review)Dialogue 45 (3): 591-594. 2006.ABSTRACT: Within Hegel’s system of science, judgement (Urteil) is thought’s original dividing from identity into difference. In the same context, judgement is also an act of predication where “subject” must be understood in both a grammatical and psychical sense. Thus, judgement expresses a language act that is a self-positing into the difference of being. This article looks at two examples where Hegel’s ontological notion of judgement obtains, then finds, the roots of this notion in Hölderlin a…Read more
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8Hegel's Theory of ImaginationJennifer Ann Bates Suny Series in Hegelian Studies Albany, NY: Suny Press, 2004, xlv + 202 pp., $50.00 (review)Dialogue 45 (3): 591-594. 2006.
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18Hegel’s Critique of Solger: The Problem of Scientific CommunicationIn Real Words: Language and System in Hegel, University of Toronto Press. pp. 96-103. 2007.Hegel's critique of Solger's theory of irony, through his review of the latter's posthumous writings and correspondence, shows that while he distinguishes Solger's irony over that of Fr. Schlegel, the literary forms that Solger's work takes reveals the lack of mediation and content in his philosophical expression: the linguistic forms that Hegel associates with Spirit.
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363The Fiery Crucible, Yorick’s Skull, and Leprosy In the Sky: Hegel and the Otherness of NatureIdealistic Studies 34 (1): 99-115. 2004.This paper deals with the problematic relationship between thought and nature in Hegel. This entails looking at the philosophy of nature and discovering to what extent it claims to incorporate natural otherness or contingency and how it does so. I briefly summarize other approaches to this question (Maker, Winfield, Braun, Wandschneider, Hoffheimer...) while putting forward my own solution. This is expressed in an argument articulated around the three Hegelian images (and their texts) in the pap…Read more
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12Dialectique et désespoir dans « La fatigue culturelle du Canada français »Horizons Philosophiques 3 (1): 77-84. 1992.
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30Objectivité et discours chez HegelPhilosophiques 28 (2): 351-367. 2001.L'objectivité dont s'occupe la science hégélienne n'est pas celle d'une réalité détachée, mue selon les lois dialectiques, et le discours scientifique n'est pas vrai et objectif parce qu'il serait la réflexion adéquate d'une telle réalité. L'objectivité scientifique chez Hegel doit être saisie comme le logos , c'est-à-dire le discours de la science elle-même dans son actualité existante. Il s'agit d'un discours qui est son objet et qui est l'objectivité véritable. Ce type de langage est seulemen…Read more