Karin De Boer

OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES many attempts have been made to defend Hegel’s philosophy against those who denounce it as crypto-theological, dogmatic metaphysics. This was done first of all by foregrounding Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant, that is, by interpreting speculative science as a radicalization of Kant’s critical project. This emphasis on Hegel’s Kantian roots has resulted in a shift from the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Science of Logic. Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness can be considered as having made one of the most influential contributions to this shift. Pippin’s “nonmetaphysical” interpretation of Hegel rightly contends that the Science of Logic does not pertain to a reality existing independently of thought, but to “thought’s attempt to determine a priori what can be a possible thought of anything at all.” For Pippin this entails that Hegel should be regarded as appropriating “Kant’s claim about the ‘self-conscious,’ ultimately the ‘spontaneously’ self-conscious, character of all possible experience.” I agree with Pippin that one cannot understand Hegel unless “one understands the Hegelian investment, the original engagement with Kant’s critical philosophy.” I would hold, however, that Pippin’s interpretation of this engagement threatens to lose sight of the proper achievement of Hegel’s philosophy. By arguing that the unity of self-consciousness constitutes the “original source of Hegel’s hermetic claim about thought’s self-determination,” Pippin to my mind ignores, first, that Hegel takes the Kantian notion of self-consciousness to be nothing more than the concrete manifestation of the pure concept and, second, that Kant’s transcendental philosophy, though radically critical of the dogmatic metaphysics of his day, does all but abandon the possibility of a critical ontology. Defending Hegel against his antimetaphysical critics, Pippin is right in taking Hegel into the Kantian camp, but he does this by sacrificing the question as to the possibility of ontology, a question I believe to be pivotal for both Kant and Hegel.

Heidegger often stressed that the analysis of Dasein in Being and Time should be understood as a mere preliminary investigation. That this analysis indeed prepares the investigation into the relationship between time, the understanding of Being and ontology,can only become clear when some light is thrown on the never published third section ofBeing and Time. In this section Heidegger would have explicated in what sense time can be understood as condition of possibility for every kind of ontology. As ontology is a specific possibility of human beings, this possibility must be based on the same basic structures as Dasein as such. In Heidegger's analysis of Dasein, the distinction between a proper and an improper mode of existence is understood as based on a different temporalisation of temporality. Improperness results from a temporal movement in which presentness takes the upper hand and determines the way Dasein understands beings, other people and itself. In the proper mode of existence on the other hand, not only presence, but the three ecstasies of time as a whole would constitute the openness of Dasein. Heidegger would have demonstrated in the third section that this same temporal difference also forms the condition of possibility for the improper and proper mode of ontology: the so-called metaphysics of presence and Heideggers own temporal ontology respectively.From the rather formal perspective of our interpretation, the different moments of the analysis of Dasein are read in view of their significance for the investigation into the essence of metaphysics. By doing so, the third section appears to be the aim of Heidegger's questioning and the 'missing link' between the analysis oí Dasein and the destruction of traditional metaphysics. When Being and Time is read with such a focus on the third section, the often used distinction between the early and the later Heidegger looses much of its sharpness, if not its relevance: it is already in Being and Time itselfthat Heidegger tries to decenter the human being in behalf of a temporality that constitutes meaningful openness as such

RésuméBien que Hegel soit parfaitement conscient du fait que l'activité de penser nepuisse devenir ce qu'elle est que dans etpar le langage, on peut dire qu'ila préservé une distinction hiérarchisée entre la pensée et le langage dans lequel elle s'exprime. Dans le but de clarifier ce qu'il veut dire exactement lorsqu'il distingue entre, d'un côté, la totalité des concepts purs et, de l'autre, le langage, la première partie du présent article—qui en est aussi la plus longue—fournit une interprétation deplusieurs textes de Hegel sur le rapport entre la pensée pure et le langage, et montre pourquoi la conception qu'il se fait de cette relation est plus difficile à critiquer qu'on ne l'a souvent cru. L'article part de la conception hégélienne du concept absolu et, après avoir briévement esquissé la relation entre la Logique et la philosophic de la nature et de l'esprit, examine divers passages sur le langage, tirés, entre autres, des leçons sur la philosophic de l'histoire mondiale. La deuxième partie de l'article propose—dans une veine heideggérienne—une perspective à partir de laquelle une déconstruction des présupposés de base de cette conception pourrait avoir quelque chance de succès.

OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES many attempts have been made to defend Hegel’s philosophy against those who denounce it as crypto-theological, dogmatic metaphysics. This was done first of all by foregrounding Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant, that is, by interpreting speculative science as a radicalization of Kant’s critical project. This emphasis on Hegel’s Kantian roots has resulted in a shift from the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Science of Logic. Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness can be considered as having made one of the most influential contributions to this shift. Pippin’s “nonmetaphysical” interpretation of Hegel rightly contends that the Science of Logic does not pertain to a reality existing independently of thought, but to “thought’s attempt to determine a priori what can be a possible thought of anything at all.” For Pippin this entails that Hegel should be regarded as appropriating “Kant’s claim about the ‘self-conscious,’ ultimately the ‘spontaneously’ self-conscious, character of all possible experience.” I agree with Pippin that one cannot understand Hegel unless “one understands the Hegelian investment, the original engagement with Kant’s critical philosophy.” I would hold, however, that Pippin’s interpretation of this engagement threatens to lose sight of the proper achievement of Hegel’s philosophy. By arguing that the unity of self-consciousness constitutes the “original source of Hegel’s hermetic claim about thought’s self-determination,” Pippin to my mind ignores, first, that Hegel takes the Kantian notion of self-consciousness to be nothing more than the concrete manifestation of the pure concept and, second, that Kant’s transcendental philosophy, though radically critical of the dogmatic metaphysics of his day, does all but abandon the possibility of a critical ontology. Defending Hegel against his antimetaphysical critics, Pippin is right in taking Hegel into the Kantian camp, but he does this by sacrificing the question as to the possibility of ontology, a question I believe to be pivotal for both Kant and Hegel.

in a late note, dated 1797, Kant refers to the schematism of the pure understanding as one of the most difficult as well as one of the most important issues treated in the Critique of Pure Reason.1 His treatment of this theme is indeed notorious for its obscurity.2 As I see it, part of the problem is caused by the fact that Kant frames his discussion in terms that he could expect his readers to be familiar with, while he gradually develops ideas that breach any traditional account of cognition. This holds for his references to the power of judgment and the related view that cognition is a matter of subsuming intuitions under concepts3 as well as for the suggestion that there is an initial gap between categories...

Abstract: This article contends that the relation of early logical empiricism to Kant was more complex than is often assumed. It argues that Reichenbach's early work on Kant and Einstein, entitled The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge (1920) aimed to transform rather than to oppose Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. One the one hand, I argue that Reichenbach's conception of coordinating principles, derived from Kant's conception of synthetic a priori principles, offers a valuable way of accounting for the historicity of scientific paradigms. On the other hand, I show that even Reichenbach, in line with Neo-Kantianism, associated Kant's view of synthetic a priori principles too closely with Newtonian physics and, consequently, overestimated the difference between Kant's philosophy and his own. This is even more so, I point out, in the retrospective account logical empiricism presented of its own history. Whereas contemporary reconstructions of this history, including Michael Friedman's, tend to endorse this account, I offer an interpretation of Kant's conception of a priori principles that contrasts with the one put forward by both Neo-Kantianism and logical empiricism. On this basis, I re-examine the early Reichenbach's effort to accommodate these principles to the paradigm forged by Einstein

This article challenges the prevailing interpretations of Hegel's account of the concept "contradiction" in the Science of Logic by arguing that it is concerned with the principle of Hegel's method rather than with the classical law of non-contradiction. I first consider Hegel's Doctrine of Essence in view of Kant's discussion of the concepts of reflection in the first Critique. On this basis, I examine Hegel's account of the logical principles based on the concepts "identity," "opposition," and "contradiction." Finally, I point out how the principle Hegel derives from the concept of contradiction actually informs his own method.

This essay draws on Hegelrsquo;s conception of tragedy in the emPhenomenology/em to reinterpret the intercultural conflicts that confront us today. It is argued that the prevailing self-conception of modern states, relying on the opposition between universality and particularity, effaces the irresolvable entanglement of contrary values such as progress and tradition or reason and faith. The essay seeks to employ Hegelrsquo;s insight into the dynamic of tragic conflicts to conceptualize precisely this entanglement. This requires, however, that the tragic strand of this insight be extricated from the predominant optimism of Hegelrsquo;s dialectics as a whole. By turning this tragic strand into a conceptual perspective of its own, this essay seeks to account for the inherent tendency of contending cultural paradigms to oppose their counterpart instead of recognizing themselves in the other.nbsp; br /

Shedding new light on Kant’s use of the term ‘transcendental’ in the Critique of Pure Reason, this article aims to determine the elements that Kant’s transcendental philosophy has in common with Wolffian ontology as well as the respects in which Kant turns against Wolff. On this basis I argue that Wolff’s, Kant’s and Hegel’s conceptions of metaphysics – qua first philosophy – have a deeper affinity than is commonly assumed. Bracketing the issue of Kant’s alleged subjectivism, I challenge the opposition between metaphysical and non-metaphysical readings of Hegel’s Science of Logic. One the one hand, I argue that Hegel was more deeply indebted to Kant than he generally admits. On the other hand, I hold that this debt concerns Kant’s conception of metaphysics rather than his alleged subjectivism.

Hegel is most famous for his view that conflicts between contrary positions are necessarily resolved. Whereas this optimism, inherent in modernity as such, has been challenged from Kierkegaard onward, many critics have misconstrued Hegel's own intentions. Focusing on the Science of Logic, this transformative reading of Hegel on the one hand exposes the immense force of Hegel's conception of tragedy, logic, nature, history, time, language, spirit, politics, and philosophy itself. Drawing out the implications of Hegel's insight into tragic conflicts, on the other hand, De Boer brings into play a form of negativity that allows us to understand why the entanglement of complementary positions always tends to turn into their conflict, but not necessarily into its resolution.

Given the history of the twentieth century, it is understandable that many contemporary philosophers—in the wake of Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche—have turned against Hegel’s seemingly unbridled optimism. As I will argue in this chapter, however, Hegel’s account of modern civilizations is much less optimistic than his account of the past. Hegel’s hesitation as to the capacity of modernity to resolve its immanent conflicts preeminently emerges in his account of the oppositions between poverty and wealth and between the state and its citizens. In this chapter I will focus on passages from the Essay on Natural Law, the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and the Philosophy of Right that express this hesitation and, hence, complicate the prevailing view of Hegel’s philosophy of world history.

In his early Jena System Drafts, Hegel elaborates a conception of time which is no longer thematized in later works such as the Encychpaedia. Hegel's early philosophy of nature bears not only on time insofar as it constitutes — together with space — the basic framework of the sciences, but also on the interiorization of time which occurs in the animal. This interiorization marks a decisive moment in the transition from nature to human consciousness, for it is here, in Hegel's view, that time begins to enact itself as pure form of intuition. In this article I reconstruct Hegel's conception of this transition by sketching out the movement in which the pure concept unfolds itself in the element of exteriority and, within the limits imposed by that element, increasingly overcomes its self-externalization. According to Hegel's Jena texts, the concept initially determines itself as ether, space and time, reaches its turning point in the interiorization of time that occurs in the animal, and culminates in the distinction between the pure I and time which allows human consciousness to increasingly overcome its dependence on impressions caused by outward objects. I argue that this construction of the genesis of human consciousness sheds new light on Hegel's understanding of the relation between the pure concept and time, and hence on his philosophy as such

This article challenges Honneth's reading of Hegel's Philosophy of Right in The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel's Social Theory (2001/2010). Focusing on Hegel's method, I argue that this text hardly offers support for the theory of mutual recognition that Honneth purports to derive from it. After critically considering Honneth's interpretation of Hegel's account of the family and civil society, I argue that Hegel's text does not warrant Honneth's tacit identification of mutual recognition with symmetrical instances of mutual recognition, let alone his subsequent projection of symmetrical forms of mutual recognition onto the various spheres of the Philosophy of Right as a whole. I conclude by indicating an alternative way in which Hegel's text might be used to understand contemporary society

Since the 1970s, debates about Hegel’s Science of Logic have largely turned around the metaphysical or non-metaphysical nature of this work. This debate has certainly issued many important contributions to Hegel scholarship. Yet it presupposes, in my view, a set of oppositions that thwart an adequate assessment of Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant. I hope to show in this paper that Hegel is deeply indebted to Kant, but not to the Kant who is commonly brought into play to argue for the non-metaphysical nature of the Science of Logic. If Kant ’s own Critique of Pure Reason defies oppositions such as that between epistemology and metaphysics, then they cannot be employed to determine the extent to which Hegel’s Logic moves beyond Kant. By focusing instead on the system of pure reason that Kant intended to elaborate, I hope to bring out the ontological thrust of both Kant’s transcendental philosophy and Hegel’s Science of Logic. My paper thus intends to highlight the deep continuity between Kant’s transcendental philosophy and Hegel’s Logic, yet without reducing the latter to the kind of epistemology commonly attributed to Kant.