Karin de Boer

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.

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.

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.

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 /