Richard Dien Winfield

At a time when the enemies of democracy cannot be dissuaded by appeals to shared values and conventions, nothing is more pressing than a thoroughgoing investigation of what the state should be. Whereas contemporary thinkers have mostly relativized political justice or conceived it as a formal concept lacking institutional detail, The Just State provides a comprehensive theory of self-government, legitimating democracy and concretely conceiving how political institutions should be organized. Carefully and clearly evaluating the fundamental options of normative political theory, philosopher Richard Dien Winfield shows how political self-determination has an exclusive validity independent of any assumptions, enabling democracy to be successfully defended against postmodernists and antimodern fundamentalists. Winfield first examines the household, social, and cultural transformations that enable political emancipation. He then methodically details how self-government should be organized. Uniquely addressing all the central issues embroiling contemporary politics, The Just State determines how political parties should function; resolves controversies between participatory and representative democracy, majoritarian and proportional representation, presidential and parliamentary systems, and federalism and centralization; and examines the ramifications of international relations for political freedom. By tackling all the questions that political philosophers have abandoned to neutral description by political scientists, Winfield reclaims political relevance for normative theory. The Just State will be of key interest to law students, politicians, and citizens at large who wrestle with what a just constitution should mandate, how positive laws should be legislated and enforced, what content they should have, and how their constitutionality should be determined.

The philosophy of nature has become virtually an oxymoron for the prevailing philosophical consensus. Reason, we are told, is powerless to conceive what nature is in itself but must instead hand over all understanding of physical reality to empirical science. Philosophy may reflect upon how natural science models its data, scrutinizing the consistency of scientific theories and the way research projects are framed, but reason must never go beyond its frail limits to provide a priori ampliative, synthetic knowledge of what holds universally and necessarily of nature. Insofar as the problems of knowing nature a priori apply to any extension of a priori knowledge beyond reason’s knowledge of itself, philosophy should ..

Logic, as a thinking of thinking, in which method and subject matter are indistinguishable, cannot begin with any determinate form or content without question begging. The essay examines how logic can proceed from such an indeterminate starting point and achieve closure as a valid thinking of valid thinking. Drawing upon the final chapter of Hegel’s Science of Logic, the essay examines the nature of the end of logic and the significance this termination has for both philosophical method, the difference between truth and correctness, and the possibility of thinking what is other than thought.

From the beginnings of philosophical investigation, there has been widespread recognition that reason must be autonomous to think the truth and that philosophy must be the freest of all disciplines. Nonetheless, conceiving how self-determination can be in thought and reality seems to pose insurmountable challenges. The essay shows how these challenges can be met, explaining how the nature of the concept enables reason to be autonomous, how nature can give rise to animal life, providing the enabling conditions for linguistic intelligence, how the psychological and cultural conditions of discourse leave it free, and how conduct can achieve self-determination in the intersubjective exercise of institutionalized rights.

Systematic aesthetics, as initiated by Hegel, begins by determining the universal features of the actuality of beauty in the work of art, artistic creation, and the reception of art. As such, these features are ingredient in all further forms of art and every individual art. Yet, as merely universal determinations of art, they themselves do not differentiate whatever particular artforms and individual arts there may be. Indeed, if any candidate for a universal constituent of art were peculiar to a particular form or individual branch of art, it would disqualify itself as an element in the account of art in general. Conversely, a particular mode of artistic creation may necessarily incorporate those general desiderata that make something an object of art, but an artform's particularity must reside in something more, just as what distinguishes one individual art from another must lie beyond the constitutive elements common to every work of art, every artistic creation, and every aesthetic awareness.

Recently, a slew of Carl Schmitt’s political writings have been translated into English, making newly available his Concept of the Political, Political Theology, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, and Political Romanticism. Addressing the theory and practice of modern politics, these slim monographs at once tantalize and frustrate with their bold strokes, whose sweeping connections are more intimated than systematically developed. All four studies are united by a critique of liberal political theory and the depoliticization of modern institutions, a critique that has found subsequent resonance among thinkers as diverse as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, and Jürgen Habermas. This dual critique has as its counterpart a positive doctrine of politics that Schmitt traces in reaction to the political crisis of our times. Both in its critique of liberalism and modern politics and in its affirmation of the political, Schmitt’s work lends itself to a confrontation with Hegel, that other modern thinker who repudiated liberalism and its political embodiments in an effort to re-establish the primacy of politics.

Maker’s Philosophy Without Foundations is that rare work which deserves to shift the entire direction of philosophical debate by posing a bold alternative that contemporary discussion has all but ignored. In eleven tightly argued, interconnected essays, Philosophy Without Foundations presents a radical challenge to current thought first, by defending the option of a non-foundational philosophy that does not abandon objective truth, secondly, by arguing how such a non-foundational philosophy can provide modernity with its only adequate justification, and thirdly, by showing how Hegel’s system can be most coherently understood as providing just such a philosophy without foundations. Maker makes these arguments in critical dialogue with an imposing range of thinkers covering modern epistemology from Descartes through Fichte and culminating in the contrast between Hegel’s overcoming of foundationalism and contemporary trends from Rorty and Davidson to Gadamer and Derrida. If Maker’s arguments succeed, he has not only refuted the prevailing directions in Hegel interpretation, but, more importantly, rehabilitated the project of systematic, yet foundation-free philosophy, breaking the back of the emerging consensus of analytical and continental theory, and undermining the philosophical basis of the traditional and postmodern opposition to modernity from which a resurgent fascism draws ideological support.

Although logic’s thinking of thinking overcomes the difference between subject and object of knowing, subjectivity and objectivity have distinct logical determinations presupposed by objectivity in nature and subjectivity in rational agency. An analysis of Hegel’s account of subjectivity and objectivity in his Logic of the Concept shows how both can be differentiated without relying upon any contents of nature and spirit. This logical distinction of subjectivity and objectivity is then employed to clarify how objectivity in nature can be irreducible to objectivity in logic, independently of any empirical material, an insight bearing upon the whole relation between logic and reality and its formulation by Burbidge, Maker, and Halper.

There is hardly any feature of Hegel’s philosophy whose current significance is greater, or more neglected, than the unique place given the analysis of thought. Unlike any other thinker before or after, Hegel begins his philosophical system with a logic conceiving categories without regard for their reference to reality or how a given knower might think them. He allows thinking itself to figure as an object of investigation only within the subsequent theory of reality comprising the philosophies of nature and spirit. There Hegel treats thinking as a real activity of living individuals, inhabiting a common world of which they are conscious and able to speak. Consequently, thought becomes something properly analyzable only after not just categories, but nature and such worldly features of mind as consciousness, representation, and language have been determined. As unsurprising as this ordering may appear, it represents a fundamental break from ordinary philosophical practice, a break bearing crucial importance for the nonmetaphysical, antifoundational character of Hegel’s philosophy, as well as signaling the genuine alternative he provides to the dilemmas plaguing so much contemporary thought.

Beauty's joining of meaning and configuration involves a concrete universality exhibiting the logic of self-determination distinguishing the reality of rational agency. Consequently, natural beauty presents a challenge to aesthetics. An examination of the ordering principles commonly ascribed to nature (the abstract universality of efficient causality, the generic universality of species being, and the reciprocal functionality of organic unity) shows that they all lack concrete universality, establishing that aesthetics must be the philosophy of art and that natural beauty has aesthetic value only as a derivative projection of artistic beauty

Philosophy can begin neither by making claims about the given nor by investigating knowing, since, in either way, unjustified assumptions must be made. In the face of this predicament, Hegel presents his Phenomenology of Spirit as the only viable introduction to philosophy, introducing presuppositionless science by immanently critiquing the construal of knowing which presumes that cognition always has assumptions, always confronts some given. Can the challenge of completing this immanent critique in all its daunting complexity be avoided by alternative shortcuts? The article examines four such options: Hegel’s complementary introductions to the Science of Logic and arguments on how the self-referential inconsistencies of transcendental investigation and foundationalism resolve themselves. All these alternative shortcuts are shown to rest on assumptions that only the full phenomenological investigation can overcome.

Hegel presents two very different accounts of the initial categorization of essence in his Science of Logic and his later Encyclopedia Logic, thereby raising the question of whether this discrepancy undermines the univocal necessity of systematic logic. A close examination of these arguments reveals that the Science of Logic account captures a necessary ordering that is incompletely presented in the Encyclopedia. The details are provided for comprehending why the logic of essence must begin with a contrast of the essential and the unessential, how this reverts to illusory being (whose determining entails three successive forms of reflection), and why identity depends upon the transformation of refl ection from being positing to being external to being determining in character. Significantly, the self-developing nature of these logical developments calls into question the foundationalism entailed by any privileging of the categories of essence.

With the rise and global expansion of modernity, art has increasingly become a problem. Cast adrift from the fixed bearings of traditional shape and meaning while enduring the pressures of market necessity and public subsidy, art has confronted a dilemma internal to its own aspirations, calling into question the very significance of its enterprise. Through the crucibles of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, capitalism, the American and French Revolutions, and social democracy, a world has begun to come into being recognizing no other authority than the autonomy of reason and will. The rights to property, moral accountability, a free household, equal economic opportunity, and self-government have become ever more acknowledged as universal principles revoking legitimacy from any particular factors given independently of self-determination, such as hereditary rank, race, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. Through the widening struggles over erecting free households, civil societies, and political democracies, the divide between the modern and the pre-modern has been drawn by a normative agenda in which the universality of free agency is to be realized in a self-sustaining system of institutions of freedom.