Clark Wade Butler

Over twenty years after the 1989 General Assembly voted to open the Convention on the Rights of the Child for signature, the United States remains only one of two UN members not to have ratified it. The other is Somalia. This book explores the reasons for this resistance. The book highlights the priority of ethical human rights over legal human rights. Part One includes contributions by educators and child psychologists who favor and use the Convention even when it is not ratified. Part Two includes two chapters by opponents of the Convention by home-schooling advocates. Part Three examines child rights in the developing world.

A problem is posed by differences between the temporal order of philosophers in the history of philosophy and the rational order in which “definitions of the absolute” upheld by these philosophers appear in Hegel’s Logic. Hegel holds, according to § 88 of the Encyclopedia, both that the Logic reconstructs the history of philosophy on the level of pure thought and that chronological history deviates in places from the rational sequence. A problem is posed for anyone who takes this passage seriously, thus rejecting both a panlogist view of the logic as an autonomous, non-historical self-construction and a neo-Platonic interpretation as approaching but never quite reaching a transdialectical intuition of eternity. It poses a problem for anyone who takes the logic as a hermeneutic key to history as seriously as Hegel himself.

The annual series of Clio Hegel Studies, which has been published since 1981, is to continue under the title Clio Philosophy Studies. The Hegel series numbers were inaugurated at a time when there was no assurance that the Owl would become a journal. Now that the organ of the HSA is a journal of Hegel studies, Clio can best serve by addressing a wider audience, while continuing to encourage and welcome contributions related to Hegel. For the next two years, beginning July 1, 1986, this series will be edited from the University of Strasbourg. Manuscripts by HSA member members and friends may be submitted either to Clio, Indiana-Purdue, Fort Wayne, Indiana 46805, or to Clark Butler, Indiana-Purdue Foreign Study Program, 1b, Rue de Bouxwiller, 67000 Strasbourg, France. The journal remains interested in testing Hegelian theses through interacton with the most important living currents of thought.

Elder is a Hegel scholar who is well versed in analytic philosophy. His distinctive style is more reminiscent of G. E. Moore than Hegel. Yet the book’s title fails to direct the reader’s attention to the true subject matter. The author’s stated intention is to demonstrate Hegel’s contribution to current discussion of the mind/body problem. The antimaterialist thrust of Hegel’s philosophy is exhibited by showing that conceptual schemes employing materialistic concepts cannot be coherently employed, according to Hegel, without also drawing upon mentalistic concepts. However, the bulk of Elder’s text is an original recreation of the dialectic of Hegel’s Logic. Although this reenactment is undertaken to serve the stated purpose of the book, it has value in its own right as an introduction to the Logic. The distinction between two interpretations of the categories of essence is particularly useful. Elder’s underlying thesis—namely, that concepts of matter arising in the dialectic of Being and Essence transmute themselves within the dialectic of the Notion into concepts of mind—will surely be accepted by anyone adopting a Hegelian standpoint. His real achievement is to have helped make that thesis more understandable and plausible by suggesting as a translation that concepts of matter implicitly function as role players in the goal directed activity of rational agents, that their use conditions the possibility of such activity and is functionless unless embraced within such activity. Matter is resolved into obstacles, raw materials, instruments, products, etc.—all relative to rational activity. Granting that this is a Hegelian thesis, historically it is more distinctively Fichtean than Hegelian, just as in contemporary philosophy it is Sartrean. Elder gives the thesis Hegelian pedigree, in effect highlighting a frequently unnoticed Fichtean theme in the Logic.