Daniel Dahlstrom

Commentaries on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit are hardly novel. Several attempts exist to supply readers with sometimes critical, sometimes historical explanations of difficult passages and transitions and occasionally with an interpretation of the work as a whole. Curiously German scholars, unlike their French and English speaking counterparts, had not produced an extensive commentary before the appearance of Scheier's impressive undertaking. Rightly convinced that neither its architectonic nor the need to which it responded had been adequately treated in previous studies of the Phenomenology, Scheier's commentary single-mindedly attempts to pursue Hegel's employment of "die einfachen Bestimmungen, z. B. des Ansichseins, des Fürsichseins, der Sichselbstgleichheit usf.," described by Hegel in the Vorrede. The result is quite aptly labelled an "analytic commentary," one that refrains from the temptation either to pass over passages or to "explain" them in terms of extraneous considerations or possibly relevant historical detail. Such reflections are useful, perhaps even necessary to comprehending Hegel's most baffling work, but interpretation must begin with the sort of careful textual analysis Scheier has undertaken. Scheier's approach makes for rather dry reading and it is certainly flawed by being too uncritical, even slavish. He often takes positions on controversial matters of interpretation without entering into the reasons elaborated for and against that position by other commentators. Yet Analytische [[sic]] Kommentar remains a valuable contribution to study of the Phenomenology of Spirit, as a clearly written and tenacious pursuit of its logic, both in detail and in general outline.

This paper addresses puzzling issues concerning the ontological status of dispositions. Following review of debates about a traditional conditional analysis as well as Lewis’s “reformed conditional analysis” of dispositions, the paper analyzes attempts to solve the problem of what makes the relevant conditional true. Reasons are presented for rejecting attempts to locate the relevant truth-maker in a causal basis that allegedly dispenses with dispositions or in properties that are universally dispositional. In this way the paper argues that neither “eliminativism” nor “pandispositionalism” provides a successful account of dispositions’ ontological status, and that ontology must find a way to countenance the reality of both dispositional and non-dispositional properties.

This engaging work explores how Hegel's philosophy both entails and is entailed by a certain conception of Christianity. What distinguishes Burbidge's exploration is the emphasis that he places on an interpretation of Hegel's logic, in which a central role is assigned to the understanding. The first set of essays elaborates the operation of the understanding in relation to the operations of dialectic and speculative reason in Hegel's logic. The first essay concentrates on Hegel's attempt to display the universal movement of pure thought in terms of all three operations. Complementing his earlier work, On Hegel's Logic, Burbidge argues that, given the appropriate interpretation of these operations, the absolute difference between "being" and "nothing" can be said to be sustained, even as these concepts are held together in "becoming," which in turn disappears into "a being". Burbidge's second essay presents an interpretive sketch of Hegel's logic as a whole, based upon a consistent, thorough, and self-referential application of the understanding. The essay's title "Transition or Reflection" refers to the distinction, characteristic of dialectical development, between inherent and posited concepts. The movement of thought between members of the first set of concepts is immediate and hence a "transition," while that between members of the second set is mediated by "reflection." Burbidge argues that the logic of concepts in Part 3 of Hegel's logic, construed as the understanding applied to itself, specifies within itself these two contradictory moments. The same theme informs Burbidge's third essay as he identifies the understanding, not as the beginning, but as the culmination of Hegel's logic, holding together in the disjunctive judgment of the logic of concepts both the dialectic emphasized by the left wing of Hegel scholars and the speculation championed by the right wing. Burbidge argues for what might be called the ironic interpretation of Hegel's claim to an absolute method, namely, the understanding that "no immediate transition, no comprehensive vision, and no philosophical wisdom will ever be the last word". The final essay of this first part discussed the necessity of contingency in the context of Hegel's logic.

The "conceptual story" told by Kisiel neatly divides into three parts, reflecting the genesis of SZ respectively "as a topic, as a program, and as a text". Part 1 begins with the 1919 War Emergency Semester and Heidegger's transformation of Husserlian phenomenology into a "pretheoretical science" of pretheoretical origins, leading to the elaboration of a hermeneutics of facticity and its methodological problematic in concert with the demands of a phenomenology of religion. Part 1 is the lengthiest of the three parts, but with good reason. By securing extant transcripts of courses, Kisiel is able to provide illuminating material not found in the published editions. The paraphrase of lectures of the winter semester 1920-21 "Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion," based upon four extant student transcripts, is particularly valuable since Heidegger's autograph of this course is missing and, hence, the lectures presumably will not find their way into the Gesamtausgabe. Kisiel relates how the course undergoes an abrupt change in focus from methodological considerations to the examination of concrete religious phenomena, a change apparently prompted by students' complaints over the lectures' "lack of religious content".

There are several difficulties, largely the product of the distinctive question and paths of Heidegger's thinking, that beset any attempt to determine his philosophical heritage. In the first part of the following paper, after reviewing these difficulties, the author argues that Heidegger is, nonetheless, singularly and quite rightly preoccupied with the heritage of his thinking. In the second part an attempt is made to show how a particular understanding of being, namely, being as presence and absence, motivates various paths taken by his thinking, paths which, indeed, have given rise to several appropriations of his thinking in the present: pragmatic, religious, hermeneutical as well as in the philosophy of art and technology. In the final part of the paper the author identifies some of these ongoing "Heideggerian heritages," but with the aim of underscoring their dependence upon what for the author is the principal heritage of his thinking, a way of thinking about being that recovers its fundamentally historical character. /// Existem várias dificuldades, as quais são em larga medida produto da questão distintiva e dos diversos caminhos do pensamento de Heidegger, que condicionam toda e qualquer tentativa de determinar a sua herança filosófica. Na primeira parte do presente artigo, o autor, depois de mencionar as sobreditas dificuldades, argumenta que Heidegger, apesar de tudo, está singularmente, e apropriadamente, preocupado com a herança do seu pensamento. Na segunda parte, é feita uma tentativa no sentido de mostrar até que ponto uma compreensão particular do ser, nomeadamente do ser como presença e ausência, deu lugar a diversas apropriações do pensamento heideggeriano no presente: apropriação pragmática, religiosa, hermenêutica, bem como no âmbito da filosofia da arte e da tecnologia. Finalmente, na sua última parte, o presente artigo identifica algumas das "heranças heideggerianas" correntes, mas com a intenção de sublinhar a sua dependência em relação àquilo que para o autor constitui a principal herança do seu pensamento, nomeadamente, um modo de pensar acerca do ser que recupera o seu carácter fundamentalmente histórico.

For much of contemporary ethical theory, the universalizability of the motive of a contemplated action forms a necessary part of the basis of the action’s moral character, legitimacy, or worth. Considering the possibility of resentment springing from the performance of an action also serves as a means of determining the morality of an action. However, considerations of universalizability and resentment are plainly inconsistent with the performance of some unselfish moral actions. I argue that the sphere of the moral adequacy of considerations of universalizability and resentment is limited. I profile key elements of “conformist” or “consensus-driven” ethical thinking modelled on Nagel’s ethical theory. Then, I elaborate the measure of validity of the profiled ethical thinking as well as its limitation, suggesting that its proper domain is located in an ethics of honor, delimited by an ethics of love and friendship.

The aim of this crisply written study is to elaborate and criticize the basic direction of the third section of the first part of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, the unfinished but, as it were, systematic center of the entire project. Köhler undertakes this ambitious project with the help of lectures held right after the completion of Sein und Zeit as well as the lectures of the winter semester of 1925/26. In these lectures the works of Scheler and Kant figure significantly and Köhler, accordingly, devotes the first four chapters of the book to the way in which the use of schemata by these two thinkers is reworked by Heidegger in an attempt to schematize the sense of 'to be'. The first and second chapters of the book lucidly detail affinities and disaffinities [[sic]] between Scheler's analysis of the environment and Heidegger's analysis of Dasein. Scheler's more dynamic, but also more restricted, use of the concept of schema is indicated as are several crucial differences between the two thinkers.

This volume of essays by internationally prominent scholars interprets the full range of Heidegger's thought and major critical interpretations of it. It explores such central themes as hermeneutics, facticity and Ereignis, conscience in Being and Time, freedom in the writings of his period of transition from fundamental ontology, and his mature criticisms of metaphysics and ontotheology. The volume also examines Heidegger's interpretations of other authors, the philosophers Aristotle, Kant and Nietzsche and the poets Rilke, Trakl and George. A final group of essays interprets the critical reception of Heidegger's thought, both in the analytic tradition and in France. This rich and wide-ranging collection will appeal to all who are interested in the themes, the development and the context of Heidegger's philosophical thought.

To criticize a philosopher’s views properly a primary requirement is an accurate understanding of the questions he raises, the problems he acknowledges, and the procedures he follows. In the following study I attempt to identify the specific question of truth which Hegel addresses, the basis of the sort of skepticism posing a serious threat to its resolution, and finally a strategy he adopts. The specific question of truth for Hegel is a question of metaphysical truth or, in the Cartesian terms which Hegel willingly employed, the question of the objectivity of thoughts. The sort of skepticism he has in mind is one which, based on certain purported conditions of human knowing, rejects the possibility of metaphysical truth. While Hegel’s strategy is to analyze those various conditions in an encyclopedic fashion, my concern in this paper is his analysis of the logical conditions of human knowing.

Hegel's Encyclopaedia Logic constitutes the foundation of the system of philosophy presented in his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Together with his Science of Logic, it contains the most explicit formulation of his enduringly influential dialectical method and of the categorical system underlying his thought. It offers a more compact presentation of his dialectical method than is found elsewhere, and also incorporates changes that he would have made to the second edition of the Science of Logic if he had lived to do so. This volume presents it in a new translation with a helpful introduction and notes. It will be a valuable reference work for scholars and students of Hegel and German idealism, as well as for those who are interested in the post-Hegelian character of contemporary philosophy.

Challenging art historians' scientific pretensions as well as their neglect of theoretical questions, the author traces art history's development from the turn of the century by critically reviewing the early and lesser known writings of Erwin Panofsky, "the most influential art historian in the twentieth century." In a brief sketch of art history's nineteenth century roots, the first chapter reviews what is retained and what is discarded in Hegel's, Burckhardt's, and Dilthey's successive conceptions of historiography. The march of the Hegelian absolute through history may have been decried a fiction, but not the effort to construe history culturally and contextually.

Mendelssohn's Philosophical Writings, published in 1761, bring the metaphysical tradition to bear on the topic of 'sentiments'. Mendelssohn offers a nuanced defence of Leibniz's theodicy and conception of freedom, an examination of the ethics of suicide, an account of the 'mixed sentiments' so central to the tragic genre, a hypothesis about weakness of will, an elaboration of the main principles and types of art, a definition of sublimity and analysis of its basic forms, and, lastly, a brief tract on probability theory, aimed at rebutting Hume's scepticism. This volume also includes the essay 'On Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences', selected in 1763 by the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences over all other submitted essays, including one by Kant, as the best answer to the question of whether metaphysical sciences are capable of the same sort and degree of evidence as mathematics.

After reviewing basic features of language, this paper reviews a central debate among twentieth-century philosophers over the proper analysis of linguisticmeaning. While some center the analysis of meaning in language’s capacity to be true, others locate meaning in the communicative intentions of the users of thelanguage. As a means of addressing this impasse and suggesting its unfounded character, the paper draws on recent studies of language acquisition and relates them to existential dimensions of language.

This essay takes a critical look at a specific altruistic interpretation of the moral nature, legitimacy, and value of unselfish actions. The aim of the essay is to raise questions about this altruistic attitude toward the morality of unselfish actions by focussing on certain assumptions that inform that attitude. It is argued that, among those assumptions, the most counterintuitive and deleterious is the notion that the morality of an unselfish action can and should be established by appeal to the possibility of resentment springing from the performance or non-performance of the action. After a short presentation and explanation of these assumptions and their questionableness , the essay investigates the extent to which an altruistic attitude animates contemporary discussion of the moral character of unselfish actions. This investigation is limited to a sketch of a particular development of contemporary ethical theory, from Thomas Nagel's initial attempt to explain the possibility of pure altruism to his revisions of his early theory into a concept of a revised altruism, and culminating in the intersubjective altruism, elaborated by Christine Korsgaard as a consequence of her critique of Nagel's moral theory. In conclusion , after iterating the fundamental inadequacy of appeals to possibilities of resentment, an explanation for the altruistic attitude is ventured. This explanation tries to secure the measure of validity of the assumptions of the altruistic attitude as well as its limitations by suggesting its grounding in an ethics of honor, delimited by an ethics of love and friendship