Claudia Melica

Arthur C. Danto adopts the Hegelian topic of the End-of-Art as a reference point concerning the historical link between art and knowledge in the contemporary era. The fundamental difference compared to Hegel is that in Danto’s view art is not conceived as a figure of the Geist that historicizes itself. Danto’s interest is limited to the reflective self-awareness of art, to which the Hegelian Absolute Spirit acts as a model. Danto’s “non-specialist” approach to Hegel’s thinking allows him to bring together not the whole system but some specific theoretical instances on the order of an autonomous discourse. On this ground, Danto’s confrontation essentially consists of four aspects: the “an-aesthetic” determination of art (self-reflexivity), the placement of art out of any historical-narrative frame (the end of art history), criticism of the speculative philosophy of art (theory of philosophical “disenfranchisement”), and the recognition of freedom as a specific character of art in the contemporary era (post-history).

The article deals with three topics. First of all it considers the place the Hegelian philosophy of religion gives to Judaism as the Other in Christian-Greek civilization in the history of religions: it underlines the differences which characterize the Vorlesungen of 1821, 1824, 1827, and 1831 with regard to the relationship between Jewish religion on one side and Eastern, Greek and Roman religions on the other, all of them superseded - according to Hegel - by Christian religion, and describes how Samuel Hirsch (1815-1889), a Reformer Jew, rabbi, freemason, criticized this place. Secondly, the article analyzes the main points of Hirsch’s Religionsphilosophie der Juden (1842): particularly it emphasizes the concepts of Judaism, Christianity and philosophy elaborated in this work. Finally, it points out how Franz Rosenzweig’s and Ernst Cassirer’s idea of a new philosophy, inspired by both the Greeks and the Jews, has a deep affinity with Hirsch’s proposal.

In the Introduction to the Lectures on Aesthetics Hegel observes that Schiller praises women because he believes that they embody the aesthetic ideal of a unification of nature and spirit, by fully expressing the “grace” and the “dignity” which characterizes a “beautiful soul”. This essay, starting from this Hegelian statement, analyses, firstly, in which way it is possible to establish an analogy between the female virtue and the beautiful soul in Schiller’s writings. Secondly, it lingers on the comparison between the Schillerian doctrine of the beautiful soul and the Hegelian one, to defend the thesis that the latter does not represent a criticism of Schiller but of the model of moral beauty typical of philosophies that, like those of Jacobi, absolutize subjectivity.

In this paper I argue that Hegel’s dialectical critique as method for instituting truth and freedom is the articulation of three interconnected moments or actions: first, transformative appropriation; second, refutation as self-refutation; and the final act of letting go. I discuss these moments by looking at three crucial passages of the Science of Logic: the Absolute in which the Logic of Essence appropriates Spinoza’s substance; the Widerlegung of Spinozism as the “genesis” of the Begriff and the beginning of freedom; the act of frei Entlassen by which the “absolute idea” brings the logic as a whole to the end leading logical thinking beyond itself to its radical other. The paper frames the idea of “dialectical critique” present in Hegel’s philosophy in terms of the movement of “refutation” (Widerlegung). Critique as refutation requires, for Hegel, the fundamental recognition of the position and independent value of the other (the other theory, the other culture, voice, agency which is being refuted). But it also implies the two apparently contradictory acts of making oneself other (hence refutation always and necessarily implies a self-critical stance), and of appropriating the other - that which is criticized is that which is appropriated (not discarded as untrue). Refutation is the beginning of freedom but not the highest act of freedom. The final act of freedom is the gesture of “letting go” and “letting be” - the frei Entlassen that is the act of relinquishing whatever has been appropriated thereby letting it be free from the subject, free for itself or in its own right, free for new possibilities.

In this paper it is proposed a comparison between Homeric poems and Hegelian philosophy, to try to demonstrate that some instances present in Hegel’s speculation find their genesis not only in classical Greece, as many studies affirm, but even further back, in epic poetry. The comparison hinges on two main aspects, the historical and the logical. Regarding the first aspect, an attempt is made to underline the analogy between the way of making history in Homer and the genesis of the Hegelian Begriffne Geschichte. At the same time, it is underlined that some instances typical of Homer’s society and of the history of archaic Greece echo Hegelian speculation in other forms: see for example the concepts of timè and Anerkennung. Concerning the logical aspect, this paper proposes a rereading of the structure of Hades starting from the conception of the dream in ancient Greece: Hades is considered here as a metaphor for the Hegelian logical concept and the capacity for logical abstraction.

In the Arabic-speaking world, most of Hegel’s works have been translated and are studied and discussed. In this paper I address the consideration of Hegel’s philosophy in Egypt, which is one of the most important Arab countries for the reception of Hegel’s thought and which plays a very important role in the field of translation of his works. Here I focus on the approach to Hegel’s view of history and the role of the “Oriental” peoples and of Islam by some prominent scholars, to show the depth and complexity of the relationship with Hegel’s philosophy in Egypt’s cultural, philosophical, and (geo)political context.

This book presents a unique rethinking of G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy from unusual and controversial perspectives in order to liberate new energies from his philosophy. The role Hegel ascribes to women in the shaping of society and family, the reconstruction of his anthropological and psychological perspective, his approach to human nature, the relationship between mental illness and social disease, the role of the unconscious, and the relevance of intercultural and interreligious pathways: All these themes reveal new and inspiring aspects of Hegel’s thought for our time.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the critical interpretation of Greek art and religion provided by Hegel in the “Religion in the form of art” section of Chapter VII of his Phenomenology of the Spirit. The study will, thus, commence with an overview of the role played by art in the religion of ancient Greece, and then examine the reasons for the historical decline of this special phenomenon and the rise of Christianity, a religion referred to by Hegel as a “visible religion” as it is required to “disclose” and manifest its contents: the spirit. Having focused special attention on the relationship between the people of ancient Greece and their gods and the role played by the concept of the ethical life, the paper will then proceed to investigate the relationship between the individual, the population and the ancient polis or Greek State as illustrated in the early works of Hegel and in the Phenomenology of the Spirit, in which Hegel develops his theory of ethical relations in ancient Greece as exemplified in the model of sibling relations within the family. The paper continues with an examination of Hegel’s criticism of Greek rituals and the inability of the modern world to understand such practices from the perspective of the life of the time, concluding, in line with Hegel, that our experience is now an external process as we no longer embrace the interiority of the ethical life of the past. Indeed, as Hegel considers the “spirit of destiny offered by those [ancient] works of art” to go beyond the ethical life of a nation, the fact that those works of art are no more considered useful and important is a tragic event, even though this destiny has shown us the spirit within them, and thanks to this tragic end, we have finally been able to reunite all the Greek gods in a single Pantheon in which “the spirit is conscious of itself as a spirit”.