Joshua Wretzel

Hegel regarded his Enyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences as the work which most fully presented the scope of his philosophical system and its method. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that scholars regularly accord it only a secondary status. This Critical Guide seeks to change that, with sixteen newly-written essays from an international group of leading Hegel scholars that shed much-needed light on both the whole and the parts of the Encyclopedia system. Topics include the structure and aim of the Encyclopedia system as a whole, the differences between the greater and lesser Logics, the role of nature in Hegel's thinking, and the shapes of absolute spirit as art, religion, and philosophy. This book will be invaluable to students and scholars with an interest in Hegel and the history of philosophy.

This book discusses the most comprehensive of Hegel's works: his long-neglected Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline. It contains original essays by internationally renowned and emerging voices in Hegel scholarship. Their contributions elucidate fundamental aspects of Hegel's encyclopedic system with an eye to its contemporary relevance. The book thus addresses system-level claims about Hegel's unique conceptions of philosophy, philosophical "science" and its method, dialectic, speculative thinking, and the way they relate to both Hegelian and contemporary notions of nature, history, religion, freedom, and cultural praxis.

This paper offers a limited defence of two seemingly disparate interpretive approaches to free thought in Hegel’s JenaPhenomenology of Spirit. On the one hand, I defend the view of so-called post-Kantian Hegelians, that Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception is central to Hegel’s account of free thinking in thePhenomenology. On the other hand, I argue that the notions ofdas Offenein Heidegger’sVom Wesen der WahrheitandAb-Lösungin his 1930/31 lectures on Hegel’sPhenomenologyare no less crucial to an understanding of free thought in Hegel’s work. I show that absolution is a condition for the possibility ofdas Offene, which is a condition for the possibility of apperception in its reflexive capacity.

This paper concerns Hegel's early treatment of the productive imagination in his 1803–1804 Faith and Knowledge. I show how he articulates that activity in terms of a pair of speculative unities, which solve lingering problems of self-knowledge and self-constitution from Kant's B-deduction. On the one hand, I argue that the familiar unity of spontaneity and receptivity makes possible knowledge of the moment of self-positing. On the other hand, I contend that Hegel's talk of imagination as both an “organic idea” and an “intuitive intellect” refers to a self-constituting capacity that intellects like ours possess. I show that self-constitution is possible, for Hegel, only in so far as intellects like ours possess a capacity to unify possibility and actuality in thought, or to think themselves into being.

I criticize the normative and interpretive practices of recognition that underlie discursive exchanges within Robert Brandom’s so-called ‘game of giving and asking for reasons.’ The central criticisms illuminate the shortcomings of Brandom’s approach on both descriptive and prescriptive grounds. As concerns the former, I show that Brandom’s account of the practices of discursive recognition cannot explain the means by which discursive beings acquire facility with the norms that guide their discursive dealings with others. As concerns the latter, I argue that a Brandomian recognizer would fail to discursively recognize others that she, by rights, ought to so recognize. I then show how Brandom’s commitment to this form of discursive recognition undermines his commitment to the broadly Kantian picture of discursive freedom and constraint by norms.

I criticize the normative and interpretive practices of recognition that underlie discursive exchanges within Robert Brandom’s so-called ‘game of giving and asking for reasons.’ The central criticisms illuminate the shortcomings of Brandom’s approach on both descriptive and prescriptive grounds. As concerns the former, I show that Brandom’s account of the practices of discursive recognition cannot explain the means by which discursive beings acquire facility with the norms that guide their discursive dealings with others. As concerns the latter, I argue that a Brandomian recognizer would fail to discursively recognize others that she, by rights, ought to so recognize. I then show how Brandom’s commitment to this form of discursive recognition undermines his commitment to the broadly Kantian picture of discursive freedom and constraint by norms.

In this paper, I contend that Brandom’s interpretive oversights leave his inferentialist program vulnerable to Hegelian critique. My target is Brandom’s notion of “conceptual realism,” or the thesis that the structure of mind-independent reality mimics the structure of thought. I show, first, that the conceptual realism at the heart of Brandom’s empiricism finds root in his interpretation of Hegel. I then argue that conceptual realism is incompatible with Hegel’s thought, since the Jena Phenomenology, understood as a “way of despair,” includes a critique of the philosophical framework upon which conceptual realism relies. Finally, I offer the Hegelian critique of Brandom that results from these textual infidelities