Lorenzo Cammi

In my paper, I aim to present Hegel’s and Wittgenstein’s notions of Wirklichkeit. As a first step, I offer my view on Hegel’s treatment of actuality, which consists in the following stages: firstly, the consideration of the knowledge of actuality as the fundamental purpose of philosophy; secondly, the distinction between Wirklichkeit and Realität, that is, between actuality and reality; and thirdly, the distinction between actuality and actualization, which traces back to Aristotle’s concepts of entelecheia and energeia. On this line, I offer a dynamic interpretation of Hegel’s understanding of the constitution of actuality. As a second step, after addressing the possibility of knowing actuality from Wittgenstein’s standpoint, I outline the issue concerning the relation among language, logic, and world, as well as the view regarding the way the actual world comes to be constituted as such, springing from what Wittgenstein calls substance of the world. By way of conclusion, I sketch a comparison of Hegel’s and Wittgenstein’s conceptions of Wirklichkeit.