•  5
    The topic of this paper is Hegel's claim in the Philosophy of Right that, within the modern social world, human needs tend to be endlessly expanded. Unlike the role that the system of needs plays in the formation of its participants' psychological makeup and the problem of poverty and the rabble, the topic of the expansion of needs remains underdiscussed in the recent Hegel literature on the virtues and vices of civil society. My discussion of the topic aims to answer the following two sets of q…Read more
  • The topic of this paper is Hegel’s claim in the Philosophy of Right that, within the modern social world, human needs tend to be endlessly expanded. Unlike the role that the system of needs plays in the formation of its participants’ psychological makeup and the problem of poverty and the rabble, the topic of the expansion of needs remains underdiscussed in the recent Hegel literature on the virtues and vices of civil society. My discussion of the topic aims to answer the following two sets of …Read more
  •  35
    Hegel's Ethical Organicism
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    In this paper, I attempt to make sense of Hegel’s repeated comparisons between the biological and the social by articulating and defending the claim that social members and the institutions in which they participate are normatively evaluable, for him, in a manner analogous to that of animal organisms and their parts. In arguing for this interpretive thesis, I hope to bring together two Hegelian views (namely, what I shall refer to as his normative essentialism about animal organisms and his orga…Read more
  •  11
    Hegelian Practical Freedom and Nature
    Journal of Modern Philosophy 4 (1): 13. 2022.
    In this paper, I argue that, despite his remarks to the effect that freedom consists in the ‘movement’ away from nature, Hegel conceives of the will as a natural power or capacity of sorts. I articulate and defend this thesis in two steps. In section I of the paper, I sketch a reading of Hegel’s account of practical freedom in the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right as a capacity to respond to ethical requirements or duties. In section II, I argue that the will, on that account, qualifies fo…Read more
  •  28
    Jean-François Kervégan’s The Actual and the Rational is a detailed study of the bulk of Hegel’s social and political philosophy, as we find it in the published text of the Philosophy of Right, the...
  •  22
    Self-consciousness is Desire Itself: On Hegel’s Dictum
    Review of Metaphysics 74 (3): 331-360. 2021.
    In this paper, I offer a novel reconstruction of Hegel’s argument for his mysterious claim that “self-consciousness is desire itself.” In section I, I motivate two interpretive constraints, which I refer to as the practicality constraint and the continuity constraint. According to the former, the kind of desire that Hegel argues is a necessary condition of self-consciousness involves a practical (and so not merely theoretical or contemplative) relation between subject and object. According to th…Read more
  •  29
    Hegel on the Normativity of Animal Life
    Hegel Bulletin 41 (3): 446-464. 2020.
    My aim in this paper is to show that and how animal organisms are appropriate subjects of normative evaluation, on Hegel's view. I contrast my reading with the interpretive positions of Sebastian Rand and Mark Alznauer. I disagree with Rand and agree with Alznauer that animal organisms are normatively evaluable for Hegel. I substantiate my disagreement with Rand, and supplement Alznauer's interpretation, by spelling out the role that the ‘generic process’ or ‘genus process [Gattungsprozess]’ pla…Read more
  •  22
    Hegel, Kant and the Realizability Problem
    Hegel-Jahrbuch 2017 (1): 283-288. 2017.
  •  33
    «¿ Cuál debe ser el comienzo de la ciencia?» El problema del comienzo en Hegel
    Anales Del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía 29 (1): 189-215. 2012.
    The following paper focuses on the problem of the beginning of Hegelian science. By means mainly of a reading of the preface and the introduction to the Phenomenology of spirit, on the one hand, and the introduction and the text that opens the first book of the Science of logic, on the other, the arguments in favor of a phenomenological beginning and a directly logical beginning are presented. The conclusion reached is that the problem is not only a problem inherent to the Hegelian notion of sci…Read more
  •  95
    Realizing the Good: Hegel's Critique of Kantian Morality
    European Journal of Philosophy (1): 195-212. 2017.
    Although the best-known Hegelian objection against Kant's moral philosophy is the charge that the categorical imperative is an ‘empty formalism’, Hegel's criticisms also include what we might call the realizability objection. Tentatively stated, the realizability objection says that within the sphere of Kantian morality, the good remains an unrealizable ‘ought’ – in other words, the Kantian moral ‘ought’ can never become an ‘is’. In this paper, I attempt to come to grips with this objection in t…Read more