•  7
    In Thinking like a Mall Steven Vogel argues that there is no authoritative nature independent of human standards to which one can appeal to correct damaging environmental practices. Human practices are the only basis for interpreting the environment and our ecologically destructive practices have made our environment into the degraded thing that it is. Revising these flawed practices requires becoming alienated from them; only then can we be responsible for them. Alienation is overcome by a demo…Read more
  •  14
    The role of Bildung in Hegel’s philosophy of history
    Intellectual History Review 31 (3): 445-462. 2021.
    The notion of Bildung comes to prominence in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was originally conceived to capture the cultural conditions by which an individual becomes a moral agent. In Hegel’s thought, it develops a much more expansive role; it is at the heart of his socio-historical project. Bildung is Hegel’s theory of culture, but for Hegel, is not just the way in which individuals are cultivated, the process by which individuals internalise the norms of their society, or devel…Read more
  •  8
    1. Poststructuralism and Modern European Philosophy
    In Benoît Dillet, Iain MacKenzie & Robert Porter (eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 23-46. 2013.
  •  18
    The Logic of Modernity and Ecological Crisis
    Environmental Values 30 (3): 277-296. 2021.
    This paper examines the theory of sustainable development presented by Jeffrey Sachs in The Age of Sustainable Development. While Sustainable Development ostensibly seeks to harmonise the conflict between ecological sustainability and human development, the paper argues this is impossible because of the conceptual frame it employs. Rather than allowing for a re-conceptualisation of the human-nature relation, Sustainable Development is simply the latest and possibly last attempt to advance the co…Read more
  •  666
    The Problem of Nature in Hegel's Philosophy of Right
    Hegel Bulletin 42 (1): 96-113. 2021.
    The notion of being-at-home-in-otherness is the distinctive way of thinking of freedom that Hegel develops in his social and political thought. When I am at one with myself in social and political structures they are not external powers to which I am subjected but are rather constitutive of my self-relation, that is my self-conception is mediated andexpandedthrough those objective structures. How successfully Hegel may achieve being-at-home-in-otherness with regard to these objective structures …Read more
  •  15
    Habit and the Limits of the Autonomous Subject
    Body and Society 19 (2-3): 58-82. 2013.
    After briefly describing the history and significance of the nature–reason dualism for philosophy this article examines why much of the Kantian inspired examination of norms and ethics continues to appeal to this division. It is argued that much of what is claimed to be rationally legitimated norms can, at least in part, be understood as binding on actions and beliefs, not because they are rationally legitimated, but because they are habituated. Drawing on Hegel’s discussion of ethical life and …Read more
  •  19
    The Logic of Modernity and Ecological Crisis
    Environmental Values 30 (3): 277-296. 2021.
    This paper examines the theory of sustainable development presented by Jeffrey Sachs in The Age of Sustainable Development. While Sustainable Development ostensibly seeks to harmonise the conflict between ecological sustainability and human development, the paper argues this is impossible because of the conceptual frame it employs. Rather than allowing for a re-conceptualisation of the human-nature relation, Sustainable Development is simply the latest and possibly last attempt to advance the co…Read more
  •  18
    Hegel's God, Normativity, and Self-Knowledge
    Philosophy Today 63 (2): 543-548. 2019.
  •  14
    This chapter presents the model of subjectivity that Hegel establishes in his _Phenomenology of Spirit_, which requires some examination of the key conceptual problems that he inherited from his predecessors. The development of Hegels subjectivity is set against the views expressed by Fichte and Kant. A particular concern for the Hegelian subjectivity established in the _Phenomenology_ is how Kant conceived the conditions for self-consciousness and his failure to resolve the concept/intuition di…Read more
  •  122
    Community in Hegel’s Social Philosophy
    Hegel Bulletin 41 (2): 177-201. 2020.
    In thePhilosophy of RightHegel argues that modern life has produced an individualized freedom that conflicts with the communal forms of life constitutive of Greek ethical life. This individualized freedom is fundamentally unsatisfactory, but it is in modernity seemingly resolved into a more adequate form of social freedom in the family, aspects of civil society, and ultimately the state. This article examines whether Hegel’s state can function as a community and by so doing satisfy the need for …Read more
  •  22
    The Satisfaction of Absolute Spirit
    The Owl of Minerva 49 (1): 83-105. 2017.
    Robert R. Williams, in Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God, offers an important examination of the notion of absolute spirit, a central but under-examined notion in Hegel’s thought. Williams argues that absolute spirit, along with Hegel’s other core notions such as the concept and the absolute idea, is best conceived as an organic whole. This approach, he claims, best captures the self-determination and dynamism of the whole. What absolute spirit seeks to describe is how spirit can bot…Read more
  •  24
    Ecological Crisis and the Problem of How to Inhabit a Norm
    Ethics and the Environment 23 (1): 29. 2018.
    Abstract:The Anthropocene is distinguished by the knowledge that collective human action is damaging the earth's biophysical systems in a manner that has serious implications for human life and nature. In a recent work, Dale Jamieson has argued that despite this knowledge moral philosophy is limited in its capacity to provide the wholesale re-orientation of human practices that are required if humanity is to respond successfully to the array of ecological crises that have emerged in the Anthropo…Read more
  •  44
    Veganism, Normative Change, and Second Nature
    Environmental Philosophy 14 (2): 221-238. 2017.
    This paper draws on the account of second nature in Aristotle, Dewey and Hegel to examine the way in which norms become embodied. It discusses the implications of this for both the authority of norms and how they can be changed. Using the example of veganism it argues that changing norms requires more than just good reasons. The appreciation of the role of second nature in culture allows us to: firstly, better conceive the difficulty and resistance of individuals to changing norms because of the…Read more
  •  6
    Hegel, Derrida and the Subject
    Cosmos and History : The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 3 (2-3): 32-50. 2007.
    There is a simple story to be told about Derridarsquo;s relation to Hegel. He develops his core concepts such as diffeacute;rance and trace through an essentially negative relation to the central notions of the idealist tradition. Derrida has been particularly concerned to undermine what he takes to be the heart of the idealist projectmdash;the self-present subject. This paper examines the influence of Heidegger on the deconstructive critique of idealist subjectivity and presents Derridarsquo;s …Read more
  •  37
    Introduction to German Philosophy (review)
    International Philosophical Quarterly 45 (2): 259-260. 2005.
  •  47
    Second Nature and Historical Change in Hegel’s Philosophy of History
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (1): 74-94. 2016.
    Hegel’s philosophy of history is fundamentally concerned with how shapes of life collapse and transition into new shapes of life. One of the distinguishing features of Hegel’s concern with how a shape of life falls apart and becomes inadequate is the role that habit plays in the transition. A shape of life is an embodied form of existence for Hegel. The animating concepts of a shape of life are affectively inscribed on subjects through complex cultural processes. This paper examines the argument…Read more
  •  36
    Philosophy and the Logic of Modernity
    Review of Metaphysics 63 (1): 55-89. 2009.
    The paper argues against those who interpret Hegel's project as concerned above all with reconciliation. These interpreters usually take reconciliation to be a historical achievement produced by thought moving along a self-correcting pathway. On this view, modernity is its high point, since here Spirit is at home with itself, its freedom realized. The paper argues that in Hegel's assessment of philosophy's role, Spirit's dissatisfaction is more fundamental than reconciliation, and hence philosop…Read more
  •  60
    Absolute Knowing
    The Owl of Minerva 30 (1): 3-32. 1998.
    In this essay, I focus on the way Hegel reconciles consciousness and self-consciousness in absolute knowing. What I want to suggest is that in absolute knowing the conscious subject comes to understand itself in terms of these conditions, providing it with the content of a new form of consciousness. It is in conceiving of itself in terms of these objective conditions for knowledge, which supersede the singularity of the self and yet are the conditions for consciousness, that the conscious subjec…Read more
  •  133
    The rise of the non-metaphysical Hegel
    Philosophy Compass 3 (1). 2008.
    There has been a resurgence of interest in Hegel's thought by Anglo‐American philosophers in the last 25 years. That expansion of interest was initiated with the publication of Charles Taylor's Hegel (1975). That work stills stands as one of7 the important branches of Hegel interpretation. However the dominance of the strongly metaphysical interpretation of Hegel, which dominated the understanding of Hegel until the 1980s, and of which Taylor's work represents the culmination, has now, at least …Read more
  •  24
    Review of Barry Stocker, Derrida on Deconstruction (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (1). 2007.
  •  33
    Hegel’s Metaphysics of God (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 57 (3): 608-610. 2004.
    The argument of the book develops through four chapters, all of which are heavily reliant on Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. There is little engagement with Hegel’s systematic works, the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic. Instead, Hegel’s thought of god and religion is determined almost entirely by his lectures on religion, and the argument is largely constructed through a detailed use of quotations from these lectures. The first chapter is concerned to position He…Read more
  •  12
    Between Nature and Spirit
    Proceedings of the Hegel Society of America 20 121-137. 2013.
  •  80
    Hegel had taken the Kantian categories of thought to be merely formal, without content, since, he argued, Kant abstracted the conditions of thought from the world. The Kantian categories can, as such, only be understood subjectively and so are unable to secure a content for themselves. Hegel, following Fichte, tried to provide a content for the logical categories. In order to reinstate an objective status for logic and conceptuality he tries to affirm the unity of thought and being. The idea tha…Read more
  •  57
    Realism and Idealism in Fichte's theory of Subjectivity
    The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 10 189-196. 2007.
    Kant's account of subjectivity is ambiguous: there is an implicit critique of Descartes in Kaaat, but this is in conflict with more Cartesian aspects of his approach to subjectivity. Fichte develops the critical elements of Kant and turns them against Kant's residual Cartesianism. Fichte, in the various versions of the Wissenschaftslehre, is the first to be aware of the limitations of the reflective model of consciousness. In those texts he presents his alternative model for subjectivity by tryi…Read more
  •  53
    Fichte's striving subject
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 47 (2). 2004.
    In this paper I argue that Fichte's attempt to reconcile the dualism of concept and intuition requires the overcoming of any idea of a thing-in-itself. At the same time he preserves the idea of an external constraint on the I's self-positing. This central role for the realist constraint of the check conflicts with recent interpretations of Fichte that see his project as advocating the exclusivity of the space of reasons. The striving subject confronts and unifies the opposition between the reali…Read more
  •  15
    A Subject for Hegel’s Logic
    International Philosophical Quarterly 40 (1): 85-99. 2000.
  • Robert Stern's Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit (review)
    Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 47 101-105. 2003.