In the 1930s, C. I. Lewis, who was responsible for the revival of modal logic in the era of modern symbolic logic, characterized ‘intensional’ approaches to logic as typical of post-Leibnizian ‘continental philosophy’, in contrast to the ‘extensionalist’ approaches dominant in the British tradition. Indeed Lewis’s own work in this area had been inspired by the logic of his teacher, the American ‘Absolute Idealist’, Josiah Royce. Hegel’s ‘Subjective Logic’ in Book III of his Science of Logic, can, I suggest, be considered as an intensional modal logic, and this paper explores parallels between it and a later variety of modal logic—tense logic, as developed by Arthur Prior in the 1950s and 60s. Like Lewis, Prior too had been influenced in this area by a teacher with strong Hegelian leanings—John N. Findlay. Treated as an intensional (with an ‘s’) logic, Hegel’s subjective logic can be used as a framework for addressing issues of intentionality (with a ‘t’)—the mind’s capacity to be intentionally directed to objects. In this way, I suggest that the structures of his subjective logic can clarify what is at issue in the ‘Psychology’ section of the Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Subjective Spirit.

The Hegelian concept, with its all-encompassing power, epitomizes the kind of totality-oriented thinking that Levinas, a philosopher of genuine alterity, sharply criticizes. This paper investigates this antagonism by focusing on a notion that is pivotal for both authors, the notion of subjectivity. Hegel makes transcendence into an immanent dimension of the subject whereas Levinas conceives transcendence as the subject’s relation with radical exteriority. The decisive question is whether Levinas falls back into the failures of so-called ‘philosophies of reflection’ or whether the Hegelian dialectic of being and nothing relies on an un-condition for which it does not and indeed cannot account. The paper culminates in the thesis that Hegel and Levinas reverse the order of priority of the Good and the True. While Hegel conceives of the absolute as system of truth, for Levinas the ethical ‘failure’ of totalization constitutes a necessary condition for rationality.

This paper traces the relationship between Hegel and Levinas regarding their understanding of difference in relation to truth and history. It is the aim of this paper to show that Levinas is not a thinker in opposition to Hegel, since opposition would only confirm what it seeks to oppose. Instead, I argue that Levinas interrupts Hegel’s thought in such a manner that it is opened to a supplement of ethical meaning. This ethical meaning is irreducible to truth and history as Hegel understands them, yet it invokes them and makes them possible.

This paper aims to understand Hegel’s claim in the introduction to his Philosophy of Mind that mind is an actualization of the Idea and argues that this claim provides us with a novel and defensible way of understanding Hegel’s naturalism. I suggest that Hegel’s approach to naturalism should be understood as ‘formal’, and argue that Hegel’s Logic, particularly the section on the ‘Idea’, provides us with a method for this approach. In the first part of the paper, I present an interpretation of Hegel’s method in which life plays a central role. In the second part of the paper, I develop Hegel’s method by providing a reading of Hegel’s Subjective Spirit, focusing on the sections ‘Anthropology’ and ‘Phenomenology’ in particular, arguing that they display the dialectic between life and cognition outlined by Hegel’s Idea.

In Georges Bataille’s view, the Hegelian interpretation of kenotic sacrifice as passage from Spirit to the Speculative Idea effaces the necessarily representational character of sacrifice and the irreducible non-presence of death. But Hegel identifies these aspects of death in the fragments of the 1800 System. In sacrificial acts, subjectivity represents its disappearance via the sacrificed other, and hence is negated and conserved. Sacrifice thus provides the representational model of sublation pursued in the Phenomenology as a propaedeutic to Science. Bataille’s critique clarifies the fragments of the 1800 System, contextualizing Hegel’s rehabilitation of kenotic sacrifice in the Phenomenology. Bataille’s poetics parodies Hegelian kenosis via repetition of material difference, enacting an ecstatic temporality which Hegel perhaps suppresses as the condition of his system. Finally—if Bataille is correct in his assessment—the system would be subjected to a reversal, with radical implications for the philosophy of religion.

This article proposes an interpretation of Hegel’s famous maxim in the Preface of the Grundlinien: ‘What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational’, not (as usual) as a politically conservative normative statement, but as an epistemological statement concerning the way in which philosophical discourse relates to reality. My aim is to take seriously Hegel’s claim that the purpose of philosophy is not to prescribe to the social world what it has to be but to define the mode through which it may be known.

The following article will broach the issue of the relation between Hegel and Foucault based on the binomial knowledge-power. While for Hegel human knowledge comes with the development of consciousness, for Foucault the possibility of knowledge is articulated within a phenomenology of power. While for Hegel Bildung leads spirit to self-consciousness, Foucault initially considers formation to be connected to a forced correction. At first Foucault studies the problem of formation in view of the dynamics of power, as a faculty of repression; later he underlines that the exchange between the sovereign and the advisor positively influences the decisions of the latter, as well as their personal growth. Foucault points out the connection between truth and freedom, and emphasizes the fundamental role of parresia as a force to break the system of power relations.

Picking up on Marx’s and Hegel’s analyses of human beings as social and individual, the article shows that what is at stake is not merely the possibility of individuality, but also the correct conception of the universal good. Both Marx and Hegel suppose that individuals must be social or political as individuals, which means, at least in Hegel’s case, that particular interests must form part of the universal good. The good and the rational is not something that requires sacrificing one’s interests for the community or denying one’s particular character so as to become an equal rational agent. Very much to the contrary, the rational or the common good is nothing but the harmonious structuring of particular interests. While Section I introduces Marx’s and Hegel’s conceptions of individual and social beings, Sections II and III discuss their respective views of individuality, and Sections IV and V discuss the notion of a universal good containing individual interests.

Rather than model Hegel’s account of terrorism on the struggle for recognition and against domination, I maintain that his account is best understood according to Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity. The logic of autoimmunity models terrorism as a symbolic, suicidal act of violence that is created by and directed against the violence of hegemony. It is also continually stimulated by a messianic and nihilistic ideal. This article provides a historical account of Derrida’s elaboration of this concept through his continual dialogue with Hegel. That concept is then applied to Hegel’s account of religious and political terrorism. Ultimately, this analysis supports a reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology in which the confrontation with terrorism as autoimmunity is its lynchpin and which culminates in a moral community that is radically open to the other, to difference, and to the undecidable rather than being closed off and insulated by so-called absolute knowing.

This essay offers an account of Kierkegaard’s view of the limits of thought and of what makes this view distinctive. With primary reference to Philosophical Fragments, and its putative representation of Christianity as unthinkable, I situate Kierkegaard’s engagement with the problem of the limits of thought, especially with respect to the views of Kant and Hegel. I argue that Kierkegaard builds in this regard on Hegel’s critique of Kant but that, against Hegel, he develops a radical distinction between two types of thinking and inquiry: the ‘aesthetic-intellectual’ and the ‘ethico-religious’. I clarify this distinction and show how it guides Kierkegaard’s conception of a form of philosophical practice that involves drawing limits to the proper sphere of disinterested contemplation. With reference to two rival interpretations of Kierkegaard’s approach to the limits of thought—which I call ‘bullet-biting’ and ‘relativizing’—I further show how my ‘disambiguating’ account can better explain how, and why, his work courts a form of self-referential incoherence, in which it appears that certain limits of thought are at once affirmed and violated.

This paper elaborates Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘war machine’ in relation to key theses in Hegel’s political philosophy, with the aim of showing how it illuminates the conditions under which politics and political institutions as Hegel understands them both emerge and are compromised. After first introducing the idea of the war machine and its appropriation by discussing it in relation to Carl Schmitt’s theory of partisan warfare, it examines both the war machine and Hegel’s theory of the State by way of a focus on Hegel’s discussions of drive (Trieb) and semblance (Schein). Regarding the first, the paper explores how both Hegel and Deleuze and Guattari conceive of social structure in terms of a structure of drives even while they differ in their understandings of the drives in relation to desire and subjectivity. Regarding the second, the paper explores how moments of semblance identified by Hegel as he develops his system of Right reveal points where the war machine can emerge from within State structures. The paper argues that the war machine concept challenges understandings of politics built on friend/enemy antagonisms and the use of external conflict to secure internal unity, the former being Schmitt’s explicit political project and the second being the place at which Hegel’s project ultimately finds itself when it fails to secure the rational structure of Ethical Life.

This article offers a discussion of James Kreines’s book Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal. While broadly sympathetic to Kreines’s ‘concept thesis’ as a conceptual realist account of Hegel, the article contrasts two Kantian arguments for transcendental idealism to which Hegel’s position may be seen as a response—the argument from synthetic a priori knowledge and the argument from the dialectic of reason—and explores the implications of Kreines’s commitment to the latter over the former.

In the article I argue that Hegel and Deleuze/Guattari construct two distinct political paths toward immanence. Both of these paths have as their starting point Rousseau’s bourgeois. I show that both thinkers follow Rousseau in his attempt to construct political immanence and abandon the position of private man. However, in doing so they move in opposite directions. Hegel seeks to convert the bourgeois into the citizen, with the intention of reformulating the immanence of state-life presented in the The Social Contract by extending mutual recognition a distinct space in the form of civil society. In contrast Deleuze/Guattari move in the direction of becoming-animal along the lines of the Discourse on Inequality, by reformulating the relationship between life and society. At the same time, I argue that the overcoming of the problems that Hegel and Deleuze/Guattari identified in Rousseau introduces new ones and that the dangers inherent in the project of immanence cannot disappear.

I critically discuss Kreines’s arguments against readings on which Hegel holds some version of metaphysical monism. In section 1, I address Kreines’s claim that Hegel’s revised version of Kant’s argument in the Transcendental Dialectic implies a rejection of metaphysical monism. I argue both that the argument that Kreines ascribes to Hegel does not itself rule out monism, and that there are serious exegetical problems with the way Kreines understands Hegel’s diagnosis of the antinomies and his critique of the metaphysics of the understanding. In section 2, I discuss additional reasons that Kreines gives for seeing Hegel as rejecting metaphysical monism. In particular, I argue that Hegel is much more optimistic about the intelligibility of nature than Kreines thinks: to a substantial degree, the basic structure of nature, including the laws of mechanics, is open to explanations that are ultimately based on a monistic principle.

This article is a reply to comments by Franz Knappik and Robert Stern on my book, Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and its Philosophical Appeal. Issues addressed include the systematicity of Hegel’s philosophy, the prioritizing of metaphysical over epistemological questions in his arguments, Hegel’s response to Kant’s Antinomy of Pure Reason, and my conclusion that there are senses in which Hegel’s own position is both ambitiously metaphysical and also monist, but that the monism present there is epistemological, and the ambitious metaphysics is non-monist.