Our reception of Hegel’s theory of action faces a fundamental difficulty: on the one hand, that theory is quite clearly embedded in a social theory of modern life, but on the other hand most of the features of the society that gave that embedding its specific content have become almost inscrutably strange to us (e.g., the estates and the monarchy). Thus we find ourselves in the awkward position of stressing the theory’s sociality even as we scramble backwards to distance ourselves from the particular social institutions that gave conceptualized form to such sociality in Hegel’s own opinion. My attempt in this article is to make our position less awkward by giving us at least one social-ontological leg to stand on. Specifically, I want to defend a principled and conceptual pluralism as forming the heart of Hegel’s theory of action. If this view can be made out, then we will have a social-ontological structure that might be filled out in different ways in Hegel’s time and our own while simultaneously giving real teeth to the notion that Hegel’s theory of action is essentially social.

Hegel’s Logic argues in a manner that is supposed to support a systematic philosophy. But it is difficult to explain how such a systematic argument is supposed to work. For answers, I look to the key transition from the Doctrine of Essence to the Doctrine of the Concept. Here we find discussions of both Spinozist and Kantian systems of philosophy: both are supposed to be helpful, and yet also to be lacking in instructive ways. So the initial hope is that these comparisons can help us to understand Hegel’s own systematic argument, and what it means to transition from an objective to a ‘Subjective Logic’. But the comparisons bring additional difficulties. First, to defend a comprehensive system involves refuting rivals, and the discussion of Spinoza demonstrates that refutation is difficult. Second, it is hard to see how any argument for Hegel’s system could be akin to those in Spinoza and Kant given the extent of the differences between them. I argue that the best way to deal with these difficulties is to explain the systematic argument of the Logic as modelled on the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant’s first Critique.

Hegel uses the term Einsicht (‘insight’) throughout several key subsections of Chapter Six of the Phenomenology of Spirit (notably in ‘Faith and Pure Insight’ and ‘The Struggle of the Enlightenment with Superstition’). Nowhere else in his work does the term enjoy such a sustained treatment. Commentators generally accept Hegel’s use of the term in the Phenomenology as simply referring to the type of counter-religious reasoning found in the French Enlightenment. I show how Hegel derives the term, through the lens of Kant’s essay, ‘What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?’ from the Pantheismusstreit, the philosophical debate between Mendelssohn and Jacobi about knowledge of God. The Aufklärung provenance of Einsicht shows how a deep complicity between faith and reason, in the form of immediate knowing, leads beyond the Terror to a happier outcome in the Morality section. Finally, passing reference to Einsicht in the Vorbegriff of the Encyclopaedia Logic confirms its role in the ethical and political vocation of Hegel’s Science.

In this paper, I consider the role of perspective in Hegel’s metaphysics, and in particular the role that multiple perspectives play within the ultimate structure in Hegel’s metaphysics, which Hegel calls ‘the idea [die Idee]’. My (somewhat anachronistic) way into this topic will be to inquire about Hegel’s stance on what Adrian Moore has called ‘absolute representations’. I argue for the claim that perspective is maintained, even in the absolute idea, which generates the task of understanding the nature of that perspective and its compatibility with absoluteness. I attempt to accomplish this task by asking what a logical perspective could be, and how it might be related to visual perspective. Then I inquire into the relation that perspectives have to each other, i.e., to the system of perspectives. I construe those relations in reciprocal and dynamic terms, so that absoluteness takes the form of a structured round of perspectives rather than a relation to reality ‘once and for all’.

The article aims to show that Priest wrongly associates Hegel’s dialectic with his dialetheism. Even if Priest correctly argues that the notion of contradiction in Hegel’s logic is a logical one and that contradiction is meant to be true, Hegel goes a long way beyond Priest’s dialetheism insofar as he is not committed to a dialetheist conception of a three truth-values logic. I start my analysis with a brief introductory overview of the dialetheist’s thesis of the truth of contradiction. Then, in the first part of the article, I show that Hegel’s notion of contradiction can be equated with a logical contradiction and that Hegel argues that some contradictions are true. In the second part of the paper I show that Hegel’s thesis of the truth of contradiction is different from Priest’s, because Hegel endorses a developmental conception of truth which allows him to account for complex and dynamic properties of reality in a way that Priest’s does not allow.

In order to understand Hegel's gnomic oracle according to which the ‘I’ is a ‘We’, the notion of a personal subject is explained by its competence to perform personal roles in a pre-given partition of roles. Explicit divisions of labour by contractual promises are special cases that presuppose the general case of an already established social practice. On the other hand, methodological individualism is right to stress that we actualize joint intentions only via corresponding instantiations. In performing our parts, we form a plural subject, a we-group. The result of what each of us does is what we do, and the generic ‘We’ turns into the generic ‘I’.

The aim of this paper is to show how certain distinctive elements of Hegel's theory of action can provide a fresh philosophical perspective on the phenomenon of addiction. What motivates the turn to Hegel is a set of puzzles that arise out of contemporary medical and philosophical discussions of addiction. Starting with questions concerning ongoing attempts to define addiction, the paper examines the resources needed for addiction to be classed as a disorder, as it commonly is. Provisionally settling with the notion of akrasia, the paper turns to Hegel for a theory of agency that fills in the gaps of the account of akrasia used in the contemporary literature on addiction and helps resolve the puzzles that occasioned the paper.

Although Hegel is very critical of representative democracy, his views on political participation are in many ways richer and more sophisticated than the ones favoured today by most Western societies. The present paper aims to shed light on this apparent paradox by dispelling some of the misunderstandings still associated with Hegel’s ethical and political thought. I argue, on the one hand, that Hegel’s emphasis on the notion of freedom does not amount to an endorsement of political liberalism, but to a critique of its underlying principles. On the other hand, I show that the Hegelian theory of the modern state, albeit falling short of a fully democratic constitutional solution, is by no means opposed to social justice or political pluralism. Hegel views political freedom as the result of a global web of mutual recognition, embodied by social institutions destined to bridge the gap between private and communal interests. Despite the ambiguous and outdated elements of Hegel’s description, I believe his overall solution remains uniquely relevant, and an important source for the ongoing debate about the merits and limitations of contemporary democracies.

One prominent feature of analytic metaphysics in the second half of the twentieth century was the revival of metaphysical debate over modality, and in this paper I suggest that a particular position that emerged within this debate, ‘modal actualism’, bears a striking resemblance to the way that Hegel discusses modal notions in the final chapter of Book 2 of the Science of Logic, ‘Wirklichkeit’ or ‘Actuality’. Modal actualists opposed David Lewis’s counter-intuitive claims about the existence of alternate possible worlds, and aimed to reconcile the reality of alternate possibilities with the common-sense idea of the actual world as all there is. Like Hegel in the chapter ‘Actuality’, they thus argue that possible alternatives to the actual world must, somehow, exist within the actual world. Here I approach these issues via the ideas of John N. Findlay who, in the 1950s, had attempted to reintroduce Hegel into an Anglophone philosophical culture, but who also influenced the later development of modal actualism via his influence on the modal logician, Arthur Prior. Like certain actualists, Findlay distinguished between two modes of predication in order to distinguish, but relate, judgements about the actual from those about the possible. This predicative dualism is strikingly similar to the way Hegel distinguishes two types of predication in his treatment of judgement in Book 3 of the Science of Logic. Reading Hegel’s dualistic account of judgement structure against this background enables us to see how it was meant to provide a logical framework for the ‘actualist’ metaphysics he earlier sketched in the chapter, ‘Actuality’.

Adorno’s critical theory is distinguished by his affirming what I call the ‘Wrong Life Claim’ (WLC), the claim that everything in existence exhibits wrongness or badness. This claim is notoriously hard to justify. The WLC, as I describe it, appears to rest on two things: the first is a form of Hegelian social holism; the second is some experience of or fundamental orientation towards reality which can motivate an ‘inversion’ of said holism. In this paper, I will leave aside questions of whether Hegelian holism is itself justified, and instead focus my efforts on convincing already-convinced Hegelians of the plausibility of the WLC. My argument is that we can formulate a version of the WLC that stands a chance of convincing ‘the Hegelian’ by focusing on the Kierkegaardian heritage of Adorno’s ideas: specifically, by understanding Adornian ‘wrongness’ to be analogous to ‘despair’, a concept which Kierkegaard explores at length in The Sickness Unto Death.

Charles Taylor claims that not only Kant, but also successors of Kant such as Fichte and Hegel, advocate a primitive concept of action, namely, a basic, irreducible, indispensable concept allegedly essential to our self-understanding. This paper shows how philosophers like Robert Brandom agree with Taylor explicitly with regard to Hegel, and attribute to him transcendental non-metaphysical arguments in support of such a concept. It then proceeds to challenge this attribution (both of the concept and the type of argument), offering a brief presentation of an alternative non-transcendental metaphysical approach to the Hegelian idea of giving actuality to a concept (or end) through a productive activity.

Critics of Marx of various stripes have rejected the view of historical necessity that he purportedly inherits from Hegel. Marx famously pledges allegiance to Hegelian necessity by arguing, for example, that social antagonisms ‘spring from natural laws’ that work themselves out with ‘iron necessity’; that the bourgeoisie produces its own ‘gravediggers’; that the proletariat’s victory is ‘inevitable’. In response, some commentators have argued that Marx’s allegiance to Hegelian modality has more to do with understanding possibility as indexed to actuality than with claims about the necessary logic and eventual collapse of capital. Iain Macdonald complicates both classic and revisionary accounts by distilling a rare but powerful notion in Marx’s early and middle period: ‘deactualization’ (Entwirklichung). Marx deploys this term to theorize the ‘thwarting’ indeed ‘undoing’ of real possibility within the ‘living process of actuality’. For Macdonald, this is a deeply ‘unHegelian moment’ in Marx’s corpus. In this paper, I provide a reading of Hegel’s treatment of modality in the Doctrine of Essence that shows that Hegelian modality not only makes room for alternate possibilities, but indeed accounts for thwarted possibilities within actuality. Rather than formal or real modality, Hegelian absolute modality is the proper philosophical framework for thinking the coextensive actualization and deactualization distinctive of capitalism.

In this paper, I demonstrate that the category of Schein (which I translate as ‘semblance’) in Hegel’s Science of Logic expresses the structure of ideology in general, and specifically the ideology of equality and freedom in capitalism. To this aim, I motivate Marx’s mature critique of political economy in Capital and the Grundrisse. I argue that while the semblance of equality is false and misleading, it is constitutive of the essence of capitalism. This implies that domination in capitalism does not exclude equality, but requires it. In particular, I argue that the structure of domination generates equality as its own necessary moment. The paper shows, on the one hand, how a close study of Hegel’s Logic is helpful for understanding the structure of capitalism, and on the other hand, how reading Hegel’s Logic through Marx can help in unveiling its social import.

In this paper we propose a new interpretation of Hegel's views on action and responsibility, defending it against its most plausible exegetical competitors.1 Any exposition of Hegel will face both terminological and substantive challenges, and so we place, from the outset, some interpretative constraints. The paper divides into two parts. In part one, we point out that Hegel makes a number of distinctions which any sensible account of responsibility should indeed make. Our aim here is to show that Hegel at least has the materials for a sensible and nuanced account, whatever the precise details of how they hang together. Part two then turns to a hard question concerning the relation of two different aspects of our deeds to responsibility. We consider five alternate ways of relieving the tension in Hegel's text, before putting forth our own preferred solution.

The first part of this essay develops the idea of logic as the science of thought, articulating, and thus being, the self-consciousness of thought. It explains that logic, so understood, is nothing other than metaphysics, the science of what is in so far as it is. Self-consciousness, then, thought itself, is not empty, but the source of all content. The second part of the essay discusses the opening paragraphs of Hegel’s Science of Logic; it shows how, in these paragraphs, thought is revealed to be the source of its own content in virtue of its original negativity. Thus the second part begins to make concrete the idea of logic provided by the first.

This paper offers an alternative perspective to the traditional interpretation of Hegel's philosophical reflection on history, departing from a reinterpretation of Hegel's reading of the tragic action of Antigone in Chapter VI of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The customary interpretation of this text affirms that Hegel shows how the conflict of tragic action finds its truth and its end in the identity of spirit. Tragic conflict is left behind to the same extent that (modern historical) spirit sublates the Greek ethical substance. This way, spirit can guarantee that our historical time is released from the past of the substance, or the spiritual movement of mediation from the immediacy of an ‘in-itself’. My reading, by contrast, finds under the tragic conflict of this text of Hegel's nothing but the ‘no’ of death that negates itself, or a principle that has the form of an original and irreducible conflict. Under this interpretation of Hegelian spirit, it becomes clear that it can neither fail to posit some form of ‘in-itself’ nor sublate its own tragic nature. This way it is shown that Hegel's reflection on the past does not reassure the superiority of the identity of the (modern) present (as the end of history), but rather illuminates its ‘broken’ nature. I thus offer an alternative view on Hegel's comprehension of the relation between present and past and between philosophy and time.

While much has been written in recent years about the significance of Hegel’s Logic for Marx’s method in Capital, less attention has been given to the relevance of Hegel’s method for understanding Marx’s outlook on rights. The dominant view among political theorists across the Anglo-American, Marxist and critical theory traditions is that the revolutionary transformation of capitalism would pave the way for the disappearance of rights in communist society. The aim of this article is to question the orthodoxy concerning the fate of rights in communist society by bringing into relief the relevance of Aufhebung. When applied to Marx’s social theory, this Hegelian concept sheds valuable light on the transformation of rights in communist society and points to an alternative conclusion than the one proposed by leading commentators. A re-Hegelianized reading of Marx’s cumulative reflections on rights shows the possibility of a reconstituted notion of rights in communist society.

This paper defends Hegel’s positive contribution in the Subjective Logic and argues that it can be understood as presenting a compelling account of the space of reasons as a form of second nature. Taking Hegel’s praise of Kant’s conception of internal purposiveness and its connection to what he calls the Idea as a point of departure, I argue that Hegel’s theory of the Idea that concludes the Logic must be understood in direct reference to Kant’s argument in the third Critique that purposiveness defines the space of judgement’s power. I take up two arguments that help to understand Hegel’s appropriation and transformation of Kant’s purposiveness thesis: first, Hegel’s contention that internal purposiveness must have primacy over external purposiveness when considered in relation to judgement; and second, Hegel’s presentation of a logical concept of life as the immediate form of the Idea.

This paper argues that the different ways of facing Hegel's system, as an impossible attempt to harmonize tradition and openness to novelty, respond to an underlying malaise: that provoked by the disturbing question of “the actuality of philosophy” after Hegel. That question insistently arises with respect to different paradigms of contemporary philosophy, and is found in critical theory, in analytical philosophy of action, in Žižek's materialism, and in Derrida's deconstructive reading. Adorno's interpretation introduces the tension between universal concepts and laws, transmitted by the cultural tradition, and particular elements that the subject of the action must always take into account. As a consequence, the subject must include what is not reducible to a concept, which enables the construction of a language of experience that transcends the identifying thinking of the concept and makes negative dialectics possible as a theory of action.