According to a well-known statement in Hegel's Encyclopaedia, what differentiates the philosophy of nature from physics is ‘the kind of metaphysics used by them both’ (W9: §246Z: 20, N: 11). In the same vein, recent scholarship has stressed that Hegel criticises the logical procedures and metaphysical presuppositions of the working scientist's activity, taking issue with their lack of awareness about the mental categories they use and the alleged consistency of their way of arguing. Put rather more critically, it is often claimed that Hegel's concerns were purely philosophical, and that he never entered into genuinely scientific debate. Unlike Schelling, who engaged in scientific debate, Hegel is thought to have confined himself to observing and judging it, demonstrating his ability to grasp its main features, on the basis of which later to build his philosophy of nature.

To combat the old tradition of negative assessment of Hegel's relation to the empirical sciences, which saw it as aprioristic, dogmatic, misleading and ill-informed, the editors of the critical edition of the Phenomenology retrace some of the contemporary scientific sources for Hegel's objections to description and classification in the natural sciences, and document his appreciation of new developments in electricity and chemistry. Through a primarily historical approach, Hegel's critical remarks on the attempt to fix laws for organic forces (sensibility, irritability, reproduction) and his critique of the scientific status of physiognomy and phrenology, all of which elucidate his allusions in ‘Observing Reason’, are shown to be rooted in contemporary scientific debates. Recendy, however, it has been contended that this kind of scholarship that identifies Hegel's active engagement with the science of his time, ‘tend[s] to reduce the text to a document for historians of nineteenth-century science’ (Stone 2005: xv). In Italy, a scholar has also made a subtle case for his claim that, in contrast to his mature system, Hegel's confrontation with the natural sciences in the Phenomenology is essentially and necessarily critical, aiming to reveal the partiality, one-sidedness, and inadequacy of forms of cognitive approach typical of the natural sciences, and that it forms part of Hegel's dissolution of all of consciousness's forms of externality.

In recent years, the long-standing philosophical and religious duel between ‘Hegel’ and ‘Kierkegaard’ has quiedy transmuted into something that, if still far from an amicable resolution, is something much less black and white. We are, of course, collectively grateful to Jon Stewart for demonstrating not only something of the extent to which ‘Kierkegaard's relation to Hegel’ needs to be re-envisaged as ‘Kierkegaard's relations to Hegel,’ but also that, often, even mosdy, the passages where Kierkegaard is seemingly attacking Hegel are actually directed against one or other, often Danish, representative of Hegelianism — above all, against J. L. Heiberg and H. L. Martensen. As a biographical narrative, this is largely beyond dispute — though, as many of Stewart's critics have noted, this does not necessarily lead, as he himself suggests, to the elimination of crucial philosophical differences between the two erstwhile protagonists.

In this paper, I accept Stewart's point that Kierkegaard's reception of Hegel is inseparable from his multiple receptions of Hegelianism. I shall, however, offer a particular focus on a part of the story that, I believe, still remains under-represented in the secondary literature, namely, Kierkegaard's early response to a number of those theologians often referred to as ‘Right’ Hegelians. This focus calls for a revision of Stewart's emphasis on the relation to Heiberg and Martensen as the decisive factor in Kierkegaard's anti-Hegelianism.

Kierkegaard was, at least during his early years, an avid reader of Hegel's philosophy. For example, his dissertation, The Concept of Irony, constitutes a careful study of, among other things, Hegel's account of Socrates in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and of Hegel's discussion of Romantic irony in both the Lectures on Aesthetics and the book review of Solger's Posthumous Writings. Similarly, in connection with the analysis of Antigone in Either/Or and the discussion of universals and particulars in the unfinished Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus dubitandum est, Part Two, there is clear evidence that Kierkegaard consulted the relevant parts of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Based on these examples, Kierkegaard's use of Hegel can almost always be characterised as ad hoc. He goes directly to specific passages or discussions in Hegel's texts, which are of special interest in connection with works that he himself is writing. Thus, when working on The Concept of Irony, the first part of which is concerned with Socratic irony, Kierkegaard goes specifically to the section in Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy that treats Socrates, without feeling any obligation to read the book from cover to cover.

In the young Henrik Ibsen's intellectual quarters, abroad as well as in his native Norway, Hegelianism was very much the philosophical system de rigueur. Hegel's student Marcus Jacob Monrad taught phenomenology and aesthetics at the University of Christiania (now Oslo) throughout the 1850s, and promoted a wider Hegelian way of thinking through frequent book reviews and newspaper articles. In Italy, soon to be his home away from home, Ibsen socialised with the art-historian Lorentz Dietrichson, whose views on the history of art were outspokenly Hegelian. Ibsen was also in touch with the Hegelian circle gathering around the painter I. C. Dahl at the Academy of Art in Dresden. While Ibsen rarely engages in explicit philosophical discussion, he makes a significant exception when responding to the Danish translation of John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism. He admits that he has no professional expertise in this area but continues to observe that, insofar as ‘there are writers [like Mill] who lay down the law about philosophy without any knowledge of Hegel or German thought in general,’ it seems to him that ‘anything is allowed.’ To think philosophically without Hegel appears to Ibsen as tantamount to thinking without a reference point or standard.

By comparison with other parts of his philosophy, Hegel's Aesthetics has been slighted by Anglo-American philosophers. All the more welcome then are two recent essays by Robert Pippin, which promise to go well beyond received notions. With Hegel's Idealism, Pippin published what is by any measure one of the most original of recent treatments. Shortly thereafter came a penetrating study of the idea of the modern, which allotted a central role to artistic modernism, and since then he has published various essays actively engaging our post-Kantian legacy. Readers will therefore have heightened expectations of Pippin's turn to Hegel's aesthetics, or rather, as he himself signals, the philosophy of art — unlike some he clearly approves of the shift from Kantian questions of aesthetic taste to Romantic speculations on art, indeed on Art as cultural absolute.

They will hardly be disappointed. Yet in the event they will find themselves negotiating texts that are at once dense and elliptical, much of the argument being conducted via footnotes, its implications—what it commits the author to in theory and in practice — not evident straightaway. If Hegel's position (so far as one can speak of such a thing, when it is known largely from student notes made over a number of years) is complex, Pippin's turns out to be no less so. While I can hardly do justice to its intricacies, I do consider it both important and controversial, whether as interpretation of Hegel or as an approach to modernist abstraction.

Very often, the rise of non-Euclidean geometry and Einstein's theory of relativity are seen as the decisive defeat of Kant's theoretical philosophy. Scientific progress seems to render Kant's philosophy obsolete. This view became dominant during the first decades of the twentieth century, when the movement of logical positivism arose. Despite extensive criticism of basic tenets of this movement later in the twentieth century, its view of Kant's philosophy is still common. Although it is not my intention to defend Kant infinitely, I think that this view is rather unsatisfactory and even misleading.

Let us consider the first factor: non-Euclidean geometry. If one reads the first Critique carefully, it becomes clear that the claims of transcendental logic do not imply Euclidean geometry. Kant's notion of space, as explained in the aesthetics chapter, is rather limited: it does neither entail nor presuppose a specific form of geometry (Cf. B37-B57). None of his statements about the form of space is specific enough to imply or support Euclidean geometry. Although Kant uses several examples, Euclidean geometry does not play any systematic role; only the pure form of space is at issue in the aesthetics chapter. In my view, the same holds in the case of Newton's physics: it is neither presupposed nor entailed by Kant's transcendental logic. The justification of Newton's physics requires further specialisation and application of the transcendental framework to empirical concepts like matter and motion. Kant took this step in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science.

Although Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy was teaching material intended for students and published posthumously, it would be wrong to regard this work as irrelevant to his philosophical project. In his introduction to the Lectures, Hegel emphasised that the history of philosophy should not be treated as a mere accumulation of opinions, or as a random collection of correct and incorrect views according to some later standards. The history of philosophy, just like art, religion and Recht, reflects the necessary logical determinations of the Idea, and in this sense it should be studied with the intent of revealing those determinations. Hegel, of course, intended his project to be sufficiently established through the Phenomenology and the Logic without the need to resort to any historical manifestations of culture. However, his interpretation of the history of philosophy does reveal his own philosophical agenda more straightforwardly than the ahistorical complex accounts of his other major works.

Hegel's intention was to present the development of the history of philosophy as a reflection of the development of the Idea. Therefore, one would assume that the further we go back in time, we would find philosophers whose doctrines were less mature and more distant from Hegel's own conception of philosophy. However, Hegel seems to have singled out a few favourite philosophers, to whom he did not hesitate to attribute insights that could not possibly have been developed at the time, according to his pre-conceived pattern of development. One famous example was Aristotle, whom he credited with the conception of a Reason that becomes its own object, i.e., Reason which is ‘in and for-itself.’ A philosopher belonging to the ‘objective’ stage of the spirit could not normally have achieved such a conception.

Between the late 18th and early 19th century, various philosophical schools of thought developed in Germany, which exerted influence on the young Hegel. Although the origins of Hegelian ‘idealism’ have yet to be fully explored, the studies of Pöggeler, Henrich and Jamme establish clear connections with the so-called Vereiningungsphilosophie in Hölderlin's research, which was acknowledged by Hegel during his Frankfurt period. Although the intellectual relationship between Hegel and Hölderlin is still being assessed, Hemsterhuis' philosophy of unification is emerging as a key influence on Hölderlin and many of his contemporaries, including Hegel. Despite the fact that Hemsterhuis was described by August Wilhelm Schlegel as the ‘prophet of transcendental idealism’ (Schlegel 1989: I: 296), there is little critical literature to date on this topic. So the questions remain open: who was Hemsterhuis? Why did he influence Hölderlin and consequently also Hegel?

The aim of my paper is to suggest possible answers to these questions, thus I shall commence by exploring whether Hemsterhuis influenced Hegel directly — and, if so, how — or whether his influence was in any way mediated by Herder and Hölderlin. I will also attempt to compare Hemsterhuis' theories on desire, set forth in his Lettre sur ks désirs (1770), with Herder's commentary and Hegel's concept of love, which was developed firstly in the Tübingen Fragment entitled Religion is one of the most important questions (1793) and then in The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, a work written in Frankfurt between 1798 and 1799 and published posthumously in 1907 with a title chosen by the editor Hermann Nohl. The paper is divided in two parts.

Hegel's very first acknowledged publication was, among other things, an attack on Fichte. In 1801, Hegel was still laboring in almost complete obscurity, while Fichte was an international sensation, though already somewhat past the peak of his meteoric career. In the 1801 Differenzschrift, Hegel cut his teeth by criticizing Fichte's already widelycriticised Wissenschaftslehre, and by demonstrating that Schelling's philosophical system was not simply to be equated with it. Fichte himself never bothered to respond to Hegel's criticisms; indeed he never publicly acknowledged their existence. This was not because he was unconcerned with criticisms of his views; quite the contrary. But at the time he had bigger fish to fry. He responded to Jacobi's criticisms, and to Schelling's; he replied in great detail to critical questions raised by Reinhold, and with vituperative intensity to objections raised by skeptics and purportedly loyal Kantians. But Hegel's Differenzschrift was left without a Fichtean rebuttal. This is a pity, both because of the missed opportunity to illuminate by controversy central issues at stake in the post-Kantian period, but also because it made it easier for Hegel simply to reiterate his youthful criticism as if it were the last word. And reiterate it he did: in one form or another Hegel's early criticisms of Fichte reappear at every subsequent stage of his career: in the Phenomenology, in the Science of Logic, in the Encyclopaedia, as the final chapter in Hegel's History of Philosophy, and in countless other minor works and documents from the Nachlass and correspondence.