Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: On reading Hegel today
- 1 Hegel on conscience and the history of moral philosophy
- 2 The apperceptive I and the empirical self: towards a heterodox reading of “Lordship and Bondage” in Hegel's Phenomenology
- 3 Hegel, McDowell and recent defences of Kant
- 4 Substance, subject and infinity: a case study of the role of logic in Hegel's system
- 5 Dialectic as logic of transformative processes
- 6 Hegel, ethics and the logic of universality
- 7 Recognition and reconciliation: actualized agency in Hegel's Jena Phenomenology
- 8 The contemporary relevance of Hegel's practical philosophy
- 9 Catching up with history: Hegel and abstract painting
- 10 New directions in Hegel's philosophy of nature
- 11 Hegel and the gospel according to Immanuel
- 12 What is conceptual history?
- 13 On Hegel's interpretation of Aristotle's psyche: a qualified defence
- Bibliography
- Index
13 - On Hegel's interpretation of Aristotle's psyche: a qualified defence
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: On reading Hegel today
- 1 Hegel on conscience and the history of moral philosophy
- 2 The apperceptive I and the empirical self: towards a heterodox reading of “Lordship and Bondage” in Hegel's Phenomenology
- 3 Hegel, McDowell and recent defences of Kant
- 4 Substance, subject and infinity: a case study of the role of logic in Hegel's system
- 5 Dialectic as logic of transformative processes
- 6 Hegel, ethics and the logic of universality
- 7 Recognition and reconciliation: actualized agency in Hegel's Jena Phenomenology
- 8 The contemporary relevance of Hegel's practical philosophy
- 9 Catching up with history: Hegel and abstract painting
- 10 New directions in Hegel's philosophy of nature
- 11 Hegel and the gospel according to Immanuel
- 12 What is conceptual history?
- 13 On Hegel's interpretation of Aristotle's psyche: a qualified defence
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the chapter on “Plato and Aristotle” in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel praises Aristotle's work for displaying a principle of “pure subjectivity” that, by contrast, he considers largely absent from the Platonic corpus:
In general, Platonic thinking [das Platonische] represents objectivity, but it lacks a principle of life, a principle of subjectivity; and this principle of life, of subjectivity, not in the sense of a contingent, merely particular subjectivity, but in the sense of pure subjectivity, is proper to Aristotle.
(W 19: 153)Elsewhere and repeatedly, Hegel refers to Aristotelian conceptions of organic life and of thinking – especially from the Metaphysics and the De Anima – as the first speculative insights to be found in the history of (Western) philosophy.
A “speculative insight” in Hegel's sense may be characterized in a general way as grasp of the thinking subject's theoretical and practical relation to itself, that is, as theoretical self-knowing and practical self-will. “Speculative” is any concept that grasps (holds together intelligibly) what other kinds of cognition keep asunder, for example, the subjective and objective dimensions of a phenomenon or a state of affairs. But even independently of a detailed analysis of the meaning of speculative insight or a speculative principle, one is struck by the apparent inconsistency of these claims on Aristotle with Hegel's overall view of the logically necessary stages of philosophical thinking in history.
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- HegelNew Directions, pp. 227 - 242Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2006
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