This essay focuses on “Music Decomposed” and, to a lesser extent, “A Matter of Meaning It” (they are companion pieces), contextualizing these texts, and exploring some important parallels between musical composition and philosophical authorship. Colapietro shows how, in subtle and surprising ways, some of the main themes of Cavell’s philosophical investigations are articulated in “Music Decomposed” (themes such as voice, timing, extemporaneity, contingency, deep listening, rule-following, and an uncompromising affirmation of the radical nature of human responsibility made in the teeth of one or another fashionable celebration of impersonal mechanism). Tradition and technique are necessary for creativity, even if creativity reconfigures tradition and transcends technique.

This chapter critically examines some of the popular theoretical justifications that have hitherto been postulated as explanations for the existence of intellectual property rights in general and patent rights in particular. The focus here is limited to the Lockean theory, the Hegelian theory, the utilitarian theory, and the regulatory theory. The chapter is structured into four sections. Sections 2.2 and 2.3 examine the Lockean and Hegelian theories, respectively, while Sections 2.4 and 2.5 focus on the utilitarian and regulatory theories, respectively. The chapter concludes with the view that the regulatory theory of intellectual property is the only theory that adopts a broad socio-centric approach. Thus, any developing country that seeks to preserve its patent policy space and secure access to medicines for its citizens should treat intellectual property law (including patent law) as an instrument that regulates the grant of exclusive rights to creators.

H. Patrick Glenn, Professor of Law and former Director of the Institute of Comparative Law at McGill University, passed away in 2014. For the past decades, he had been a central figure of legal scholarship, especially in the global discourse on comparative law. This chapter is the introduction to a collection that intends to honour Professor Glenn’s intellectual legacy by engaging critically with his ideas, especially focusing on his visions of a ‘cosmopolitan state’ and of law conceptualized as ‘tradition’. To this end, the collection brings together an international group of leading scholars in comparative law, legal philosophy, legal sociology, and legal history. This introductory chapter situates Glenn’s work within the context of his trajectory as a scholar of comparative law and reflects critically, in particular, on Glenn’s concept of ‘tradition’.

The introduction outlines the kind of attention to prose techniques that forms the basis for the chapters that follow. It claims that prose is all too infrequently granted this kind of attention. In part, this is because of the claims to ordinariness that prose writing often proposes for itself, where prose comes to seem either prosaic or prosy. Critical and philosophical traditions have reinforced the view that prose is at its best when it effaces itself, when it conceals its own wording. But this principle has tended to distract from the craft of prose. The introduction outlines the parts of prose (punctuation, words, sentences, and so on) and the various genres (realism, comedy, Gothic, science fiction, and creative non-fiction) that subsequent chapters take up for inspection as regards the techniques of prose themselves.

Chapter 2 introduces Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and offers an analysis of his account of the story of the Fall from Genesis. Here Hegel develops his discussion of alienation, since the Fall is a story about how humans are alienated from themselves. It shows that alienation is a fundamental fact of human existence and not just something contingent. The chapter also introduces Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History and presents his analysis of the alienation that was characteristic of the Roman Empire. Hegel points out that the schools of Roman philosophy—Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism—can all be seen as reactions to this. An account is given of Hegel’s analysis of Christianity, which he sees as overcoming this alienation. At the end of his lectures, Hegel claims that his own time in the 1820s has certain elements in common with the Roman Empire, when the world of culture had lost its meaning and people fell into a state of alienation and despair. Later thinkers were generally dissatisfied with Hegel’s view that it was sufficient simply to understand the nature of the contemporary crisis. They demanded a more active approach to the world.

Chapter 1 begins with an overview of Hegel’s life. This chapter offers an introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and explains the role of the work vis-à-vis what Hegel calls “science.” The work is intended to refute different forms of dualistic thinking. A close reading of his analysis of the lord and the bondsman and the unhappy consciousness from the “Self-Consciousness” chapter is given. Hegel’s account of intersubjective recognition is explored. Self-consciousness is our awareness of ourselves in contrast to our awareness of objects. We like to think of ourselves as independent individuals. We know who we are, regardless of what the circumstances are or what others might think of us. But Hegel goes through a series of arguments to refute this view of common sense. He demonstrates that our awareness of ourselves is in fact dependent on other people. It is argued that the Phenomenology can be read as a book primarily about alienation. At each level in the work, there is some kind of other that confronts the human mind. The goal is to work through these different conceptions and overcome them by showing the deeper, hidden unity.

This chapter looks at the enduring influence of Hegel on the philosophy of the nineteenth century, especially his ideas of alienation and recognition. Variations of these ideas can be found explicitly or implicitly in all of the thinkers examined in this study and appear in a number of different contexts in addition to philosophy: religion, history, politics, literature, poetry, etc. This shows that the seed that Hegel planted in The Phenomenology of Spirit and later in his Berlin lectures in the 1820s continued to grow through the subsequent decades. This chapter shows that, starting with him, all the thinkers discussed in this study believed there to be an important crisis in their time. An overview is given of their different diagnoses of the nature of this crisis and its causes. A key feature in all of these is the role of alienation in modern life in various spheres: religion, politics, economics, art, etc. Likewise, an account is provided of the various solutions they proposed. Finally, an attempt is made to demonstrate that these issues carry over into the twentieth century, where they are taken up and further expanded upon by philosophers and social scientists.

Chapter 8 treats the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and provides a close reading of his work Notes from Underground. While Dostoevsky was never one of Hegel’s students in Berlin, he was influenced by Hegel’s thought and fits well with the general trajectory of European thinking in the nineteenth century that the present work traces. The underground man is portrayed as suffering from the disease of reflection, which is characteristic of the modern age. He offers a criticism of the modern scientific worldview, specifically rationalism and materialism. The influence of Hegel can be seen in the fact that the underground man’s relations to others can be characterized as based on the need for recognition. The underground man plays the role of the slave with some and the master with others. The theme of self-alienation is also very much present. The underground man knows full well that he is a coward and a morally depraved person, and in his moments of transparency he admits this. He can be seen as a symbol of modern alienation.

The Introduction presents the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and raises questions about the influence of his Berlin lectures in the 1820s. A remarkable generation came to learn from him, which included figures such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, David Friedrich Strauss, and Heinrich Heine. After his death a second generation of students came to Berlin and were inspired by his legacy. Among these were Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Søren Kierkegaard, Ivan Turgenev, and Mikhail Bakunin. All of these thinkers testify to the special intellectual atmosphere in Berlin that arose in connection with Hegel’s philosophy both during his lifetime and in the decades after his death. The present work takes as its point of departure the intellectual milieu at the University of Berlin, which was the fountain of inspiration that nourished the leading figures of the age. The introduction defines Hegel’s concepts of alienation and recognition, which are taken as the guiding themes for a study of philosophy in the nineteenth century. A handful of critical theses are sketched.

Chapter 9 is concerned with the thought of the Russian anarchist thinker Mikhail Bakunin. In 1840 Bakunin traveled to Prussia and attended the University of Berlin. There he came into contact with some of Hegel’s leading students. The chapter begins with an analysis of his work God and the State. Like Hegel, he has recourse to the myth of the Fall in order to understand the fundamental shift from nature to spirit. But in contrast to Hegel, the important thing about the biblical account for Bakunin is the element of rebellion, which is essential for human freedom. A comparison is given of the criticism of religion found in Bauer and Bakunin, according to which humans must emancipate themselves from the belief in God in order to realize their own freedom. Bakunin also draws on Hegel’s theory of recognition and freedom. To be who we are, we need the recognition of others in society. An overview is provided of Bakunin’s criticism of Hegel and his followers in Statism and Anarchy. Finally, Bakunin’s bitter polemic against his one-time friend Karl Marx is examined.

It is striking how many of Shakespeare’s erotic plays have war either as their setting or are born out of a recent state of violent conflict. Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra fall most clearly into the former camp, but think also of comedies like Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where eros emerges from a newly forged peace only to constitute a new battleground of its own. This chapter probes the conjunction of war and eros that appears in almost half of Shakespeare’s plays, first through a broad survey of his corpus and then through studies of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Troilus and Cressida, and Romeo and Juliet. It argues that, far from merely contingent, theatrical conjunctions, Shakespeare provides us a deep conceptual study of the connection between eros and violence, both the potential violence of sexuality and the unsettling underlying sexuality of war.

Remembering is also the theme of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) but of a different kind than Schelling’s. It is not of a cosmic event; nor does it yield a theogony. The issue for Hegel is rather the actualization of the historical human individual and of humanity accordingly, and the remembering is of how being rational affects an individual’s relation to nature. At origin this relation is worked out unconsciously. It is visibly reflected, however, in the sense of self-identity into which an individual is historically born, just as one is born into a family. To retrieve the source of the identity, thus to make it deliberately one’s own – by the same token to make of nature a work of intelligence – is the factor that motivates experience. Chapter 5 contrasts Schelling’s and Hegel’s respective ideas of history. It then proceeds with a detailed examination of the Phenomenology up to the section on Religion. It argues that, while in some ways a work of conceptual fiction, the Phenomenology must nonetheless have historical anchoring and logical significance. It also underscores the debt Hegel owes to Fichte that makes him quite different from Schelling.

Religion is for Hegel the language of a community about itself. Its practices and beliefs reflect the sense of self-identity that animates the community’s members, and, since that identity is a product of reason, they also reflect the level of explicit rationality the community has achieved. Religion, however, is not the same as rational knowledge. Evil, for Hegel, is not a cosmic event as it is for Schelling but a historical and eminently individual act – in effect, the product of reason doing violence to nature. Religion’s specific function is thus one of reconciliation, a function that assumes different forms depending on historical circumstances and the advent of self-aware rationality. Nonetheless, reconciling cannot be the same as understanding reconciliation. Chapter 6 contrasts religion in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. It returns to the theme of feeling of Chapter 1, for feeling is an experience of identity. It also examines Hegel’s interpretation of the Christian story of incarnation and redemption as an imaginative portrayal of incarnate rationality. It then again returns to Chapter 1 by interpreting Hegel’s Logic, the science of this rationality, as an extension of Kant’s doctrine of the categories but without the classical metaphysical presuppositions still encumbering that latter.

I argue that Hegel’s immaterialist metaphysics provides a viable alternative to those dissatisfied with a “disenchanted” materialism. I defend a “minimalist critique of materialism.” I show that what Hegel criticizes in materialism is not the reality of matter, but only its ultimate reality. I show that he maintains a “minimalist conception of immateriality.” I argue that he operates with a very specific notion of matter referring to mutually independent entities formed by means of external action upon them. So he is referring to entities that are not material, i.e. that are not mutually interrelated and/or are formed by means of their internal activity upon themselves. Adopting this “minimalist conception,” Hegel thinks, changes how we see the way things are. He thus starts to speak about how all things strive toward some ultimate immateriality. This is the “transformational conception of immateriality.” While this part of Hegel’s critique is problematic, I contend that Hegel’s extravagances are just his way of incorporating an expansive, “re-enchanted” conception of nature that allows material reality to exist alongside immaterial entities as Hegel conceives them.