Brownlee, Timothy. Review of G. W. F. Hegel, THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. NDPR (June 2011).

Hegel, G. W.  The Science of Logic.  Ed. and trans. George di Giovanni.  Cambridge: CUP, 2010.

The Science of Logic, Hegel's second major work, is a notoriously difficult book. Hegel's prose is dense, and his subject matter is onerous. At the same time, Hegel understands his project in the Logic to be a significant one. Tracing the development of a series of concepts out of "thinking" itself, the Logic is supposed to provide the core of ontology and, in some sense, to mark a renewal of metaphysics after Kant. In this new English translation of Hegel's Science of Logic, George di Giovanni has produced a readable and scholarly edition of Hegel's text that should replace A. V. Miller's translation as the standard one.

This volume is the second in Cambridge University Press's new 'Cambridge Hegel Translations' series, under the general editorship of Michael Baur. (The third, a new translation of the Encyclopedia Logic, has since appeared.) Di Giovanni's edition and translation set a high standard for future volumes. He augments his translation with extensive introductory and supplementary materials. He helpfully documents the history of the publication of the Logic and traces the development of Hegel's thinking about logic and its relation to metaphysics in the Jena writings of the first decade of the nineteenth century. He situates his own interpretation of the Logic in relation to Hegel's idealist predecessors, stressing in particular its relation to the work of Kant and Fichte. He also provides a summary account of the development of the argument of the text itself and relates this account to other prominent interpretations of the text, both historical and contemporary. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23830.

Howley, Kerry. "Hegel Hits the Frontier." THE DAILY May 19, 2011

In 1856, a Prussian immigrant named Henry Conrad Brokmeyer retreated deep into the Missouri woods with a gun, a dog and a copy of Science of Logic, a philosophical text by Georg Hegel. Alone with Hegel’s thoughts over the next two years, Brokmeyer became convinced that this abstruse work by a German 25 years dead could save the nation from the very divisions about to lead it into civil war. It didn’t, of course, and Missouri, a border state, would not escape a gruesome guerrilla war. But a decade later, Brokmeyer and a friend named William Torrey Harris convinced the elite of St. Louis that Hegel’s work was central to the recovery of their country, their city and their own lives. The Civil War, Brokmeyer said, was part of a dialectical process. In what turned out to be one of the oddest episodes in the history of American thought, a group of men known as the St. Louis Hegelians declared that the direction of history led to eastern Missouri.

Brokmeyer sold a warped Hegelianism just flattering enough to believe: History had a direction. That direction was west, from Europe to the United States. History would unfold in the direction of a world-historical city, culminating in a flowering of freedom under a rational state. While Hegel had assumed Europe to be the place to which all of history pointed — when he said “west,” he meant from Asia to Europe — Brokmeyer said history would keep on rolling across the Atlantic, toward the biggest American city west of the Mississippi: St. Louis. . . .

Visit: http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/05/19/051911-opinions-history-hegelians-howley-1-3/.

Inwood, Michael. Review of Robert B. Pippin, HEGEL ON SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. NDPR (May 2011).

Pippin, Robert B.  Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit.   Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011.

Hegel's account of self-consciousness in chapter IV of his Phenomenology of Spirit is the most influential, and perhaps the most insightful, passage in his works. Yet, like Plato's allegory of the cave, it seems to point in too many directions to allow a consensus about its meaning. In this book, Robert Pippin produces an interpretation that attempts to accommodate all the elements in Hegel's engaging narrative: desire, life, encounter with another self-consciousness, struggle to the death, and recognition. Hegel is commonly supposed to be giving a quasi-Hobbesian account of the transition from a state of nature to a state of society. But Pippin's Hegel begins where Kant left off.

Kant had argued that the conceptual contribution that we make to our sensory input enables us to be more than the sentient perceivers that animals supposedly are and to make perceptual judgements about objective states of affairs. We humans can stand back from our representations, make judgements based on them, and wonder whether they are really veridical. Similarly, we can stand back from our desires and emotions and ask whether they are appropriate and justifiable. We are 'self-conscious' creatures, not simply absorbed in our current passing state of consciousness. Because of this we advance claims about putatively objective states of affairs. But to make such claims, Pippin argues, is to claim an authority or entitlement to do so, and this claim needs to be justified. This is why Hegel introduces other self-conscious creatures, who were neglected by Kant in his theoretical philosophy, though not in his practical philosophy. One's authority to advance objective claims needs to be recognised or acknowledged by another self-conscious being; the claims themselves must be supported by reasons presented to the other self-consciousness and defended against their challenges, defended, if need be, to the death. Hegel is more aware than Kant that a self-conscious being is an embodied living creature as well as a bare 'I think', but it must be willing to risk the loss of its biological life in the defence of its objective authority. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23672.

Das, Saitya Brata. "Friedrich Schelling." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY March 14, 2011.

F. W. J. von Schelling is one of the great German philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th Century. Some historians and scholars of philosophy have classified him as a German Idealist, along with J. G. Fichte and G. W. F. Hegel. Such classifications obscure rather than illuminate the importance and singularity of Schelling’s place in the history of philosophy. This is because the dominant and most often limited understanding of Idealism as systematic metaphysics of the Subject is applicable more to Hegel’s philosophy than Schelling’s. While initiating the Post-Kantian Idealism of the Subject, Schelling went on to exhibit in his later works the limit and dissolution of such a systemic metaphysics of the Subject. Therefore, the convenient label of Schelling as one German Idealist amongst others ignores the singularity of Schelling’s philosophy and the complex relationship he had with the movement of German Idealism.

The real importance of Schelling’s later works lies in the exposure of the dominant systemic metaphysics of the Subject to its limit rather than in its confirmation. In this way, the later works of Schelling demand from the students and philosophers of German Idealism a re-assessment of the notion of German Idealism itself. In that sense, the importance and influence of Schelling’s philosophy has remained “untimely.” In the wake of Hegelian rational philosophy that was the official philosophy of that time, Schelling’s later works was not influential and fell onto deaf ears. Only in the twentieth century when the question of the legitimacy of the philosophical project of modernity had come to be the concern for philosophers and thinkers, did Schelling’s radical opening of philosophy to “post-metaphysical” thinking receive renewed attention.

This is because it is perceived that the task of philosophical thinking is no longer the foundational act of the systematic metaphysics of the Subject. In the wake of “end of philosophy,” the philosophical task is understood to be the inauguration of new thinking beyond metaphysics. In this context, Schelling has again come into prominence as someone who in the heyday of German Idealism has opened up the possibility of a philosophical thinking beyond the closure of the metaphysics of the Subject. The importance of Schelling for such post-metaphysical thinking is rightly emphasized by Martin Heidegger in his lecture on Schelling of 1936. In this manner Heidegger prepares the possibility of understanding Schelling’s works in an entirely different manner. Heidegger’s reading of Schelling in turn has immensely influenced the Post-Heideggerian French philosophical turn to the question of “the exit from metaphysics.” But this Post-Structuralist and deconstructive reading of Schelling is not the only reception of Schelling. Philosophers like Jürgen Habermas, whose doctorate work was on Schelling, would like to insist on the continuation of the philosophical project of modernity, and yet attempt to view reason beyond the instrumental functionality of reason at the service of domination and coercion. Schelling is seen from this perspective as a “post-metaphysical” thinker who has widened the concept of reason beyond its self-grounding projection. During the last half of the last century, Schelling’s works have tremendously influenced the post-Subject oriented philosophical discourses. During recent times, Schelling scholarship has remarkably increased both in the Anglo-American context and the Continental philosophical context. . . .

Visit: http://www.iep.utm.edu/schellin/.

Cutrofello, Andrew. Review of Rebecca Comay, MOURNING SICKNESS. NDPR (May 2010).

Comay, Rebecca.  Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution.  Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010.

Rebecca Comay's insightful study of Hegel's philosophical reflections on the French Revolution clarifies Hegel's conception of the temporality of absolute knowing. On her account, absolute knowing is neither an atemporal intellectual intuition of the absolute nor the immediate self-presence of a persisting subject. It is, instead, a conceptual elaboration of the ubiquity of delay. This is not to say that thought is discursive in the Kantian sense of requiring the performance of temporal syntheses. The delay of the concept registered in absolute knowing is not due to the fact that concepts are second-order representations that succeed or postpone intuitions of objects. Absolute knowing represents thought as essentially belated (subsequent to events never apprehended and so unavailable for synthesis) and premature (prior to events whose essential, and therefore irreducible, futurity again makes them unavailable for synthesis). Acknowledging itself to be a Johnny-come-lately-and-early, spirit abandons previous conceptions of itself as a gathering subject of retentions and protentions (Self-certainty), or the gathered Da of a three-fold temporal ekstasis (Sittlichkeit). Terror, not anxiety, has taught it that time is out of joint. The moral impossibility of setting right a time disjoined by terror is brutally summarized by Lady Macbeth: "What's done cannot be undone." Despite the definitiveness of this hard, if banal, lesson, Hegel allows the confession of un-undoable evil to be answered -- not without a crucial delay (123) -- by an act of forgiveness that purports to undo past crime (146): "The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind" (129). This response marks, for Comay, the advent (in every sense of the term) of absolute knowing. Whether Hegel succeeds in reconciling Lady Macbeth's thesis with his own antithesis -- a veritable antinomy in Comay's juxtaposition of the two -- is the difficult question posed by Mourning Sickness.

As the title of her book indicates, Comay represents Hegel's philosophical response to the French Revolution in the vocabulary of psychoanalysis: trauma, repetition compulsion, mourning, melancholia, introjection, incorporation, etc. This approach is justified by the fact that the Phenomenology of Spirit prefigures (both conceptually and lexically) psychoanalytic descriptions of the experience of loss (96). Comay does not seek to psychologize Hegel's dialectical analyses of shapes of consciousness, but rather to bring out their "normative" significance (6). As she says of her guiding concept: "by 'trauma,' I don't mean anything psychological. . . . My interest is philosophical: to explore trauma as a modal, temporal, and above all a historical category" (4). This raises the stakes, inviting us to wonder not only about the philosophical significance of psychoanalytic concepts, but about what it might mean to absolve them of psychological significance. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23549.

"Hegel Now?," Department of Philosophy, Middlesex University, May 5, 2011.

Society is divided, and the social order is riddled with contradictions. Does Hegelian philosophy provide the basic method for understanding the way societies are structured by their own contradictions? Is it possible to be a Hegelian now? Could it even be necessary to be a Hegelian now? Or is it impossible to be a Hegelian, especially now? And what is a Hegelian? This workshop will assess the ongoing relevance of Hegelian thought for the 21st century.

Schedule

2.45 Welcome
3.00 Ali Alizadeh, ‘Why Hegel Now?’
4.00 Slavoj Zizek, ‘Is it Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today?’
6.00 Break
6.30 Katerina Deligiorgi, ‘Hegelian Individualism’.
8.00 Ian Jakobi, ‘The Lacerated Dialectic: On Madness and Subjectivity in Hegel's Encyclopaedia’
Inquiries: c.kerslake@mdx.ac.uk

Brandom, Robert. "Knowing and Representing: a Reading of Hegel’s Introduction to the PHENOMENOLOGY." Hegel Lectures, LMU Munich, May 30-June 1, 2011.

The philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel is a major focus of Robert Brandom's work. Brandom makes Hegel's thought accessible to analytic philosophy by developing a semantic interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In his Munich lectures, Brandom is going to present new texts on the "Introduction" of Hegel's Phenomenology for the first time.

• Monday, May 30, 2011, 18 h (LMU main building, room A 140):
  Lecture One: "Conceptual Realism and the Semantic Possibility of Knowledge"
• Tuesday, May 31, 2011, 18 h (LMU main building, room A 240):
  Lecture Two: "Representation and the Experience of Error"
• Wednesday, June 1, 2011, 18 h (LMU main building, room A 140):
  Lecture Three: "Determining Meaning and Truth: The Emergence of the New, True Object"

On Wednesday, June 1, from 10-12 h, Brandom is going to give an additional seminar, in which the topics of the lectures will be discussed. In order to participate in the seminar, please register with Kristina Maschek.

Visit: http://www.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de/lehreinheiten/philosophie_2/forschungsprojekte/society/english_version/lectures/index.html.

"Naturalism," Annual Conference, Hegel Society of Great Britain, University of Oxford, September 5-6, 2011.

This year's Hegel Society of Great Britain annual conference will be on the theme of Naturalism: Was Hegel a naturalist or an anti-naturalist and can he shed light onto how we think about these issues in philosophy today.

The speakers will be:

Will Dudley (Williams College) 'Hegel's Critical Naturalism'
Alexis Papazoglou (Cambridge) 'Hegel, the Space of Reasons and the Realm of Nature'
Paul Redding (Sydney) 'Hegel: Naturalist-leaning Forms of Idealism and Idealist-leaning Forms of Naturalism'
Sebastian Roedl (Basel) 'The Self-Determining Concept'
Alison Stone (Lancaster) 'Hegel, Philosophy of Nature and Naturalism'
Kenneth Westphal (UEA) 'Aspects of Philosophical Naturalism in Hegel's 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit'

For more information, contact Alexis Papazoglou on ajp83@cam.ac.uk.

Pub: Jeffrey High, et al., eds. WHO IS THIS SCHILLER NOW?

High, Jeffrey, Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers, eds.  Who Is This Schiller Now?  Essays on His Reception and Significance.  Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011.

The works of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) -- a dramatist and poet for the ages, one of Germany's first historians, and an important aesthetic theorist -- are among the best known of German and world literature. Schiller's explosive original artistry and feel for timely and enduring personal tragedy embedded in timeless sociohistorical conflicts remain the topic of lively academic debate. The essays in this volume address the many flashpoints and canonical shifts in the cyclically polarized reception of Schiller and his works, in pursuit of historical and contemporary answers to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's expression of frightened admiration in 1794: "Who is this Schiller?" The responses demonstrate pronounced shifts from widespread twentieth-century understandings of Schiller: the overwhelming emphasis here is on Schiller the cosmopolitan realist, and little or no trace is left of the ultimately untenable view of Schiller as an abstract idealist who turned his back on politics. Ehrhard Bahr, Matthew Bell, Frederick Burwick, Jennifer Driscoll Colosimo, Bernd Fischer, Gail K. Hart, Fritz Heuer, Hans H. Hiebel, Jeffrey L. High, Walter Hinderer, Paul E. Kerry, Erik Knoedler, Elisabeth Krimmer, Maria del Rosario Acosta López, Laura Ann Macor, Dennis F. Mahoney, Nicholas Martin, John A. McCarthy, Yvonne Nilges, Norbert Oellers, Peter Pabisch, David Pugh, T. J. Reed, Wolfgang Riedel, Jörg Robert, Ritchie Robertson, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Henrik Sponsel.

Visit: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1571134883/ref=pe_5050_19213940_snp_dp.

Pub: Jeremy Dunham, et al. IDEALISM: THE HISTORY OF A PHILOSOPHY.

Dunham, Jeremy, Ian Hamilton Grant, and Sean Watson.  Idealism: the History of a Philosophy.  Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2011.

Contents:

Introduction: Why Idealism Matters Part 1: Ancient Idealism 1. Parmenides and the Birth of Ancient Idealism 2. Plato and Neoplatonism Part 2: Early Modern Idealism 3. Phenomenalism and Idealism I: Descartes and Malebranche 4. Phenomenalism and Idealism II: Leibniz and Berkeley Part 3: German Idealism 5. Immanuel Kant: Cognition, Freedom and Teleology 6. Fichte and the System of Freedom 7. Philosophy of Nature and the Birth of Absolute Idealism: Schelling 8. Hegel and Hegelianism: Mind, Nature and Logic Part 4: British Idealism 9. British Absolute Idealism: From Green to Bradley 10. Personal Idealism: From Ward to McTaggart 11. Naturalist Idealism: Bernard Bosanquet 12. Criticisms and Persistent Misconceptions of Idealism 13. Actual Occasions and Eternal Objects: The Process Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. Part 5: Contemporary Idealisms 14. Autopoiesis: Idealist Biology I 15. Autonomous Agents: Idealist Biology II 16. Contemporary Philosophical Idealisms

Cfp: "Hegel and Capitalism," 22nd Biennial Meeting, Hegel Society of America, DePaul University, October 5-7, 2012.

The conference will cover all aspects of the theme “Hegel and Capitalism,” broadly understood. We invite papers that address this theme historically, systematically, or with reference to current questions and issues. Papers that interpret, engage, or apply Hegel are welcome. Papers that investigate the conference topic in new ways are encouraged.

Submitted papers are limited to 6,000 words, and should be formatted for blind review and accompanied by an abstract of no more than 300 words. Papers must be submitted at this length and later adjustments must remain within this limit. Papers submitted must be complete essays; proposals are not acceptable. All papers should be in English. Although papers presented at meetings of the Hegel Society of America are usually published as a collection of essays, publication cannot be guaranteed. By submitting a paper, however, an author of a paper accepted for the program agrees to reserve publication for the HSA proceedings. Final decision as to publication remains dependent on the results of peer and publisher review.

Please send papers to: Andrew Buchwalter, Program Chair, abuchwal@unf.edu.

Cfp: "German Idealism Today," Sixth international Conference, Nordic Network for German Idealism (NNGI), Aarhus University, October 31-November 2, 2011.

Speakers:

Marcus Gabriel (Universität Bonn)
Sebastian Gardner (University College London)
Arne Grøn (University of Copenhagen)
Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Stephen Houlgate (University of Warwick)
Axel Hutter (Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität, München)
Terry Pinkard (Georgetown University)
Robert Pippin (University of Chicago)
Sebastian Rödl (Universität Basel)
Camilla Serck-Hansen (University of Oslo)
Günther Zöller (Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität, München)
Alenka Zupančič (Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana)

Visit: http://nngi.org/?p=434.

Speight, Allen. Review of Benjamin Rutter, HEGEL ON THE MODERN ARTS. NDPR (April 2011).

Rutter, Benjamin.  Hegel on the Modern Arts.  Cambridge: CUP, 2010.

Hegel's aesthetics has, especially since Henrich and Danto, often been viewed as heralding the "end of art." Those who have taken pains to look more carefully at the text of Hegel's Lectures on Fine Arts have rightly pointed out that Hegel's claims seem to be more precise than this -- that Hegel does not in fact declare the "end of art" in the sense of its death but rather insists that (in T. M. Knox's translation) "the form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit." The modern aesthetic issue of concern for an Hegelian then, presumably, is not a matter of art's ceasing to exist (although Hegel does sometimes make it sound as though he might think this is not an impossibility -- as for example, when he huffs that with the German poet Jean Paul "art actually ends"), but whether art can matter any longer for those of us who inhabit a modern, rationalistic and bourgeois age.

But those who have attempted to rescue a Hegel whose aesthetics might still be philosophically relevant for at least some of the significant developments in art and literature since his death in 1831 have not always taken up the broader philosophical question about how and why art can still matter (or even -- as is the bolder claim of this book -- be indispensable) for Hegel. And Hegel's defenders as well as his critics have also had the further limitation of resting their claims about what Hegel actually said in his lectures on what remains to this day an unclear textual basis. The most widely used published English version of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics is Knox's two-volume Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, but Knox relied on an edition prepared by Hegel's student H. G. Hotho, and contemporary scholars have been at pains to use the existing transcriptions of those lectures in an effort to pare off the authentic words of Hegel himself from the accretions of his disciple.

English-speaking philosophers interested in Hegel's various Berlin lecture series on topics in the philosophy of spirit have had access for years to good translations of the various Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, thanks to the editorial work of Jaeschke, Hodgson, and others, but there exists to this day no such opportunity for those interested in Hegel's aesthetics. (The situation is in fact worse than this, since not even all of the aesthetics lecture series transcripts have been published yet in German.)

One of the best features of Benjamin Rutter's new book on Hegel's aesthetics is that he has taken care to examine the development of Hegel's views about modern art over the series of lectures Hegel gave on the topic during the 1820s. The conclusions Rutter draws based on his textual work with the German transcripts of the lectures -- that Hegel, for example, was more pessimistic about art's role in modern life in the early part of that decade but tended to soften his views in the final lecture series -- are, moreover, importantly situated in the context of a fine-grained account of Hegel's treatment of various achievements within the artistic genres that he thought mattered most in modernity (certain forms of lyric poetry and Dutch genre painting, especially). . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23290.

Snow, Dale E. Review of Yolanda Estes, et al., eds. J. G. FICHTE AND THE ATHEISM DISPUTE. NDPR (March 2011).

Estes, Yolanda, and Curtis Bowman, eds.  J. G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute (1798-1800).  London: Ashgate, 2010.

The atheism dispute (Atheismusstreit) riveted all of learned Germany in 1799, and its consequences reverberated for many more years. The precipitating event seems curiously out of proportion to the response it engendered: Fichte, who was co-editor of the Philosophisches Journal, agreed to print an essay by F. K. Forberg entitled "On the Concept of Religion." Fearing that readers could misunderstand Forberg's ideas as an expression of his views, Fichte included an essay of his own, "On the Ground of Our belief in a Divine World-Governance." As a direct result, the journal was put under an edict of confiscation; Fichte was accused of atheism, officially censured by the authorities, and ultimately resigned from his professorship at the University of Jena.

It was in all likelihood the anonymous publication of a widely circulated pamphlet, "A Father's Letter to his Student Son about Fichte's and Forberg's Atheism," which initially drew public attention to the essays. The editors describe it accurately as "a maudlin tract" (7). It contains a litany of accusations of the ways in which Fichte's and Forberg's ideas were certain to result in corruption of the youth: they stood for atheism, political rebelliousness, and even moral licentiousness. This unfavorable publicity was more than sufficient to touch off a firestorm of criticism of Fichte, his philosophy, and his person. Fichte thought of and presented himself as Kant's heir, and for many Kant's signature achievement had been the overturning of the traditional relationship between faith and reason. This made it plausible to quickly extend the suspicion of atheism to Fichte's best-known work, The Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) as well. Numerous publications for and against Fichte appeared in rapid succession, including F. H Jacobi's notorious "open letter to Fichte," which declared Fichte's philosophy to be tantamount to "nihilism." This is thought to be the first use of this term. The larger significance of the atheism dispute, then, can be seen in the way in which it led into a debate over the values of the German Enlightenment itself, much as the pantheism controversy of the 1780s had done.

For both Fichte's contemporaries and today's scholars, the atheism dispute and its aftermath threatened to overshadow all the other achievements of Fichte's Jena period. A recent remark of Allen Wood's is typical of this view: "The 1790s were for Fichte (and modern philosophy) a brief era of astonishing philosophical achievement. But the tale as a whole is far darker and more troubling, even tragic." Daniel Breazeale presents a more measured account in his Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings; however, his book, focused as it is on the Jena Wissenschaftslehre, contains none of the atheism controversy texts. Thus there is a real need for the collection and translation of the relevant materials necessary for the comprehension of this extraordinary episode in the history of philosophy. Even in German, it is difficult to find a readily accessible comparable compilation.

The present volume is a near-masterpiece of careful reconstruction and contextualization of the unfolding of the atheism dispute as reflected in the essays, letters, edicts, and petitions which combine to tell this remarkable story. All of the texts in this volume are appearing in English translation for the first time. The only major atheism controversy text which previously existed in English translation is Jacobi's "open letter" to Fichte. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22911.

Brownlee, Timonthy. Review of David V. Ciavatta, SPIRIT, THE FAMILY AND THE UNCONSCIOUS IN HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY. NDPR (March 2011).

Ciavatta, David V.  Spirit, the Family, and the Unconscious in Hegel's Philosophy.  Albany: SUNY Press, 2009.

In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel famously argues that self-consciousness depends essentially on the recognition of others and that active engagement in practices of recognizing and being recognized by others is a necessary condition for being an agent or a self. In recent years, interpreters have worked to couple Hegel's early treatment of reciprocal recognition with the account of rational institutions that Hegel offers in The Philosophy of Right by arguing that recognition in fact requires institutional mediation. One of the primary virtues of David V. Ciavatta's Spirit, the Family, and the Unconscious in Hegel's Philosophy is that it provides a concrete account of how one particular institution, that of the family, provides an enduring framework for recognition between subjects. Indeed, Ciavatta contends that the family constitutes, for Hegel, the "most foundational, comprehensive . . . form of recognition" structuring and informing our experience of ourselves, others, and the world, and he demonstrates that this recognition is importantly unique, insofar as it is primarily unreflective and unconscious, the product more of affective relations than of reflective endorsement. (2). Ciavatta's book will be of interest to students of Hegel's practical philosophy and German idealism, to phenomenologists (especially those concerned with embodiment, intersubjective relations and sociality, and identity), and to those with interests in the intersections between philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Methodologically, Ciavatta's work falls within a long phenomenological tradition of interpreting Hegel, and he stresses "Hegel's unswerving commitment to describing the concrete, lived experience of human practical existence on its own terms" (2).  Thematically, he demonstrates that Hegel shares the view, common among phenomenologists, that the unreflective and affective dimensions of our experience disclose "certain truths about our relation to the world that can only be appreciated in [an] unreflective, lived way" (10). At the same time, Ciavatta argues that, in place of a transcendental ego, Hegel conceives of the self who experiences as essentially social and, in fact, constituted through concrete relations of recognition. By consequence, he stresses that, for Hegel, intersubjective relations inform not only our identities as selves, but even our most basic perceptual experiences. Drawing on the account of mastery and slavery in the Phenomenology as exemplary, Ciavatta claims that the slave's "very contact with the concrete world is informed and contextualized on all sides by the presence of the master, and, in particular, by his recognition of the master as the only true center of experience." (34) It is in this sense that "spirit," which Ciavatta takes to consist in "the concrete practices of recognition that join selves concretely to one another," indelibly informs and shapes our experiences of ourselves, others, and the world (37).  However, Ciavatta stresses that these enduring patterns of recognition themselves depend essentially on unreflective habits and customs, which are expressed just as much in immediate affects and feelings as they are in explicit and reflected beliefs and convictions. Ciavatta therefore argues that the habitual and customary domain of "ethical life" (Sittlichkeit) informs not merely our practical relations to one another, but also our own sense of self and our relationship to the world we encounter through perception. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22969.

Cfp: "In the Aftermath of German Idealism," Bergische Universität Wuppertal, May 13-14, 2011.

Keynote speakers:

• Markus Gabriel, Universität Bonn, author of Der Mensch im Mythos and Transcendental Ontology(forthcoming by Continuum)
• Jean-Christophe Goddard, Université de Toulouse le Mirail, author of La philosophie fichtéenne de la vie: Le transcendantal et le pathologique
• Arnaud François, Université de Toulouse le Mirail, author of Bergson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche: Volonté et réalité
• Sean McGrath, Memorial University of Newfoundland, author of The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (forthcoming by Routledge)
• Devin Shaw, Zane University of Ottawa, author of Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art

Since the philosophical upheaval caused by Kant's transcendental philosophy, the status of what would later be called “German Idealism” has been anything but clear. On the one hand, the efforts of the major representatives of post-Kantianism only intensified the intrinsic ambiguity of the founding gesture of the tradition. Instead of simply interpreting or expanding Kant, yet all the while attempting to radicalize his original breakthrough, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel developed surprisingly different and opposing systems. On the other hand, the 19th- and 20th-century reception of Hegelianism would have another decisive effect, which would in its own way obfuscate the signification of German Idealism by drastically altering our perception of the tradition as a whole. Not only was Hegel thought to be the culmination of the operative logic of German idealism, which would for a long time prevent us from understanding the works of Fichte and Schelling in and of themselves, but there was also a primordial urge to immanently rethink Hegelian dialectics from the standpoint of historical finitude while being faithful to its fundamental insights, arguing for the implicit and irreducible potential still lurking in this movement.

However, the history of German idealism did not in any way end there. In the 20th century we have seen seen a countless number of virulent attacks against “traditional” metaphysics arise as different philosophical schools demanded us to give up “dead” and “outdated” notions like system and totality, German Idealism often being seen the as the epitome of excessive, unbridled reason. Yet, in the face of these so-called “devastating” critiques, classical German philosophy has not been sentenced to death and banished to the abyssal forgetfulness of a forever lost past. Not only has there been an intense increase of secondary literature in the past decades, but a multitude of contemporary philosophers are returning to this moment in order to develop their own thought.

The status of German Idealism remains more ambiguous and uncertain than ever: even two centuries after its emergence, we find ourselves – still or again – in the aftermath of German Idealism and feel its effects deep within the internal pulsations of philosophy itself.  Therefore, the goal of this conference is to open up an space within which one approach the reception of German Idealism and address its philosophical heritage. The unifying theme will be the following constellation of questions: Why do we constantly go back to German Idealism and cannot simply rid ourselves one and for all of its fundamental concepts? What could German Idealism teach us today? Are there still non-cultivated resources lurking within the thought of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling? Are we only able to unearth these resources today by passing through their internal and external critiques? Should we take the risk and plunge headfirst into the tradition in attempting to reactualize it?

Proposed topics are (but in no way limited to):

- The immediate reception of German Idealism (Jacobi, Reinhold, Schulze, Maïmon, Marx, the Schellingian, Feuerbachian, Kierkegaardian, Schopenhauerian or Marxist critique of Hegel)
- The tole of concepts such as “finitude,” “system,” “totality,” “liberty” or “subjectivity” in German Idealism and its reception
- The category of contingence in Schellingian and Hegelian dialectics
- Contemporary rereadings of Hegel (Frankfurt School, Butler, Jameson, Malabou, Nancy, Pippin, Žižek)
- The current resurgence of Schelling (Grant, Gabriel)
- The appropriation of Hegel by representatives of analytical philosophy searching for a new grounding for epistemology (McDowell and Brandom)
- Critique of the notion of history and post-Hegelian philosophies of history
- Contemporary usage of German Idealism in practical philosophy
- Critiques of German Idealism from within different philosophical movements (phenomenology, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze – and so on unto infinity)
- New interpretations of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel

Send a short abstract (200-400 words) for a 20-30 minute presentation to be given in English, French or German to Joseph Carew (jstephencarew@gmail.com) and Daniel Pucciarelli (arelli@gmail.com) by the 15th of April.

LaZella, Andrew. Review of Jon Stewart, IDEALISM AND EXISTENTIALISM. NDPR (February 2011).

Stewart, Jon.  Idealism and Existentialism: Hegel and Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century European Philosophy.  London: Continuum, 2010.

The world of Continental philosophy has been shaped by two irreconcilable schools: German idealism on the one hand and phenomenology/existentialism on the other. If they can be called a tradition at all, it is not one of shared inheritance, but of continued revolt. Phenomenology/existentialism disdains German idealism's goal of seeking systematic totality insofar as it loses sight of the lived-experience of the individual human being. True, the idealist would argue that such lived-experience has not been lost, but preserved, albeit in a higher form and according to its immanent rational structure. For phenomenology/existentialism, however, such rational preservation renders inert and lifeless the very dynamism and spontaneity that characterized lived-experience in the first place. The distinction between the two can be simplified to various sets of irreconcilable dichotomies: systematicity vs. individuality, rational necessity vs. freedom, and so on.

This is the misconceived caricature that Jon Stewart's Idealism and Existentialism seeks to shatter. In this work, Stewart challenges this purported truism of irreconcilable antagonists by displaying the wealth of factors the two schools share, even if not always with the same intentions or toward the same results. The text is divided into three parts: The first covers Hegel and German idealism, exploring myths surrounding Hegel as an "arch-rationalist" in addition to more technical studies on the Phenomenology of Spirit. The second part takes up the relation between Hegelian idealism and the forms of proto-existentialism found in Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, targeting points of contact between supposed antagonists. The third part turns to a study of existentialism proper, with particular emphasis on the thought of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.

For reasons to be discussed below, the thesis proposed in the introduction does little to unite this work into an integrated whole, and instead the chapters remain a series of loosely related studies. Stewart himself notes: "While the individual chapters each pursue their own goals with respect to specific texts or concepts, they are united in their attempt to reveal in one way or another the long shadow cast by Kant and Hegel over the subsequent history of European thought" (2). At times, the thesis shines through the individualized studies. With all but one chapter having been published previously, however, these stand-alone studies only indirectly reinforce each other to form a unified project. Although various elements of the text succeed, the project of bringing the two traditions closer together remains underdeveloped, making for a somewhat loosely stitched-together patchwork whose overall contribution could be enhanced by greater communication among the chapters themselves. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22810.

Gauthier, Jeffrey A. Review of Kimberley Hutchings, et al., eds. HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY AND FEMINIST THOUGHT. NDPR (February 2010).

Hutchings, Kimberley, and Tuija Pulkkinen, eds.  Hegel's Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone?.  London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.

Appearing some fifteen years after Patricia Mills's groundbreaking Feminist Interpretations of Hegel, this volume shows how far feminist scholarship on Hegel has progressed in that time. The anthology offers a diverse yet intersecting set of essays addressing both the significance of Hegel for feminist thought and the problems that his account of gender poses for feminists. While the earlier text brought together a set of previously published articles, Kimberley Hutchings and Tuija Pulkkinen's anthology consists almost entirely of new scholarship (only two articles were previously published, and only one before 2009). Moreover, with most of the contributors writing from a clearly continental approach to philosophy, and most having also been participants in two conferences dedicated to Hegel and feminist philosophy in 2003 and 2006, the new volume has a thematic unity that was lacking in the earlier anthology. The book is divided into two equal parts. The five essays of Part I engage the broad question of the relevance of Hegel for feminism, and those in Part II offer frameworks for interpreting Hegel's specific writings on women and gender in the Phenomenology of Spirit and Elements of the Philosophy of Right. The book concludes with the transcription of a brief e-mail discussion among Hutchings, Pulkkinen, Nancy Bauer, and Alison Stone on the significance of Hegel for feminist politics. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22809.

Di Giovanni, George. Review of Karin de Boer, ON HEGEL. NDPR (January 2011).

de Boer, Karin.  On Hegel: the Sway of the Negative.  London: Palgrave, 2010.

Though not large in size (200 pages in normal format discounting end-notes and general apparatus), this book defends a complex thesis that requires it to range far and wide over the whole Hegelian corpus. The title, indefinite as it is ("On Hegel"), and the aphorism of the subtitle ("The Sway of the Negative"), already signals the broadness of the book's reach and the complexity of the thesis underpinning it. These traits make the book difficult to report on, but one can try none the less. The book is motivated by a critique of modernity that involves a critique of Hegel inasmuch as the latter's dialectical optimism is a hallmark of modernity. The critique is inspired by such figures as "Kierkegaard, Marx, Adorno, Heidegger, and Derrida," (5) at least to the extent that, like them, the author questions Hegel's principle of "absolute negativity." However, unlike these mentors, who failed to do justice to the strength of Hegel's thought, the author intends to capitalize on this strength by relying on a suggestion, which she finds in Hegel's early Essay on Natural Law (1803), that would limit the negative to its more tragic aspects. Hegel's is only a suggestion. As the author clearly recognizes, in the same essay Hegel also advances the more speculative idea of "absolute negativity" to which he is driven because of systematic requirements (26-27). None the less, it is on this more limited suggestion of a "tragic negative," and the entanglements to which it gives rise in concreto, that the author pins her hopes for an understanding of the dynamics of the contemporary world. As she says, "Nothing prevents us from . . . converting this very entanglement into a basic philosophical principle" (28).

Accordingly, the book is a reflection on all aspects of Hegel's system that exploits, while at the same time criticizing and limiting, Hegel's leading idea of the "negative." The book unfolds in ten chapters -- the shortest 7 pages, the longest 22 -- that follow on the whole the sequence of the Encyclopedia. It is Logic, however, and the conceptual problems that it poses, that control the book's development from beginning to end. For the author, contrary to what she takes to be the tendency of post-analytical Anglophone literature on Hegel to privilege the Phenomenology (the same, I add, could be said of the post-war French scene) believes (rightly so, in my opinion) that the capital work of Hegel, the one that holds his whole system together, is precisely the Logic. Chapter 1 presents what the author believes to be "Hegel's early account of tragedy" (7). Chapters 3 to 4 are a study of the Logic, while Chapters 5 to 8 relate the author's interpretation of the Logic to the rest of the System ("Circularity," "Nature," "Language," "Teleology"). In Chapter 9, the author finally turns to History. "Drawing on the perspective developed in the preceding chapters," the aim here is "to bring out the tragic nature of conflicts such as those between universality and particularity, freedom and power, the individual and the community, or progress and tradition" (8). . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22230.

"Hegel and Hegel's God." THE PHILOSOPHER'S ZONE November 27, 2010.

This week, in another trek through the luxuriant and fascinating jungle that is the thought of one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, we turn to Hegel's god and look at Hegel as a rational mystic. Our guest again is Robert M. Wallace, a philosopher best known for his book Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom and God, and a man with a keen interest in philosophical mysticism. Liberal theologians during the last century and a half have wanted to articulate a conception of God that could satisfy people's spiritual longings without conflicting with Darwinian evolution and other well-established scientific discoveries. Robert Wallace believes that Hegel had already done this. . . .

Listen here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2010/3077690.htm.