Yoemans, Christopher. Review of ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES, PART 1: SCIENCE OF LOGIC. NDPR (July 2011).

Hegel, G. W. F.  Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part I: Science of Logic.  Ed. and trans. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom.  Cambridge: CUP, 2010.

This new translation of what is commonly known as the Encyclopedia Logic is the third volume in the series of Cambridge Hegel Translations under the general editorship of Michael Bauer. It is a readable, accurate and sometimes surprisingly elegant translation with a minimum of editorial apparatus that presents the work as the "basic outline" that it is.

As the full title suggests, the Encyclopedia Logic is the first part of Hegel's systematic but condensed presentation of his mature philosophy, which is followed by two additional parts covering the philosophies of nature and spirit (Geist). Mostly the Encyclopedia Logic covers the same ground as his earlier (and much larger) Science of Logic, though in a much more schematic form and sometimes in a slightly different order. But it also includes an extensive section -- almost 90 pages in this edition -- entitled the "Preliminary Conception", in which Hegel provides a historical introduction to his philosophy beginning with ancient Greek philosophy and continuing on through empiricism and Kant. This is the best introduction to his thought that Hegel himself wrote, both because of its relative brevity and the clarity of the historical references as compared to his official introduction, the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. It also includes the best short discussion of Hegel's understanding of the dialectical nature of reason (§§80-2). The Encyclopedia is very much an outline, with condensed presentations of the crucial steps that were intended to provide a framework for Hegel's students on which they could weave the examples, allusions, and arguments of his lectures. As compared to the Science of Logic, the Encyclopedia Logic often appears to present what animators call the extremes without the in-between frames that show how they are connected. This volume includes selections from the notes of Hegel's students (the Additions or Zusätze) that provide very helpful examples and connections to other elements of Hegel's system. The Encyclopedia went through three different versions under Hegel's own revisions, and this translation is from the last edition of 1830.

The present volume may very naturally be compared with two other (relatively) recent translations, the translation of the Encyclopedia Logic by Geraets, Suchting and Harris (hereinafter "GSH"), and George di Giovanni's translation of the Science of Logic that precedes the present volume in the Cambridge series. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24778/?id=24333

Cfp: Hegelian Topics in Aesthetics, EVENTAL AESTHETICS 1.1 (forthcoming).

Evental Aesthetics is an international, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives on art and aesthetics. We are dedicating EA's inaugural issue to Hegelian Topics in Aesthetics.

For more information about the journal and for submission guidelines, please see:

http://eventalaesthetics.net/inaugural-issue/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cfp: "Freedom," Annual Conference, International Hegel Association, Stuttgardt, June 22-25, 2011.

As every six years, the International Hegel Association will hold its traditional conference in Stuttgart in June 2011, bringing together philosophers from all over the world to discuss central issues of Hegel's thought in the context of contemporary research. In 2011, the overarching topic will be "Freedom".

Speakers include (as of November 2010): David Bakhurst, Harald Bluhm, William Bristow, Daniel Brudney, Hauke Brunkhorst, Thomas Buchheim, Andrew Chitty, Giuseppe Duso, Dina Emundts, Franck Fischbach, Lisa Herzog, Gunnar Hindrichs, Axel Honneth, Stephen Houlgate, Rahel Jaeggi, Jean-Francois Kervégan, Andrea Kern, Rudolf Langthaler, Charles Larmore, Cardinal Karl Lehrmann, Marcus Llanque, Steven Lukes, Scott Meikle, Francesca Menegoni, Christoph Menke, Fred Neuhouser, Andrew Norris, Angelica Nuzzo, Claus Offe, Philip Pettit, Terry Pinkard, Michael Quante, Birgit Recki, Paul Redding, Peter Rohs, Michael Rosen, Sebastian Rödl, Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch, Sally Sedgwick, Martin Seel, Ludwig Siep, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, Robert Stern, Holm Tetens, Dieter Thomä, Peter van Inwagen, R. Jay Wallace, David Wellbery and Marcus Willaschek.

There will be 12 panels on: Freedom and First Nature; Freedom and Second Nature; Freedom and Determinism; Social and Individual Freedom; Freedom as Autonomy; Republican Freedom; Freedom and the Market; Freedom and Law; Liberation; Hegel's Philosophy of Right; Aesthetic Freedom and Religion of Freedom. Additionally, there will be a panel dedicated to discussion about translating Hegel chaired by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. There will also be an opportunity for younger scholars to present their work in three panels chaired by Andreas Arndt, Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Beatrice Longuenesse.

For further information, visit: http://www.hegel2011.de/.

"The Mystery of Hegel." THE PHILOSOPHER'S ZONE. November 20, 2010.

His thought was hugely influential and hugely difficult. The philosopher Bertrand Russell once described him as the single most difficult philosopher to understand. He was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Though he enjoyed relative fame during his lifetime, in the decades after his death in 1831, according to one writer, Hegel's ideas were treated with "a mixture of contempt, horror and indifference." But something happened during the 20th century that brought Hegel back into sight for philosophers and thinkers. This week on The Philosopher's Zone find out what that was.

Listen here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2010/3071671.htm.

Pub: Frederic Jameson, THE HEGEL VARIATIONS.

Jameson, Frederic. The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of the Spirit. London: Verso, 2010.

In this major new study, the philosopher and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson offers a new reading of Hegel’s foundational text Phenomenology of Spirit. In contrast to those who see the Phenomenology as a closed system ending with Absolute Spirit, Jameson’s reading presents an open work in which Hegel has not yet reconstituted himself in terms of a systematic philosophy (Hegelianism) and in which the moments of the dialectic and its levels have not yet been formalized. Hegel’s text executes a dazzling variety of changes on conceptual relationships, in terms with are never allowed to freeze over and become reified in purely philosophical named concepts. The ending, on the aftermath of the French Revolution, is interpreted by Jameson, contra Fukuyama’s “end of history,” as a provisional stalemate between the political and the social, which is here extrapolated to our own time.

Further information may be found here: http://www.versobooks.com/books/495-the-hegel-variations.

Morris, Michael. Review of Nectarios G. Limnatis, ed. THE DIMENSIONS OF HEGEL'S DIALECTIC. NDPR (September 2010).

Limnatis, Nectarios G., ed.  The Dimensions of Hegel's Dialectic.  London: Continuum, 2010.

In an apt description of the guiding purpose, intended audience, and intellectual context for this collection of essays, editor Nectarios G. Limnatis notes that, "despite the immense and steadily growing Hegel discussion, dialectic is not frequently addressed in a systematic and comprehensive way in the English speaking world" (3). Accordingly, this volume brings together a roughly equal number of contributions from European and American scholars, with the intention of fostering English-language discussion of this central but abstruse Hegelian topic. While some contributions directly connect this topic with recent trends in contemporary Anglophone philosophy, including themes from the works of Wilfred Sellars, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell, other essays situate Hegel's dialectic within more exotic traditions, including negative theology and Heideggerian discussions of onto-theology. Additionally, many essays provide helpful historical context, focusing on the relationship between Hegel's dialectic and various related themes in the works of Kant, Fichte, Hölderlin, Schelling, Reinhold, and Novalis.

This book implicitly raises an important question, one that highlights the significance of the essays it contains, while, at the same time, suggesting some specific challenges these essays must address. Limnatis's pointed observation raises the question: why has the dialectic received so little attention from Anglophone philosophers, particularly those steeped in the analytic tradition?

In part, the answer lies in the history of analytic philosophy itself. If we ignore the role played by distinctly continental traditions in the formation of analytic philosophy, including the work of Frege and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, then we might say that analytic philosophy emerged from Russell and Moore's rejection of the British Hegelianism of their elders, the philosophical systems of F.H. Bradley and John McTaggart. Among other things, this involved the rejection of holism, the embrace of realism, and the insistence upon the role of formal systems and linguistic analysis as the primary means for resolving traditional philosophical problems. At least since Quine's "Two Dogmas," however, various kinds of holism have enjoyed a resurgence, and the dominance of rigidly formal, logical, and linguistic approaches to philosophical problems has greatly declined. Moreover, historical scholarship has suggested significant differences between Berkeley's idealism, with its Cartesian starting point, and the more complex and nuanced idealisms of Kant and Hegel, thus correcting certain simplistic conceptions of idealism that can be found in Bradley, McTaggert, and their detractors. Finally, the recent works of McDowell, and the reemergence of certain strands of pragmatism, as represented in the works of Sellars, Rorty, and Brandom, have suggested potential connections between contemporary concerns and the themes of Hegelian philosophy.

However, even if holism, idealism, and non-formal approaches to philosophy now enjoy a more prominent place in the Anglophone world, there remains a potential stumbling block at the heart of Hegel's philosophy: namely, the dialectic, along with Hegel's peculiar conception of the role that contradiction plays within thought and within the very structures of reality itself. It is clear, of course, that contradiction plays an important role in philosophical thought. Insofar as logical coherence provides a necessary -- if not sufficient -- condition for a true philosophical system, philosophical progress often involves both the discovery of latent contradictions within our pre-philosophical assumptions as well as the evaluation of various suggestions for removing these contradictions. If dialectic simply involved the discovery of contradiction within one system of thought and the development of a successor system that eliminates these contradictions, then it would be wholly unobjectionable. However, as many authors in this collection rightly emphasize, contradiction plays a far more complex role in Hegel's dialectic. On the traditional view of philosophical progress already presented, contradictions play a purely negative and ultimately contingent role. Their role is negative, for they merely indicate that we hold some false belief(s). Likewise, their role is contingent, for thought could, in principle, exist without them.

By contrast, contradiction plays a positive and essential role in Hegel's conception of thought, a role that apparently reflects the existence of contradictions in the basic structure of reality itself. Hegel's texts are filled with remarks like the following: "a consideration of everything that is shows that in its own self everything is in its self-sameness different from itself and self-contradictory."[1] Any serious interpretation of Hegel's texts must grapple with repeated claims of this sort. As one contributor to this volume, Dieter Wandschneider, pointedly notes: "Hegel's objective-idealistic program is so closely tied to the possibility of dialectical logic that the program itself stands or falls thereon" (31). Dialectic is not an optional feature of Hegel's philosophy, one we might safely ignore or excise.

In relation to this perplexing topic, we can approach the essays in this volume in terms of three different questions. First, what leads Hegel to make contradiction a central theme in his philosophy? Second, what aspects or interpretations of the dialectic might allow us to avoid the unsettling conclusion that Hegel's philosophy flagrantly violates the principle of non-contradiction? Third, what does Hegel actually mean when he presents contradiction as an essential feature of thought and reality? . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=21408.