Hegel's Lectures Research Articles

Hegel e o caráter

This paper is devoted to a systematic analysis of the notion of “character” within Hegel's thought. So far, this notion has been considered marginal within Hegelian philosophy and has hardly been addressed in the critical literature. This article, however, attempts to argue in favor of the thesis that character plays a prominent role in Hegel's thought. In this paper we therefore aim to provide (i) a systematic reconstruction of the concept of “character” in Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History and Lectures on the philosophy of Subjective Spirit in order to show that (ii) the notion of character in Hegel has a greater relevance than hitherto acknowledged, a relevance which invests central notions of his philosophy. Our thesis, more specifically, is that the notion of character turns out to be closely related to load-bearing notions in Hegel's thought – namely, the notion of self-consciousness (as distinctive element of human rationality) and the notion of the spirit of a people (as a set of sociocultural and dispositional factors that allow different levels of understanding of the autonomy of human rationality). Precisely on the basis of this relevance and the critical issues it brings, such an operation provides the basis for arguing that iii) the Hegelian concept of character has important repercussions both on the contemporary debate on Hegel and on contemporary hegelianisms.

G.W.F. Hegel: Lectures on Plato's Dialectics

This is a translation of four Hegel's lectures (1819, 1820/21, 1823/24, 1825/26) on Plato's Dialectics with an extensive crticial introduction from the translator.

Hegel and Egypt's African Element

AbstractContrary to the widespread view that Hegel excluded Africa from what he called world history proper, the specifically African element of Egypt was indispensable to his account of the pivotal dialectical moment that saw spirit's release from its immersion in nature. Hegel's racist caricature of Africans in the early part of the lectures was not gratuitous, something that commentators can leave to one side. It was integral to his dialectical account of world history because it served to generate the contradiction that saw the Persian Empire give way to Greece. This understanding is confirmed by the newly completed four-volume edition of Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of World History in the Gesammelte Werke. These new volumes also enable us to gain critical insight into how the editors of the first two published versions of the lectures, Eduard Gans and Karl Hegel, sought in their different ways to shape the reception of Hegel's lectures.

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Philosophy ed. by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and C. Allen Speight

Reviewed by: Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Philosophy ed. by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and C. Allen Speight Juliana de Albuquerque Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and C. Allen Speight, eds. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 276 pp. This collection edited by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and C. Allen Speight contains ten essays by leading scholars in the fields of Philosophy and German studies on the importance of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship for the history of ideas generally and to current philosophical debates. Reading this book brought to my mind both the works of Stanley Cavell and Martha Nussbaum on the relationship between literature and philosophy. Cavell's suggestion in The Claim of Reason that philosophy can be regarded as a set of texts demanding interpretation, and Nussbaum's remark in Love's Knowledge that the style of a text is itself a statement about the kind of knowledge it deals with, show how we can study Goethe as a philosopher despite his denial of a claim to this label. Reading Goethe as a philosopher or even just as a writer whose work influenced philosophy then and now raises important questions about what it means to do philosophy within the confines of academia, about the role of narrative, reading, and [End Page 188] textual interpretation in the activity of the philosopher, and about the relative value of specific literary genres (and here I would include the academic essay) for exploring the experience, performance, and formation of individual identity. The first essay of the book by Eckart Förster sheds new light on Goethe's influence, especially of his philosophy of nature, on Hegel's philosophy. This topic has been covered by others in the past, including, notably, Walter Kaufmann; unlike Kaufmann however, whose approach is primarily historical, Förster focuses on presenting Goethe as a pioneer in the study of the spiritual foundations of nature in modern times, showing how Goethe can be recognized as a philosopher in his own right and as someone who develops a scientific method that emphasizes the role of transitions in the study of nature. Stephen Houlgate's essay takes a similar approach. However, rather than emphasizing the influence of Goethe's philosophy of nature on Hegel as does Förster, he considers the reception of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship in Hegel's lectures on aesthetics. Central to Houlgate's reading, as well as to a broader understanding of the relationship between literature and philosophy, are Hegel's comments on the modern novel as "the modern bourgeois epic" and the question of whether Hegel's approach to the novel does justice to the complexity of Goethe's Meister. The two other essays that particularly drew my attention are by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and Charlotte Lee. Eldridge's text considers the interplay between the novel form and the role of the experience of contingency in Goethe's Meister. She argues with Schlegel that Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship has an organizing effect on readers by helping them critically reflect on the relationship between its parts and whole that could extend itself to the way that readers deal with their own efforts at organizing themselves: "the novel's model of managing contingency through narrative direction is fundamentally lifelike: there is no point in human life where all contingency has been permanently banished, and the task becomes one of sorting out themes and threads, values and projects, of thinking about how one might go about structuring one's experience." Charlotte Lee's essay, on the other hand, deals with agency and embodiment in Goethe's Meister, allowing us to form a more nuanced opinion about the ways in which characters may be said to express power and powerlessness in the novel. According to Lee, movement and physical vigor are not, of themselves, guarantees of power. Along with the insight that many expressions of agency in the novel are not intended to change the status quo, this conclusion pertaining to embodied movement is particularly important for an understanding of the way that gender is portrayed in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Both Eldridge's focus on contingency and Lee's emphasis on the fragility of agency in Goethe...

Перевідкриття Геґелевої філософії релігії. Stewart, J. (2022). An Introduction to Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Issue of Religious Content in the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Review of Stewart, J. (2022). An Introduction to Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Issue of Religious Content in the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Oxford: Oxford UP

Отношение разума и веры в лекциях Гегеля о доказательстве наличного бытия Бога

Отношение разума и веры в лекциях Гегеля о доказательстве наличного бытия Бога

The ‘Oriental’ Character of Islamic Philosophy in Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy

AbstractIn his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel characterizes Arabic/Islamic philosophy as ‘Oriental’. The meaning and motivation of this characterization are not obvious. In this paper, I address his treatment and outline the key ideas that lead Hegel to describe Islamic philosophy as ‘Oriental’. By highlighting similarities and differences in relation to Oriental philosophy, I shed light on Hegel's approach to Islamic philosophy, which is connected to his view of Oriental philosophy, the East and Islam in its various aspects, and to his more general view of the history of philosophy and of the Absolute as spirit.

На пути к возрождению метафизики: С.Л. Франк и Э. Корет

На пути к возрождению метафизики: С.Л. Франк и Э. Корет

Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God: Studies in Hegel's Logic and Philosophy of Religion by Robert R. Williams

Reviewed by: Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God: Studies in Hegel's Logic and Philosophy of Religion by Robert R. Williams Kevin J. Harrelson Robert R. Williams. Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God: Studies in Hegel's Logic and Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 319. Cloth, $95.00. Hegel endorsed proofs of the existence of God, and also believed God to be a person. Some of his interpreters ignore these apparently retrograde tendencies, shunning them in favor of the philosopher's more forward-looking contributions. Others embrace Hegel's religious thought, but attempt to recast his views as less reactionary than they appear to be. Robert Williams's latest monograph belongs to a third category: he argues that Hegel's positions in philosophical theology are central to his philosophy writ large. The book is diligently researched, and marshals an impressive amount of textual evidence concerning Hegel's view of the proofs, his theory of personhood, and his views on religious community. Many of Williams's sources are lectures from the 1820s, when Hegel gave more detailed presentations of his philosophy of spirit. This material has long belonged to the received corpus of Hegel, but it is only due to recent critical editions that we have a sense of how Hegel modified his approach during his final decade. There are thus plenty of unanswered questions, and Williams poses some of the right ones. What is the relationship, for instance, between Hegel's many texts on logic and his later lectures on the ontological argument? How should we understand 'personhood' such that it captures the famous chapters on recognition from the Phenomenology, the theory of positive freedom from the Philosophy of Right, and the comments about divine personhood from Hegel's final lectures on religion? The former question is the topic of part 1: Hegel on the Proofs of God. Williams demonstrates convincingly enough that Hegel's endorsement of the proofs is rooted in his view of logic. Hegel allows, with the Kantians, that the traditional forms of these arguments are invalid. Knowing this much, one might expect Hegel to reformulate them. This has been the source of disappointment for many readers: revised arguments are not to be found in Hegel's lectures in the form of well-defined premises and conclusions. Williams makes clear that Hegel's view is rather that traditional logic was not suitable for arguments about this subject matter; and he explains how Hegel saw the proofs as insufficient attempts to "elevate the mind to God" (45–46). The cosmological argument, for instance, is supposed to show that the world depends on God. But in its classical form—since there are contingent entities there must be a necessary one—our knowledge of this relation is inverted. If contingent things depend on God, Hegel reasons, then they are not contingent. A more adequate approach requires that we unlearn, so to speak, the sense of contingency asserted in the premise. Syllogistic argument cannot bring about such unlearning. Hegel purported, and Williams exhaustively documents the fact, to have done a better job in his Science of Logic when he argued that the category of 'contingency' collapses into necessity. Readers may wonder about Williams's argumentative purposes in this part of the book. He succeeds in showing that the Hegel of the Berlin lectures believed himself to have secured, in his earlier work, an adequate basis for theology. Did Hegel's logic, however, commit him to his later theological views? Revisionist Hegelians hedge on this, and Williams offers little to persuade them to his side. Should we view Hegel's positions on these topics as mounting a good defense of cosmological or ontological proofs? Williams seems to think so, but he does little to persuade anyone who is not already versed in Hegel's theory of logic. Part 2, Hegel on the Personhood of God, is more successful. Williams defends a version of recognition theory, and he argues that Hegel's understanding of self-consciousness commits him also to a defense of divine personhood. Williams is more at home with this material, having written previously several books on it. He explains Hegel's...

Experience and history: phenomenological perspectives on the historical world

Introduction: On the Phenomenology of History 1. The Phenomenological Question 2. Representation, Memory, Experience 3. Phenomenological Perspectives: an Outline Chapter I: The Varieties of Experience 1. On the Concept of Experience and its Curious Fate 2. Experience and Innocence: The Empiricists 3. Experience in Kant and Hegel 4. So Far: Three Concepts of Experience 5. Dilthey, Husserl and a New Word: Erlebnis 6. From Mysticism to Pragmatism: Buber, James, Dewey 7. Taking Stock Again: How Many Concepts of Experience? 8. Experience and Foundationalism 9. Summing Up: Four Concepts of Experience Chapter II: Experience and History 1. The Two Relevant Senses of Experience 2. Husserl on Temporality 3. Time and Experience 4. Intentionality 5. Objects, Events, World 6. Others and The Human World 7. Experience and Historicity 8. Being with Others 9. and Community 10. Community and Historicity 11. History and Retrospection 12. The Experience of Historical Events 13. Levels of Temporality 14. The Significance of These Examples Chapter III: Experience and The Philosophy of History 1. Taking Stock 2. Experience, Representation, Memory 3. Narrative Representation 4. Experience and Memory 5. What Kind of Philosophy of History Is This? 6. The Epistemology of History 7. The Metaphysics of History Chapter IV: The Metaphysics of History and Its Critics 1. The Project of Re-reading the Philosophy of History 2. The Rise and Fall of the Classical Philosophy of History: The Standard View 3. Hegel and his Alleged Predecessors 4. Hegel's Lectures and Their Reception 5. Twentieth Century Reactions Chapter V: A Phenomenological Re-reading of the Classical Philosophy of History 1. Danto and 2. Narrative and Everyday Life 3. Practical Narrative 4. Narrative and The Classical Philosophy of History 5. Narrative and The Social 6. The Project of Re-reading 7. Marx and Marxists 8. Hegel's Lectures Again 9. History and the Phenomenology of Spirit 10. Hegel as Reformer 11. Hegel and Beyond 12. Conclusion Chapter VI: Phenomenologists on History 1. The Emergence of Nineteenth Century Historicism 2. Historicism and Marxism 3. Husserl and Dilthey 4. Husserl's Response to Historicism 5. Husserl's Crisis and a Different View of History 6. Philosophy of History in the Crisis 7. Phenomenology and The Epistemology of History 8. Phenomenology and Historicity in the Crisis 9. Coda: French Phenomenology of History 10. Conclusion Chapter VII: Space, Time and History 1. Time Zones: Phenomenological Reflections on Cultural Time a. Space and Place, Home and Beyond b. Lived Space, Lived Time c. The Universal Now d. Time and The Other e. Local Time, East and West f. Conclusion: Cultural Time and the Contemporary World 2. Place and Time: On the Interplay of Historical Points of View a. Place b. The Reality of Others c. Time d. e. Narrative f. Conclusion Chapter VIII: Experience, Narrative and Historical Knowledge 1. History, Fiction and Human Time a. Questioning the Distinction Between History and Fiction b. A Response c. Fiction and Falsehood d. Knowledge and Imagination e. Narrative and Reality f. An Example g. Conclusion 2. Narrative Explanation 3. Epistemology and Ontology of Narrative BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism and the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1820

Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism and the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1820

Irony and Dialectic: On a Critique of Romanticism in Kierkegaard and Hegel's Philosophy

Irony and Dialectic:On a Critique of Romanticism in Kierkegaard and Hegel's Philosophy Lore Hühn1 I. Kierkegaard's University thesis of 1841, On the Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, has from its first literary reception been analyzed in view of its position on Hegel and Hegel's own critique of the form of irony in romanticism (cf. Pivčević 45-48; vom Hofe 134-136; and Stewart, Kierkegaard's 135f.). Kierkegaard's intellectual affinity with Hegel and his consistent borrowings from Hegel's terminology are indisputable, yet in their meaning highly contentious. The discussion revolves to the present day around two alternatives: On the one hand, Kierkegaard's work on irony is placed within the domain of Hegel's philosophy, even in its criticism of the latter, and is valued at most as an anticipation of the themes that take hold in the authorship proper, beginning with Either/Or (cf. e.g. Himmelstrup 32-60). The consequence of this interpretation is that the essay is thus detached from the main corpus of Kierkegaard's writings,2 insofar as an anti-Hegelian standpoint otherwise sets the scene for later works; [End Page 1061] a standpoint which is frequently scathing. There is little doubt that Kierkegaard's work on irony borrows from Hegel's own writing, at times word for word, sometimes paraphrasing important passages, be it from Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, published by Hotho, from the Lectures on the Histor y of Philosophy, or from the Philosophy of Right.3 Furthermore, Kierkegaard at times even sides with Hegel's crushingly critical judgment on the Fichte-inspired notion in romantic philosophy of art of a subjectivity that oversteps its boundaries. If there were a "citation index" of Kierkegaard's work The Concept of Irony, Hegel's writings would appear at the top, indeed with a considerable gap to the next author. But there is also little doubt that quantitative results of this type tell us little, especially since Kierkegaard's philologically verifiable interest in Hegel's criticism of romanticism ought to have much deeper roots than can be shown by any reconstruction of influences that merely remains at the text's surface. It is certainly not a bad thing that, for now, this superficial approach in reconstructing influences has come to a halt. The fact that an interpretation of this type, i.e. one that is not conscious of any kind of shortcoming and which completely misses the core of Kierkegaard's interpretation of Hegel, was upheld and persisted for such a long time in academic research may well have to do with Kierkegaard's own retrospective view of his earlier work. Kierkegaard's own comments gave this type of interpretation an authoritative hold; this type of interpretation became popular through a passage written by Johannes Climacus, which had been crossed out prior to publication: "In his dissertation, Mag. Kierkegaard was concerned with discovering what is Socratic, but he did not, as far as can be said, understand it, probably because, with the aid of Hegelian philosophy, he had become super clever and objective and positive…" (Papirer VI B35, 24; trans. David Carus. Cf. Schwab, "Zwischen" 136, as well as Stewart, "Hegel" 173). Kierkegaard openly states that his project was addressed in various ways at Hegel, initially with an open though ambivalent attitude towards him, yet latterly with a distinctly dismissive tone. The later Kierkegaard makes no secret of what he—ironically enough—sees as a type of youthful indiscretion, let us say, a sin. He frequently asserts that he created his own misgiving in The Concept of Irony by applying Hegelian ideas, ideas which he latterly considered scandalous [End Page 1062] and only mentions with scathing criticism. This is the historical and Hegelian context in which Kierkegaard had compared the elements of the Socratic concept of irony with the romantic concept of irony as an existential form of negative freedom and ultimately had them confront each other as manifestations of a potentiating relationship to self (cf. esp. Kierkegaard, Om Begrebet Ironi 281-284 / The Concept of Irony 241-245).4 He had done this by basing the relationship between them on a concept of...

The Hegel's Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion (1821-1831) sources and critical editions from Marheineke to Jaeschke

In this paper I provide a concise plan about Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion critical editions, laying stress on the method followed by editors in order to build a coherent text with the sources at their disposal. The Marheineke's edition (1832) is analysed with special attention since it was the edition that caused the division between a Right and a Left, opening the discussion on speculative theism as a consequence of the difficulty to distinguish the systematic part from the historical one in the reasoning carried out by Hegel.

Hegel's Contested Legacy: Rethinking the Relation between Art History and Philosophy

The publication of the original auditors' transcripts of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics offers an opportunity to reexamine the Hegelian inheritance in art history. Ernst Gombrich's attempt to “work off” this inheritance provided an important corrective to the unquestioning use of his ideas by Vienna school art historians. However, the simplifications of this account—and the simplifications to which it in turn has been subjected—can be challenged by widening the scope of inquiry to include the “nonmetaphysical” readings of Hegel that have gained currency in contemporary philosophical debates. This raises broader questions about the concourse between the two disciplines.

A (hi)story pour les analphabètes – of Larissa Sansour's video

This article, in the form of the literary fiction of the travel diary, is an investigation into the relationships between the concept of travel, the concept of history and the image of humankind beginning with some of the so-called ‘classical’ texts of European culture – in particular: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Aristotle's Poetics, Quintilianus’ Institutio oratoria, Cicero's De legibus, Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, Heidegger's Being and Time. A concept of (a form of) humankind and a concept of history that can be drawn by these texts are related to the analysis of a frame of a video, A Space Exodus, by the Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour. The ‘reaction’ that results from this approach interacts with an ethical vision of the history(ography) that keeps in mind the experience of writing by authors such as Antonio Artaud (une écriture pour les analphabètes) and Deleuze (a foreign language inside our own language).

Art and Ethical Life: The Social and Historical Background to Hegel's Reflections on Ancient and Modern Literature in the Mit- and Nachschriften of his Lectures on Aesthetics

In 1835, a few years after Hegel's death, one of his students, Heinrich Gustav Hotho, put together the first printed edition of the lectures on aesthetics, using Hegel's own lecture notes, which have mostly disappeared, and various student transcripts (Mit- and Nachschriften) of the lectures that Hegel gave on the philosophy of art in Berlin in 1820/21, 1823, 1826 and 1828/29. Hotho made some minor revisions to this edition in 1843 and in the following year. The revised edition of the lectures has until recently formed the basis of all subsequent editions of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics and, consequently, of most previous interpretations of his aesthetics. Hotho's edition of the lectures, however, has been shown to be highly problematic. To begin with, there are the various editorial interventions that Hotho made in order to give Hegel's lectures on aesthetics the systematic form he thought they lacked, while other interventions include various evaluative judgements concerning particular works of art and even some of Hotho's own ideas concerning art.As regards the systematic structure of Hotho's edition of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics, this edition divides the lectures into three main parts, whereas the available student transcripts of the lectures show that only the last series of lectures from 1828/29 were given such a three-part structure by Hegel himself.

Heinrich Heine Writes about His Life

Heinrich Heine Writes About His Life Liliane Weissberg (bio) I. Phantom Wounds None of Heinrich Heine's (1797–1856) manuscripts suffered as much speculation or provoked as much anticipation during his lifetime as his projected memoirs, which he pursued over many decades. Indeed, already in 1823 the young Berlin law student who attended Hegel's lectures was eager to apply these lessons to a vision of his own life. In those years, Heine describes his life as "tumultuous" on the outside and "dark" and dreamlike on the inside. He writes to his Jewish friend Immanuel Wohlwill, Yes, amice, I had great luck; just as I left the philosophical lecture hall, and entered the circus of worldly affairs, I could construct my life philosophically, and I can look at it objectively now—even though I lack that higher calm and contemplation that would be necessary for a clear rendering of a large theater of life.1 Heine calls this project his Bekenntnisse2 in an allusion to Rousseau's Confessions, but quickly abandons the title for the sake of other alternatives. Years later Heine takes up the concept of confessions again and this time translates it into the more legal term Geständnisse.3 The [End Page 563] Geständnisse, authored in the 1850s, were to preface his observations on Germany and were intended to counter Mme. de Stael's De l'Allemagne, as well as celebrate his own arrival in Paris two decades earlier.4 But these Geständnisse would also speak of the distance Heine had traveled from his early discipleship of Hegel to embrace a less "abstract" philosophy and affirm a newly regained sense of religion. In 1823, however, Heine's Bekenntnisse had not yet taken that turn. Instead, he was eager to remove from them any personal considerations and to turn them into a picture of his times; he intended to include portraits of relatives and friends. Thus, Heine soon uses the term Memoiren5 and claims to have begun a work that would not only counter Rousseau's famous confessions but also Goethe's autobiography. Heine wanted not only to write about his times, but to invent a new genre of life-writing that would be appropriate for a new age. Memories, not confessions, were called for, that is, a picture of the times, not just the inner life of an individual. This genre would also imply the introduction of a French tradition into the world of German letters. Heine's work seems to have progressed well, even though he wrote in fits and spurts. In 1837, over a decade after he began his autobiography and a few years after his move to Paris, Heine reports to his Hamburg publisher Julius Campe about his work. The story of his life had already turned into an "extensive work" that would be ready for perusal soon and would constitute not just a simple descriptive narrative or Lebensbeschreibung,6 but an extensive novel or Roman. "Day and night I labor over my great project," Heine writes, "and work on the novel of my life."7 He refers to his book with similar exuberance in letters to his friend Giacomo Meyerbeer. By 1838, Heine was once again preoccupied with his financial situation, which had remained precarious since his father's bankruptcy years earlier. Meyerbeer was to help him negotiate a yearly pension from his uncle, the wealthy Hamburg banker Salomon [End Page 564] Heine, who had assumed responsibility for his brother's family.8 In the following years, Heine mentions his work off and on again in letters to his sister Charlotte and to friends and business acquaintances,9 but his uncle, too, was well aware of his project, and anxious that Heine would protect the family name. After Salomon Heine's death in 1844, Heine's memoirs became instrumental in negotiations concerning his future pension payments. Salomon Heine did not leave a note regarding future pension payments in his will, and his son, Heine's cousin Carl, refused to honor the full amount of the pre-established payments. Indeed, he was only willing to issue a pension if Heine's memoirs were first sent to him for review, should...

Jews on Ships; or, How Heine's Reisebilder Deconstruct Hegel's Philosophy of World History

Although it is known that Heine attended Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of world history and became involved with the Hegelian-inflected “science of Judaism” just before beginning the Reisebilder, little attention has been given to Heine's early engagement with Hegelian ideas in his travel writings. This essay argues that Heine transforms the travel narrative into a critique of history by taking the grand historical narrative, with its investment in the “Greek” trope of seafaring, and deconstructing its systematic claims of national belonging and teleological development. Through an analysis of the North Sea poems, I show how Heine reworks both the genre of travel literature as self-discovery and Hegel's geographically determined movement of “World Spirit.” The result is a nonsystematic Jewish conception of historicity, which, in its embrace of particularity, subverts the absolutism of Hegel's philosophy of history by exposing the metaphors on which the philosophy's progressive development relies.

Philosophy, Religion, and the End of Hegel

I want to begin with two of Hegel's endings, one well known, the other less so. First, some words from the closing paragraphs of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy:A new epoch has arisen in the world. It seems as if the world spirit has succeeded in casting off everything in objective reality which is alien to itself, in order to comprehend itself as absolute spirit: to produce its own objective world from itself and to keep that world serenely in its own power. The struggle of the finite self-consciousness with the absolute self-consciousness, which once appeared as an alien reality, is now coming to an end. The finite self-consciousness has ceased to be finite; and, by the same token, the absolute self-consciousness has achieved the reality which it formerly lacked. The whole of world history and especially the history of philosophy is the representation of this conflict. History now seems to have achieved its goal, when the absolute self-consciousness is no longer something alien; when the spirit is real as spirit. For spirit is this only when it knows itself to be absolute spirit; and this it knows in speculative science (Wissemchaft).

Art as Made and Sensuous: Hegel, Danto and the ‘End of Art’

Hegel's lectures on aesthetics embrace the world history of art in its broadest sense, encompassing the advanced cultures of Asia, Egypt, and Mesopotamia as well as the specifically European tradition that extends from Classical Antiquity through to the art of the Nazarenes and the burgeoning Romanticism of his own day. This attempt to bring the different stages and forms of art into a coherent system and to tell the story of their successive unfolding from the standpoint of philosophy lies at the very heart of Hegel's aesthetics. Indeed, the detailed attention that Hegel pays to the historical development of art has led Ernst Gombrich to recognise him as the founding father of the modem discipline of art history, with all the ambivalence that this expression conveys. In this paper, however, I am concerned less with the way in which Hegel's aesthetics have informed, and continue to inform, our ongoing attempts to understand the art of the past than with the relevance that his ideas still possess in relation to the art of the present. I shall argue that Hegel's aesthetics can tell us a great deal about contemporary art and that, read in the right way, his views provide an important corrective to a significant strand of contemporary art theory.I want to start by addressing something that must be regarded as a considerable obstacle to any such endeavour: Hegel's theory of the ‘end of art’. If, as popular conceptions of this theory would have it, Hegel saw the development of art as in some way a completed historical enterprise superseded in his own time by the new science of philosophy, not only would there seem to be little meaningful role left for art to play in his larger philosophical system but also little that such a philosophy of art can contribute to helping us understand the new and unexpected directions that art has taken, and continues to take, right up to the present day. This interpretation of Hegel's views remains highly problematic and anyone familiar with Hegel's method of argumentation will remain dissatisfied with such a one-sided representation of his position. Nonetheless, the extant text of the Lectures on Aesthetics does appear to offer some support to such claims.