Hegel's View Research Articles

The Ethics and Politics of Negation: the Postdramatic on Screen

The Ethics and Politics of Negation:the Postdramatic on Screen Angelos Koutsourakis (bio) The Ethics of Spectatorship and the Postdramatic On June 22, 2008, in a television interview with Alexander Kluge, the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke was asked to explain his ethical approach to filmmaking. His response was that the prerequisite for making films ethically lies in a filmmaking practice that takes the spectator seriously and stimulates the viewer’s imagination. Haneke’s raison d’être is grounded in the idea that unlike literature, film runs the risk of restricting people’s imagination by showing and clarifying everything. As he says, “one ought to work against this wherever possible…Film, like any other art, should produce a dialogue, not a monologue. Omitting explanation is one of the many ways of inspiring the viewer’s imagination.” Haneke’s argument provides a point of entry into thinking about cinema and ethics through the postdramatic lens; according to Hans-Thies Lehmann, the fundamental principle of postdramatic representation is the negation of strategies of dramatic concreteness and the Hegelian view of drama as the conflict of moral attitudes. The postdramatic resists the “Wholeness” of dramatic art and valorizes the idea of representation as a process; it postpones the production of meaning and this is an ethical representational approach, because it negates uniform interpretations and asks the audience to co-produce meaning rather than endorse predetermined conclusions (Postdramatisches 246).1 As also mentioned by Haneke, omitting explanation can be an ethical, but also a political act. Both Haneke’s and Lehmann’s comments recall critical theory’s privileging of an aesthetics of negation. From Adorno’s idea that authentic art does not simply produce “messages” to be consumed but is committed to an aesthetics of “enigmaticalness” and “determinate negation” (129), to Alexander Kluge and Oscar Negt’s idea that “the domain of the irrational” in art is “the domain of protest,” there is a late Marxist tradition that privileges aesthetic negation as the sine qua non of social critique (239). The ethical implications of such an approach rest on the refusal to reproduce a reified reality and the desire to activate feelings of protest – what Kluge and Negt name “the antirealism of feelings” that assist individuals in renouncing a “reality that injures” them (414). [End Page 155] Such a valorization of aesthetic negation sits at the antipodes of the Cultural Studies turn to universalizing moral questions about the representations of the other, and the exploration of ethics in cinema via methodological approaches proposed by analytical philosophy. Activating a dialogue between the viewer and the object is a modus operandi that sits uneasily with the normative reproduction of moralist assertions and the unresponsive consumption of ideas. Yet recent work in film studies in the area of the ethics of representation seems to be content with more conventional, monological narratives and approaches to the question of cinema as a medium of ethical thinking.2 The determining context for much of this work is the understanding of representation as a communication model. David Bordwell aptly explains that such a model (and let me stress that he does not endorse it) presupposes, “that the plans and intentions of the filmmaker shape the movie, which becomes a vehicle for an embedded content” (Bordwell, “Part-Time Cognitivist” 1-2). Telling in this respect is the work of the moral philosopher Berys Gaut. Gaut goes to great lengths to explain the potential ethical benefits of the audience’s identification with either positive characters in a film or characters who might be deluded or mistaken but whose counter-example can help the audience “grow emotionally.” Gaut surmises that identification with characters can “teach an audience about correct emotional responses” (69). Ethics in this school of thought is invoked in a manner that does not reflect on the reduction of spectatorial labor to a reception of “correct values.” Such nuances are also overlooked by Noël Carroll, who has recently offered an analysis of the tropes and the emotional strategies employed by narratives aiming to overcome biases against homophobia or racism in order to produce moral change. The examples put forward by Carroll are the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and the film...

Hegel on Rectitude and “Virtue as Such”

AbstractMany philosophers read Hegel as rejecting Kant's ethics of duty and advocating a more or less Aristotelian conception of virtue. However, in the Philosophy of Right Hegel sharply criticizes the ancient conception of virtue, or “virtue proper,” in his terms, and distinguishes it from a more modern concept of virtue, which he calls “rectitude.” In this paper I argue that interpretations that overlook or downplay the significance of the distinction between rectitude and virtue proper are wrong, and I also put forward my own positive interpretation of Hegel's views on virtue. I am mainly concerned with defending two sets of claims: (1) Rectitude is fundamentally different from Aristotelian and other ancient conceptions of virtue. (2) Hegel believes that in modern society acting with rectitude is, in all normal circumstances, superior to attempting to use virtue proper to try to figure out what one should do. I also argue that the conception of virtue I attribute to Hegel has some distinct advantages over Aristotelian conceptions of virtue.

Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity by Antonio Negri (review)

Reviewed by: Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity by Antonio Negri Heather Ashley Hayes Antonio Negri, Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, 152 pp. Gilles Deleuze, writing in 2000 about Antonio Negri’s work The Savage Anomaly, argued, “Antonio Negri is authentically and profoundly Spinozian.” Negri had authored Anomaly, his first work dedicated to Baruch Spinoza’s place in philosophy, in prison in 1991 while awaiting trial on the false charge that he instigated the Red Brigades’ assassination of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. In 2004, Negri wrote Subversive Spinoza, extending his work in Savage Anomaly and continuing his radical renewal of Marxism via new readings of the challenging metaphysics of Spinoza. His third, less ambitious yet piercingly insightful work on Spinoza, Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity, further nuances these previous readings. Negri is not the first to champion a materialist Spinoza. The foundations of this inquiry were laid in part by Deleuze himself publishing Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza in 1968 while in 1969 Alexandre Martheron published Individu et communauté chez Spinoza, both texts arguing for serious readings of Spinoza into political philosophy. Deleuze combed the western philosophical tradition for alternatives to Hegel, and found important possibilities in Spinoza. While Louis Althusser wrote little on Spinoza directly, the influence of the philosopher is evident in the work of his students Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, both of whom have penned influential work on Spinoza. As Eugene Holland points out, Macherey’s work frames [End Page 415] “a direct confrontation between Spinoza and Hegel, stressing the degree to which the former eludes the grasp of the latter’s history of philosophy, and therefore represents an important alternative to Hegelian views” (Eugene Holland, “Spinoza and Marx,” Cultural Logic 2, 1 [Fall 1998]). In the first book of Cahiers Spinoza, published in 1977, Maximilian Rubel, Martheron, and Albert Igoin all confront the possibility of Spinoza’s influence on Karl Marx. Particularly, they focus on extensive passages of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus found hand-copied into Karl Marx’s early notebooks. As Eugene Holland argues, alternatives to Hegel and Hegelian Marxism are desirable for this group of philosophers, of which Negri is perhaps the most enthusiastic. For Althusser, alternatives to Hegelian Marxism became attractive as weapons in the fight against Stalinism within the French Communist Party. For Deleuze and many poststructuralists, Nietzsche (who acknowledged Spinoza’s influence), proved attractive because his method differed markedly from Hegel’s, and to some extent Marx’s. As Holland notes, More generally, the impetus to reevaluate Hegelian Marxism in France arose in response to a number of post-war developments, in the fields of politics and academics alike: the decline of the French working class as a “class-conscious” political actor, and of the French Communist Party as its “revolutionary” vanguard, in Fifth Republic politics and society; but also the demise of Soviet and Chinese Communisms as viable or attractive Marx-inspired regimes; and within academics, the growing dissatisfaction with certain Hegelian elements of Marxism, among historians as well as philosophers themselves. (Holland, “Spinoza and Marx”) Holland helpfully recalls the importance that interpretations of the French Revolution of 1789 took on in disputes among historians, some of whom sought to revise Marxist takes on 1789 as a bourgeois revolution that would serve to spur a future, more proletarian one. For materialist historians, Holland argues, “the problem, in short, was how to square the actual diversity of motives and actions of particular French merchants, lawyers, and statesmen with the unifying notion of the bourgeoisie as a class acting as a (singular) political agent in the historical field.” Here, Spinozan materialism, read as a forerunner to Marx’s materialism, can eradicate Hegelian dialectics. For Negri’s work, the central goal has been to read Spinozan materialism as a mature precursor to Marx’s own materialism and as a result, to relate Spinoza’s central relevance for contemporary Marxism as a true materialist. In Savage Anomaly he noted, “Spinoza’s materialist metaphysics is the potent anomaly of the century: not a vanquished or marginal anomaly but, rather, an anomaly of victorious materialism, of the ontology of a being that...

Broader contexts of non-domination: Pettit and Hegel on freedom and recognition

This study compares Philip Pettit’s account of freedom to Hegelian accounts. Both share the key insight that characterizes the tradition of republicanism from the Ancients to Rousseau: to be subordinated to the will of particular others is to be unfree. They both also hold that relations to others, relations of recognition, are in various ways directly constitutive of freedom, and in different ways enabling conditions of freedom. The republican ideal of non-domination can thus be fruitfully understood in light of the Hegelian structure of ‘being at one with oneself (Beisichsein) in another’. However, while the Hegelian view converges with Pettit on non-domination and recognition, their comprehensive theories of freedom are based on radically different metaphysics. One key difference concerns the relationship between freedom and nature, and there is a further difference between Pettit’s (ahistorical) idea of the concept dependence of freedom, and the Hegelian (historical) idea of the conception dependence of freedom.

I-Hegel's Critique of Kant

In this essay I argue that Hegel criticizes Kant for failing to carry out a thorough critique of the categories of thought. In Hegel's view, Kant merely limits the validity of the categories to objects of possible experience, but he does not challenge the way in which the ‘understanding’ (Verstand) conceives of those categories and other concepts. Indeed, for Hegel, Kant's limitation of the validity of the categories itself presupposes the sharp distinctions, drawn by understanding, between concepts such as ‘form’ and ‘matter’ or ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. I note that Hegel does not do complete justice to Kant's concept of the ‘thing in itself’ or to his conception of ‘critique’, but I argue that his criticism of Kant is none the less correct

Cosmopolitan Sociality and the Bildungsroman

Cosmopolitan Sociality and the Bildungsroman

Comments on Henry Somers-Hall, Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation

Henry Somers-Hall has written a book1 that is much needed, and in many ways. We need it, for one thing, to understand a striking feature of Deleuze's thought-striking at least to the novice reader (and I claim to be nothing more). While some of Deleuze's many insights are incredibly interesting and illuminating, some of them-including some of the deeper ones-betray a strange arbitrariness. Why empiricism, for example, and not idealism or realism? Why must inquiry explain how experiences are generated rather than conditioned? Wasn't the latter good enough for Kant? Why valorize difference above identity? Why does difference have to be affirmative, and what does that mean? Why calculus and not set theory (Badiou) or arithmetic and geometry (Kant) or modal logic (Kripke)? And so on. Somers-Hall's book operates on the level of such questions, and it is so clear and carefully argued that I learned an incredible amount from it.And not just about Deleuze, for this book's importance stretches across the philosophical spectrum-or would, if the different approaches that make up philosophy today were not in too much disarray to constitute a spectrum. It is not that philosophy fails to be a single unified discipline, with everyone working cooperatively in the same paradigm; worse than failure, that would be philosophy's death. It is, rather, that no one has any sense for what anyone else is doing. One index of this is the infamous analytic/continental split. After 60 years, philosophers still don't know what it is about.2 Another is the increasing fragmentation on both sides of the split. Analytical philosophy has divided by topic into so many subspecialties that each has room only for a few dozen people. Except for the work of race and gender theorists, much of the continental side has become a pantheon of incommensurable geniuses: Habermasians, Derrideans, Sartreans, Butlerians and so on follow their leaders without concern for anyone else's leaders.It will take great efforts to overcome this situation, and Somers-Hall shows why. Just to bring Hegel and Deleuze-only two of the many continental deities- into productive dialogue requires him to awaken, and then exorcise, a panoply of intimidating ghosts. The specters of Leibniz and Newton haunt Deleuze's and Hegel's views of the calculus respectively; Scholastic doctrines of analogy haunt Russell's theory of types; Plato's Third Man argument haunts Aristotle's ontology; Husserlian intentionality haunts Sartre and turns Merleau-Ponty to Klee and Cezanne; Cuvier's disputes with Geoffroy over teleology haunt the Hegel-Deleuze confrontation.On all this extraordinary variety of matters, and much more, Somers-Hall provides interesting and often novel insights, and by doing so shows that the various components of the philosophical panoply are far too deeply interconnected to be mutually indifferent and, so, however happily, incommensurate. While the book is dense (how could it not be?), it is always clear. The arguments are meticulously stated and, always, driven home. The diverse thinkers Somers-Hall discusses are not aufgehoben or verschmelzt into some single meta-paradigm, but are placed into fruitful dialogue-exactly what, to me, is missing in so much contemporary philosophy.Transcendentality and RepresentationSomers-Hall stages the Deleuze-Hegel confrontation in two rounds. The first concerns the fate of the realm at the hands of affirmative difference; the other, that of teleology at the hands of evolution. The book begins, however, with the problem of representation: what sort of isomorphism must hold between mind and reality if representations in the former are to give us knowledge of objects in the latter? Kant claims that this question can find its answer only on a transcendental level, one that first sets forth the kind of mind that is necessarily presupposed by knowledge and then shows that the conditions of our knowledge of objects are the conditions of the objects themselves (S-H 12). …

I. Kant and G. Hegel's Views on Subjectification of Cognitive Process

The study is designed to form innovative cognitive technologies and processes from the analysis of classical philosophical ideas.The aim of the study is to analyze I. Kant and G. Hegel's philosophical theories of subjectification problem of general and scientific cognitive process.Methods of study are logical-historical method and method of comparative analysis.Kant's approach to past scientific experience is examined. The characteristic between a teacher and a student is given. Dynamic cognitive processes are expressed by some ways for material understanding: passive and active ways predetermining dogmatic and critical thinking. Different mindsets, such as ordinary, architectonical, brilliant ones are described. G. Hegel's approach to understanding of the concept “cognition” from its subjectivity and objectivity is examined. Hegel's understanding of theoretical actions discovered in the usage of analysis, synthesis and construction methods is analyzed. The principle of a theoretical cognitive method including objective reality/existence and progress is discovered. Hegel underlines the progress connecting past and present which is a “substantial core”, a product of mind and soul.

Questions for Henry Somers-Hall's Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation: Dialectics of Negation and Difference

Henry Somers-Hall has written a great work of scholarship that does much more than simply compare Deleuze and Hegel. He shows in a profound way that both Hegel and Deleuze are working to overcome inadequacies in Kant's transcendental project, and that despite the extremely sparse number of references to Hegel in Deleuze's work, Deleuze should not be read as avoiding Hegel but rather as proposing an alternative to Hegelian solutions to Kantian problems. Along with its exceptionally clear prose and careful expository development, the book's greatest virtue is its climax, in the last two chapters, where the possibilities for mutual critique between Hegelian and Deleuzian positions are explored.It is this mutual critique I'd like to extend, here, specifically around the problem of how Hegel and Deleuze think contingency in nature. This issue emerges in Somers-Hall's eighth and final chapter, a comparison of Deleuze and Hegel's different accounts of the structure of organic life. At issue is how well Deleuze and Hegel account for two central features of contemporary evolutionary theory: 1.) the necessity for the existence of sub-optimal forms of life, and 2.) the requirement that anatomical structure be analytically separated from function, since we can observe similar structures in organs that serve different functions in different organisms. Because Hegel views nature teleologically, such that the structure of an organism is intelligible only in terms of its function, it seems that his view is inadequate to evolutionary theory. And because Deleuze does not view organisms teleologically, he seems in a better position to appreciate evolutionary theory (233).I will elaborate on Somers-Hall's accounts of Deleuze and Hegel on the organism in a moment. But I'd like to frame my discussion in the following way. Because Deleuze does not view nature teleologically, he seems able to appreciate the positive role of chance, or the accidental, in nature in a way that Hegel cannot. This seems to give his view a descriptive advantage over Hegel. But my question in what follows is this: can chance, even in nature, be understood in a completely non-normative way?1 Letting chance rhyme with contingency, for the moment, can we decide between systematic views on the role of contingency in nature purely or simply on grounds of descriptive adequacy? The paucity of Somers-Hall's references to the ethical dimension of Deleuze's and Hegel's thought invites me to pose the question in this way.On my reading, Deleuze following Nietzsche never understands chance in completely non-normative terms. When speaking of chance, Deleuze tends to do so not only in normative terms, that is, in terms of good and views of chance, but even in mythopoetic terms, evoking the gods of earth and sky in Nietzsche and Philosophy, and in Logic of Sense, evoking stoic humor, which plays with sense and nonsense by treating chance as if it were oracular, as a form of divination.2 Even in the more sober, abstract idiom of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze divides the modern approach to randomness into a good approach that emphasizes the singularity of each event, as opposed to the bad or conservative approach through a calculus of probabilities that subordinates singularity to sets or series of logically equivalent possibilities.3Deleuze is not alone, here. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard explicitly criticized Hegel for being unable to appreciate the singularity of existence precisely on the basis of the inability of the dialectic to appreciate chance.4 And Nietzsche's affirmation of chance under the banner of eternal return serves as a major inspiration for Deleuze's counter-Hegelian conception of difference as linked to a non-identical form of repetition.5 Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche link the affirmation of chance to an explicit ethics, as well as to an aesthetics. Nietzsche especially has a profound impact on Deleuze's thought, as evidenced in key passages of Difference and Repetition. …

Deconstructing the Psychoanalyst of Philosophy

This paper tries to demonstrate how Jacques Derrida deconstructs Hegel's philosophy through detecting an abyss at the hub of the Hegelian system. Derrida's work on Hegel, Glas, which is concerned with Hegel's philosophy, highlights the remarkable resemblance between Hegel's dialectic and Freud's psychoanalysis. Derrida's argument draws a comparison between the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung and Freud's repression. This comparative study aims at showing that no systematic thinking or analysis can release itself from an indigestible and paradoxical element that constitutes the abyss of the systematic or analytical thinking. The first part of the article shows how Derrida, inspired by Kant, thinks of the abyss of the system as the quasi-transcendental that, in a paradoxical way, makes philosophical system both possible and impossible. Concentrating on the concept of repression, the second part delineates similarities of the dialectic and psychoanalysis. In Hegel's view, there is nothing out of cognition; however, Hegel's obsession with Antigone's tragedy reveals that there are dark sides remained outside of the Hegelian system. The last section deals with these remains in Hegel's account of Antigone. Such abyssal points assert that there is a sort of resistance to psychoanalysis, or the process of analysis in general, which deconstruction has always attempted to make us more sensitive to it. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p1949

Adorno, Hegel, and Dialectic

This article explores critical theory's relations to German idealism by clarifying how Adorno's thought relates to Hegel's. Adorno's apparently mixed responses to Hegel centre on the dialectic and actually form a coherent whole. In his Logic, Hegel outlines the dialectical process by which categories – fundamental forms of thought and reality – necessarily follow one another in three stages: abstraction, dialectic proper, and the speculative (famously simplified as ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’). Adorno's allegiance to Hegel's dialectic emerges when he traces the dialectical process whereby enlightenment reverts to myth and human domination over nature reverts into our domination by nature. However, Adorno criticizes Hegel's dialectic as the ultimate form of ‘identity thinking’, subsuming unique, material objects under universal concepts by using dialectical reason to expand those concepts to cover objects utterly. These two responses cohere because Adorno shares Hegel's view that dialectical contradictions require reconciliation, but differs from Hegel on the nature of reconciliation. For Hegel, reconciliation unites differences into a whole; for Adorno, reconciled differences co-exist as differences. Finally, against Habermas who holds that Adorno cannot consistently criticize the enlightenment practice of critique, I show that Adorno can do so consistently because of how he reshapes Hegelian dialectic.

Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life by Lisa Sainsbury (review)

Reviewed by: Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life by Lisa Sainsbury Mike Cadden (bio) Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life. By Lisa Sainsbury . London : Bloomsbury , 2013 . Lisa Sainsbury’s book is an early entry in the Bloomsbury series “Perspectives on Children’s Literature,” for which she serves as editor. The series emphasizes cross-disciplinarity, with literature for children as the starting point. In her introduction, Sainsbury makes clear her mission: the book is “a series of disquisitions that consider and demonstrate at close range various . . . ways in which contemporary British children’s literature engages in ethical discourse at the level of philosophical inquiry” (5). “Contemporary” here means post–WWII books for children and young adults. She argues that there is a “flowering of ethical discourse” (5) for children in this period, in which authors seem to acknowledge that children and young adults are fully capable of engaging in ethical thinking; this is quite different from the moralizing that dominated earlier children’s literature. Instead of preaching a position to young readers, British books since 1945 have acknowledged a child reader’s ability to weigh the right and wrong of a situation and make judgments of her own. Cognitively restrictive didacticism used purely for socialization is simply out of fashion in British books for children. Sainsbury examines a few carefully chosen books from a range of genres (“thrillers, satire, historical fiction, and naturalistic writing—and literary forms—including picture books, poetry, novels, and short stories” [8]) rather than touching lightly on many. She makes sure, however, to list and point to other texts, both philosophical and literary, that raise similar issues or invite thinking in a particular way. The first two chapters provide a foundation in issues of morality and choice that are referenced in the subsequent four chapters dedicated to narrower topics of study. The labeling over time of children as “good or bad, virtuous or wicked” (13) in literature is a main concern of chapter 1. The development of the idea of “naughtiness”—a concept identified with children in particular—is traced from its origins in the fifteenth century. The idea of “naughty” has mingled notions of lack (coming from “noughty”) and wickedness to ultimately mean an ethically hopeful and playful description of an obstinate child going through a phase in a typical childhood (as understood in Freud, Spock, and Piaget). Naughtiness is a tricky concept, and Sainsbury points out that since 1945 it has been ambiguous in meaning. The deviance it describes can be associated with [End Page 435] gender, class, or race, and is shown to comprise any number of behaviors that challenge the established social order. Contemporary books pose to the child scenarios that depict complex choices between good and bad behavior, rather than just depicting models of naughtiness or offering a highly religious take on wrong in an increasingly secular Britain. The challenge for books that complicate good and evil as choices is to steer clear of the “ever-present danger of indifference” (38) as an attractive choice for the reader. Chapter 2 continues the discussion of sins of indifference and actual evil in children and children’s books through an examination of the possibility of childhood evil. How does society portray such a possibility through media and popular culture? Is evil born in the child, making her a “bad seed”? Is evil a psychological product of the imagination? How is evil alluring? How do crimes committed by children—in life and in literature—challenge the idea of innocence? Through thought experiments performed in British children’s literature post–1945, different conceptions of childhood are worked out for the reader—sometimes pitting ideologies of childhood innocence and evil against each other. What is “normal” childhood behavior, and what is “monstrous”? Chapters 3 through 6 move to specific questions and areas of philosophical inquiry. Whereas the first two chapters feature a variety of philosophers in wrestling with issues of good and evil—including Wiesel, Murdoch, Baudrillard, Schopenhauer, Midgely, and Kierkegaard—chapter 3 offers a specifically Hegelian view of ethical life and its role in family and society through an examination of social institutions in British children’s books. Post–1945 books refuse...

O evolucionismo econômico na pós-graduação brasileira: uma análise a partir da ótica da educação

As transformações proporcionadas pela globalização da economia influenciaram a pós-graduação brasileira, onde a pesquisa acadêmica passou a ocupar um ponto estratégico no Plano Nacional de Pós-Graduação (PNPG, 2011-2020), sendo considerada como uma poderosa ferramenta para o desenvolvimento econômico do país. Essa visão desenvolvimentista vai ao encontro da escola do pensamento econômico neoschumpeteriana (evolucionista), que preconiza a conjugação do conhecimento e aprendizado, com o estímulo à Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento (P), como fundamental à geração de inovações no sistema produtivo, e logo ao progresso tecnológico das nações. Diante desse contexto, este artigo apresenta uma análise crítica a essa formatação (economicista) presente no sistema de avaliação da pós-graduação brasileira, com base na concepção teórica de expoentes clássicos e contemporâneos da área de educação. Com isso, verificou-se a reificação do conhecimento e a (trans)formação do sujeito (docente-pesquisador), como um agente empreendedor, em detrimento de sua essência social, de sua consciência-de-si e da educação como um todo, dentro de um espectro in vivo, segundo a visão hegeliana. Além disso, constatou-se a pouca relevância dos demais pilares universitários, como ensino e extensão, com o direcionamento das políticas estatais para o fomento à pesquisa acadêmica voltada ao desenvolvimento econômico e à formação de produto(s) e produtor(es).

Newman at the Sorbonne, or, the Vicissitudes of an Important Philosophical Heritage in Inter-war France

SummaryThis article examines the reputation of John Henry Newman (Cardinal Newman) in France between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second. One effect of the controversy over Modernism was that Newman, despite his great popularity in France in the late nineteenth century as a convert to Catholicism, was not widely appreciated between the wars as an original thinker, either in the French Catholic Church or in the philosophical community. Henri Bremond's popular pre-war psychological biography of Newman had been rather misleading. Jean Guitton's 1933 thesis was a rare attempt to show the importance of Newman's ideas about time and development, which offered a robust theology of history as a challenge to the increasing dominance of Hegelian views. Debates about Christian philosophy largely ignored Newman, as did the emerging disciplines of phenomenology and existentialism, at least in their French forms. No one really championed Newman consistently in France until Maurice Nédoncelle embarked on his long-term project of translating, editing and explaining the full range of his work for a new generation (from 1945 onwards). People then began to discover, to their surprise, that these movements in philosophy, as well as the ‘nouvelle théologie’ movement in the Church, were all to some extent indebted to Newman, through some of his early French admirers such as Laberthonnière and Ollé-Laprune; and the relevance of his thought to the post-war world (recognised by the Church in the Second Vatican Council) at last began to be acknowledged.

The terrorist, the artist and the citizen: Oscar Wilde and Vera

This article links Oscar Wilde’s prose writings with his earliest drama Vera, or The Nihilists (1880, rev., 1883) and suggests how the idea of terrorism and political violence was a spectacle and threat that Wilde acknowledged and encompassed in his writing and thought. I discuss Wilde’s adoption of a Hegelian view of the development of civilisation and suggest that during his 1895 trials he cast himself self-consciously as at once agitator and scapegoat, finding that his own life had come to imitate his art though not in the ways with which we are commonly familiar. Modern terrorism from its roots in 1870s Russian political unrest is recognised as both a new force and a familiar fantasy which shapes literature.

Hegel's Geographical Thought

This paper sketches out the contours of the philosopher G W F Hegel's geographical thought. Until now, geographers have shown little interest in Hegel's geographical writing. He has figured minimally in histories of geography, and critical geographers who have engaged with Hegel have done so indirectly, either through Karl Marx's work or through Marxist and postcolonial scholars' readings of Hegel. This paper offers a more direct reading. It begins from an understanding of geographical thought as both an intellectual and a practical endeavor with its own distinct historical geographies. It examines Hegel's concepts of ‘nature’ ( Natur) and ‘space’ ( Raum); his understanding of geography's relationship to history and anthropology; his relationship to Carl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt; and the significance of ‘territory’ in his political philosophy. It highlights the ambiguity that characterized Hegel's thinking about geography, especially in his discussion of climate's influence on humans. It also challenges Henri Lefebvre's reading of Hegel's view on the state's relationship to territory. Finally, it suggests that Hegel's conceptions of nature, space, and geography mattered not only for his philosophies of history, nature, and subjective spirit, but for his understanding of modernity's geographies as well.

Gender and the Ethical Given

G. W. F. Hegel's discussion of the Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit has provoked ongoing debate about his views on gender. This essay offers an interpretation of Hegel as condemning social arrangements that take the authoritativeness of identities and obligations to be natural or merely given. Hegel criticizes the ancient Greeks' understanding of both the human law and the divine law; in so doing, he provides resources for a critique of essentialist approaches to sex and gender. On this interpretation, Hegel views the conflict between Antigone and Creon as tragic because the gendered identities and obligations inherent to Greek Sittlichkeit are naturalized and withheld from scrutiny and revision. In the conclusion, I suggest how Hegel's criticisms pose a challenge to certain approaches to religious ethics.

Towards a Conflict Theory of Recognition: On the Constitution of Relations of Recognition in Conflict

AbstractIn this paper, we develop an understanding of recognition in terms of individuals’ capacity for conflict. Our goal is to overcome various shortcomings that can be found in both the positive and negative conceptions of recognition. We start by analyzing paradigmatic instances of such conceptions—namely, those put forward by Axel Honneth and Judith Butler. We do so in order to show how both positions are inadequate in their elaborations of recognition in an analogous way: Both fail to make intelligible the fundamental nexus between relations of recognition and individuals’ capacity for conflict. We then move on to reconsider aspects of Hegel's view of recognition—ones that, from our viewpoint, have been unjustly neglected in the debate about recognition: his focus on the constitution of relations of recognition in conflict and on the status of being an author of acts of recognition. On this basis, we then spell out in a more systematic way what we take to be a more convincing conception of recognition. This puts us in the position to gesture at some consequences of this conception in practical contexts, above all with regard to the justification, role and structure of political institutions..

Hegel, Human Rights, and Political Membership

AbstractThis paper examines Hegel's view of the relationship of human rights and political membership. Attention is accorded the concept of a right to have rights, one famously thematized by Hannah Arendt but articulated already earlier by Hegel. The discussion has five parts. Part One considers how for Hegel a notion of political membership is entailed by the concept of right itself. Part Two examines the place occupied by modern civil society in a realised account of human rights. Part Three considers the challenges posed to realised right by the phenomenon of modern poverty and the experience of ‘rightlessness’ it occasions. Part Four details how Hegel's conception of the corporation addresses the phenomenon of rightlessness, taking into account his uniquely reflexive understanding of a right to have rights and its contribution to the project of thePhilosophy of Right. The concluding section briefly compares Hegel's conception of membership rights to Arendt's.

Hegel’s Living Logic

Abstract For Hegel, logic does not essentially consist of formal categories used to think about non-logical content. Rather, it consists of formal categories which are also themselves the content of logic. The idea that logic is its own form and its own content means that forms are used to think through other forms such that the same logical determination is a form in one context and a content in another. The generation of form and content out of one another—which precludes the need for the importation of external content into logic—is part of Hegel’s definition of the logical category of ‘life’ in his Science of Logic. A living logic is a logic that accounts for its own self by means of its own self. Through contrasting this idea of logic with formal logic, and logical life with natural life, this essay provides a snapshot of how Hegel views the activity of living, self-determining logic.