Hegel’s “Anthropology” considers components of an agent’s practical identity that are not chosen but rather inherited: components such as the agent’s temperament, talents, and ethnic background. Through a discussion of habit and happiness, Hegel explores how these inherited traits can become part of the agent’s self-determination. I argue that this process provides a model for explaining how we are obligated within roles we do not choose—roles for instance within the family or as citizens of a state. Through evaluation of an inherited role itself and assessment of her own place in it, the agent earns and eventually comes to own her actions within the role. In this way an inherited role, like an inherited trait, can contribute to an agent’s freedom.

Hegel suggests that spirit, in contrast to animal nature, can encounter infinite agony in the death of what was its center, and yet, by dwelling with this loss, emerge into a new form of existence. The paradigm for this move is described toward the end of the chapter on Revealed Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit. An analysis of the key paragraph introduces a discussion of four questions: Why is this experience triggered by the death of a mediator? What characterizes the spiritual metamorphosis that results? Are such transformations restricted to revealed religion? And what does this defining characteristic tell us about the way spiritual life differs from the natural?

In order to answer the debate whether Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is just an extension of his logic (Halper and Winfield) or combines thought with its other (Maker), this paper considers what Hegel writes about chemism (in the logic) and about chemical process (in the philosophy of nature). The logical argument can be constructed without reference to experience, from paradoxes that emerge within an original concept. In the philosophy of nature, however, an initial concept is analyzed, but its instantiation reflects nature’s “impotence”: unrelated processes, fours and twos rather than threes, and so on. The singular conclusion combines universal conceptual framework and particular natural processes into a new, non-logical concept.

This paper aims to show Hegel’s system to be a self-generating and conceptually closed system and, therefore, an idealism. Many readers have agreed that Hegel intends his logic to be a self-generating, closed system, but they assume that the two branches of Realphilosophie, Nature and Spirit, must involve the application of logical categories to some non-conceptual reality external to them. This paper argues that Nature emerges from logic by the reapplication of the opening logical categories to the final category of logic, Absolute Idea, and that the resulting categories are irreducible bipartite compounds that develop into new categories by characteristic forms of self-relation following, roughly, the sequence in logic from Being through Essence. With the determination of Absolute Idea by Concept, Spirit emerges, and it develops through its own characteristic forms of self-relation until Absolute Idea is self-determined. Hence, Realphilosophie is a rigorous conceptual development that goes beyond logic without introducing anything that is not conceptual.

Hegel’s notion of a systematic science requires that his system be autonomous. Any determinative role for extra systemic givens would compromise the system’s autonomy. Nonetheless, the system addresses an extra-systemic given world. It is usually held that the basis for this lies in Hegel’s postulation of a metaphysical idealism that denies the autonomy of that world from conceptual thought. I argue that this interpretation is exactly wrong. Just by beginning in logic as the self-articulation of conceptual autonomy, the system is equipped to conceive of other domains of the real in and as they are thoroughly and radically autonomous from and other than the system itself. A consideration of the end of the logic and the beginning of the philosophy of nature shows how Hegel brings this off and establishes his system as capable of conceptualizing autonomy and otherness because of its thoroughgoing rejection of reductionist metaphysics.

Although logic’s thinking of thinking overcomes the difference between subject and object of knowing, subjectivity and objectivity have distinct logical determinations presupposed by objectivity in nature and subjectivity in rational agency. An analysis of Hegel’s account of subjectivity and objectivity in his Logic of the Concept shows how both can be differentiated without relying upon any contents of nature and spirit. This logical distinction of subjectivity and objectivity is then employed to clarify how objectivity in nature can be irreducible to objectivity in logic, independently of any empirical material, an insight bearing upon the whole relation between logic and reality and its formulation by Burbidge, Maker, and Halper.

This paper responds to the debate between John Burbidge, Edward Halper, and William Maker about the nature of Hegel’s idealism, and in particular of the relationship between Hegel’s logic and Realphilosophie. I argue that Maker’s position is the one most consistent with both what Hegel says about philosophy and Hegel’s own philosophical practice. I begin by highlighting the essential differences that separate the three interpretations and then turn to Hegel’s texts, to identify the passages that pose difficulties for the readings of Burbidge and Halper. I conclude by considering, and ultimately rejecting, the objections that Burbidge and Halper raise to Maker’s interpretation.

In this essay I argue that Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature combines four elements. Hegel develops (1) an a priori account of the logical determinations immanent in and peculiar to nature—determinations that incorporate (but are not reducible to) (2) the determinations set out in the Logic. Hegel then points to (3) the empirical phenomena corresponding to each determination and so proves indirectly that such phenomena are necessary. Finally, he draws attention to (4) those aspects of nature that cannot be explained by nature’s immanent logic and so are contingent. In this way, I argue, Hegel demonstrates a priori that certain natural processes are made necessary by the distinctive logic of nature, but he also recognizes that there are contingencies in nature that only empirical science can discover.