The paper argues that the idea that immediate (i.e., self-contained, supposedly cognitively unmediated) experience of itself suffices to provide for “evident” knowledge is an illusion. The step from experiential subjectivity to objective fact always presupposes some suppositionally “taken” (rather than experientially given) linkage of an objectively trans-experiential nature. The deployment of idealistically mind-postulated resources is always needed to underwrite the step from personal experience to putatively objective knowledge.

Logic, as a thinking of thinking, in which method and subject matter are indistinguishable, cannot begin with any determinate form or content without question begging. The essay examines how logic can proceed from such an indeterminate starting point and achieve closure as a valid thinking of valid thinking. Drawing upon the final chapter of Hegel’s Science of Logic, the essay examines the nature of the end of logic and the significance this termination has for both philosophical method, the difference between truth and correctness, and the possibility of thinking what is other than thought.

Hegel’s account of international relations in the closing sections of the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1820) has been the source of considerable philosophical confusion and anxiety. This is primarily due to the fact that Hegel leaves international law at the stage of abstract right and thus, argues that an international moral order is impossible. In his essay ‘Hegel Contra Hegel in his Philosophy of Right’ (1994) and again in his systematic commentary on the Grundlinien Modern Freedom (2001) Adriaan Peperzack puts forward an innovative solution to this problem. He argues that Hegel failed to see that his own account of the transition from Abstract Right to Morality contains the solution (i.e., the appearance of the judge). In this paper I question this solution by closely examining the transition from Abstract Right to Morality. On the basis of this examination I argue that the attempt to apply this transition to Hegel’s account of international relations runs aground on the problem of punishment.

A lexical unit of meaning, or the concept, involves not just two moments, the rule and the following of the rule, but two reciprocally dependent moments. I argue that this links meaning to value. As a reciprocal relation, truth as normative is constituted by what Hegel calls ethical substance, which exists only between more than one consciousness, or, as Hegel would say, moments of consciousness. I read these two moments as the two shapes of consciousness that Hegel calls the master and slave in the Phenomenology of Spirit.

This paper aims to make better sense of Hegel’s Philosophy of Objective Spirit and defend it against the charge of political conservatism and optimism. I will argue for the left Hegelian position in the theological-philosophical respect, thereby leaving the left-right divide in the social-political respect largely open. I will explain that Hegel’s commitment to the inherent rationality of the state and the course of human history as the progress of freedom does not imply blind optimism, since his thesis is not to be taken as a factual description. Hegel’s point is rather a conceptual one: to comprehend the human world means to comprehend it as a holistically rational entity and process, which is the essential nature of comprehending in the context of the humanities. I will further clarify Hegel’s point by introducing relevant ideas from contemporary philosophy of mind and language, comparing it in particular with Davidson’s principle of charity.

Paul Ricoeur sharply distinguishes his hermeneutics from Heidegger’s ‘ontological’ hermeneutics. An ontological hermeneutics, Ricoeur claims, is bound to be insufficiently critical. Yet this cannot be the whole story, since Ricoeur himself engages in ontological hermeneutics. What really distinguishes Heidegger’s hermeneutics from Ricoeur’s? I seek an answer to this question in the two thinkers’ appropriations of Kant. More specifically, I examine their appropriations of Kant’s view of the productive imagination, as conveyed in the Transcendental Schematism. Heidegger sees the productive imagination as a ‘third basic faculty’ prior to sensibility and understanding. Conceived in this way, the imagination is so primordial that it must be characterized in a highly abstract way. Ricoeur sees this move as dangerous, and tries to avoid it by reinterpreting the imagination as a faculty that requires the mediation of concrete symbols. In doing so, he hopes to preserve Kant’s insights while leaving room for critique.

August Ludwig Hülsen’s virtually forgotten “Prüfung der von der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin aufgestellten Preisfrage: Was hat die Metaphysik seit Leibniz und Wolf für Progressen gemacht?” (1796, J. F. Hammerich, Altona) is the first German post-Kantian system in which reason is conceived as developing in history according to speculative rule based on the logical resolving of contradictions. Notwithstanding, Hülsen’s system is up to this day almost entirely unknown to most scholars in the field. This paper outlines the fundamental aspects of Hülsen’s system and discusses two of its main innovations: (1) the deduction of the transcendental possibility of rational historicity, and (2) the systematic historization of Fichte’s concept of judging activity; the constitutive equivalent of consciousness’s logical-temporal substrate.