This essay traces the relationship between Hegel and some common portrayals of modern philosophy in the nineteenth century. I explain much of the rationale behind the neo-Kantian narrative of modern philosophy, and argue that the common division of modern philosophers into rationalists and empiricists executed a principally anti-Hegelian agenda. I then trace some failed attempts by anglophone philosophers to reconcile Hegel with the neo-Kantian history, in the interest of explaining Hegel’s subsequent unpopularity in England and America. Finally, I argue that recent attempts to read Hegel in Kantian terms often rest on a misguided appropriation of an anti-Hegelian historical narrative.

In this essay I distinguish the Phenomenology’s account of the French Revolution and Terror from the Philosophy of Right’s. Understanding the former’s discussion of the “Furie des Verschwindens” of Absolute Freedom requires an appreciation of the hopes and fears raised by the Enlightenment’s Nützlichkeit, the precise structure of “Absolute Freedom and Terror,” and the fact that Verschwinden for Hegel denotes a mode of non-corporeal negation that allows particulars to reveal a universality that they themselves are not. Read in this light, the Phenomenology’s account better explains actual political experience than does the Philosophy of Right’s critique of “negative freedom.”

Michael Quante has successfully shown that the “Morality” section of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right provides an account of the cognitive conditions that must be satisfied for the imputation of actions. In this essay, I argue that Quante’s picture of these conditions is misleadingly cropped, obscuring the fact that the specific cognitive conditions Hegel places on agency are much stronger than has been recognized, and of a different kind. This suggests a much different interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of action, one that treats action not as a psychological matter, but as conceptually linked to responsibility in a juridical and moral sense.

This paper aims to present Hegel’s conception of freedom—as “being at home with oneself in an other”—in simple and straightforward terms. Drawing primarily on the “Introduction” to the Philosophy of Right, in which Hegel outlines the nature of the will, and then the first part of the discussion of Sittlichkeit (ethical substance), in which the will finds its most concrete realization, the paper presents marriage as the paradigm of Hegel’s notion of freedom. Hegel’s abstract formulation, “the free will which wills the free will,” is fulfilled in marriage as a communal willing of community.

James Elkins argues that art historians should largely abandon the concept of the sublime as a way to understand art. In making this argument, he ignores the conception of the sublime in Hegel’s Aesthetics. This essay challenges Elkins’ argument and indicates how Hegel’s conception might be relevant. After summarizing Hegel’s conception of the sublime, the essay examines its potential significance today, both for interpreting contemporary artworks and for understanding the relations among art, religion, and philosophy. Contemporary art of the sublime provides an important reason why we need to reconceive these relations and reappropriate Hegel’s conception of the sublime.

Hegel begins the third main part of the Science of Logic, the “logic of the concept,” with the dialectic of universality. This dialectic, however, proves to be insufficient for the exposition of the fundamental structure of being-as-concept, because it is dominated by the perspective of self-identity. For this reason speculative logic develops a dialectic of particularity whose domain is dominated by the perspective of difference. While the dialectic of universality made explicit the meaning of the proposition-of-reason being-as-concept is universal, the dialectic of particularity aspires to make explicit the meaning of the conflicting proposition-of-reason being-as-concept is particular. The present paper attempts a detailed reconstruction of this dialectic and thereby a disclosure of the meaning of the onto-logical claim that being-as-concept is particular. It is first shown how Hegel’s account of the particular relates to the expression of a totality of particulars. Next it is argued that the speculative notion of the particular is extremely complex and that this complexity can be decoded by means of four dimensions. Third, it is explained how abstraction comes to be regarded by Hegel as the essence of the particular. I end the paper by discussing how the collapse of the dialectic of particularity gives rise to the category of the individual and its peculiar dialectic.

In recent years, commentators have devoted increasing attention to Hegel’s conception of conscience. Prominent interpreters like Frederick Neuhouser have even argued that many points of contact can be found between Hegel’s conceptions of conscience and moral subjectivity and historical and contemporary liberalism. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of an under-examined 1830 addition to the Philosophy of Spirit concerning the relation between religion and the state which proves particularly resistant to the kind of liberal interpretation of conscience which Neuhouser provides. I assess the significance of Hegel’s argument for the “inseparability” of ethical and religious conscience for liberal interpretations. I conclude by arguing that we can identify a kind of consistency between the Philosophy of Right and the later writings and lectures, but that Hegel’s conception of conscience is incompatible with contemporary political liberalism.

Hegel’s view of India is famously negative, and postcolonial scholarship has been largely dominated by a view of Hegel as little more than a chauvinist. This paper argues that this interpretation is one-sided and overly simplistic. Most approaches to Hegel on India focus on the well-known lectures on the philosophy of history, imposing an overly teleological reading upon Hegel’s view of cultural difference. In contrast, I demonstrate the ambiguity of Hegel’s conception of India through a close reading of Hegel’s little-known essay on the Bhagavad-Gītā (Über die unter dem Namen Bhagavad-Gita bekannte Episode des Mahabharata von Wilhelm von Humboldt). Hegel believed that the Bhagavad-Gītā was India’s paradigmatic text, and he used this essay as a platform for discussing Indian thought in general. In distinction to Bradley Herling’s interpretation of the Gītā essay, I contend that here Hegel has an unexpectedly positive view of Indian thought, but only insofar as it appears to reflect his own.

In this summary I introduce the interpretive framework for Hegel's Conscience and then provide an overview of the book’s six chapters.