Search

As a source of innovation, scientific and technological creativity has long been praised in modern society as if in a mantra. However, neither the analysis of historical inventions and discoveries nor the manifold efforts to understand and foster creativity offer a guarantee of innovation success in the future, nor has a widely accepted understanding of creativity prevailed in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Against this background, it is appropriate to revisit influential reflections on creativity made by classics of modern dialectic philosophy and make them fruitful for today’s situation. From this perspective, alienated labour, although creative by its very nature, appears subjectively as a toil or necessity, and is opposed to pleasure and freedom; but although the true realm of freedom begins beyond the boundaries of work, it depends on it. We suggest that whether it is an engineer in a nineteenth-century factory, an engineer in a mid-twentieth-century office, or their descendants working with computer-aided design, their activity can be studied on the same methodological basis derived from these reflections, and that this opens up new perspectives for STS.

This chapter inquires into the interpretation of the concept of freedom of speech some two centuries ago by comparing views and actions of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the American philosopher and statesman James Madison. They were approximate contemporaries, but the article shows that considerable differences between them can be identified and illustrated. Hegel has sometimes been portrayed as a champion of freedom, but it is suggested that the mature Hegel held authoritarian views on freedom of speech and that his actions confirm this interpretation. By contrast, the chapter underlines the ways that Madison advocated the toleration of dissenting views. His writings in the context of the Sedition Act are well known, but what has been less appreciated is the way he tolerated vituperative criticism during the War of 1812, and thereby initiated the uniquely American tradition of toleration of dissent even in war time.

This chapter provides a brief history of Kantianism in Russia since the late eighteenth century and identifies the main themes of Kantianism in Russia. It considers the reasons for the uneven and intermittent spread of Kantianism, the main motives behind the fierce resistance to Kantianism within the framework of certain trends of Orthodox thought, and the ways in which this philosophical polemic was reflected in the Russian literature. The achievements of Russian Kantianism are analyzed with attention to both its undeniable merits and its weaknesses and inconsistencies. In addition, the scope and scale of Russian Kantianism will be compared with Schellingism and Hegelianism in Russia. On the basis of this comparison, I will argue against the stereotype that Russian philosophy is resistant to Kant.

This chapter is concerned with the second of the four books of Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity, which bears the title “The Categories.” It occupies 164 pages, a fifth of the total. While most systematic metaphysicians treat of categories in some form, it is rare for one to discuss the topic at such length: what we have is practically a treatise within a treatise. Alexander understands categories to be those qualities of space-time that are pervasive and fundamental. A comparative exposition is given of Alexander’s theory of categories, with allusions to Kant and Hegel. It is argued that one distinctive aspect of Alexander’s theory of categories is that it is realist through and through, unlike Kant’s. A critical evaluation is then given of how Alexander describes and infers his list of categories, showing what lessons there are to be learnt for contemporary metaphysics.

This chapter outlines the basic objectives of the book and highlights the general theoretical grounds on which the book develops its central argument that all human experience is fundamentally haunted. The primary points of reference include psychoanalytic theory, specifically Jacques Lacan’s object relational theory of ego development and his reading and expansion of Freud’s theory of the psychic apparatus and its dynamics; along with the Hegelian ontology of the negative and its later modifications by twentieth-century philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida; and the semiotics of difference introduced by Saussure and worked by Jakobson and others. Whereas ontology can be read as an attempt to exorcise “reality as such” from the ambiguities that irreducibly haunt human experience of reality, hauntology is described here as an evocation that seeks not to exorcise, but simply to recognize and address the endless ghosts that are created by the very act of human perception and cognition, and hence subjective experience. Finally, hauntology is outlined here as a mode of understanding power and its working in ways fundamentally different from historical, archaeological, or even a Foucauldian genealogical modality, in that instead of attempting to establish that which was, hauntological analysis seeks to recognize—to allow to come forward, to speak—that which had been to be but was not, that which could have been, the future that hailed the past but was forced to disappear from its horizon.

Taking its inspiration from Žižek’s essay ‘Why are there always two fathers?’ the introduction explores antecedents for Hitchcock (Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau) and Žižek (Hegel and Lacan). It is argued that Žižek reads the dialectical process of Hegel in a more radical way such that the dialectic does not produce a resolution or a synthesized viewpoint, rather it points out that contradiction is an internal condition of every identity. Like Žižek, Hitchcock’s early influences were German: he worked briefly on one German film and directed two of his own. He had a relationship with several key German directors including Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, and German filmmaking was the early source for many of his ideas about filmmaking. This introduction outlines the main features of Žižek’s revitalization of film theory and the questions of influence and tradition, innovation and influence that are explored in the book as a whole.

This chapter provides a first outline of Adorno’s idea of philosophy, starting from the course on the Concept of Philosophy which he held in Frankfurt in 1951–1952. For Adorno, the concept of philosophy coincides with that of “criticism”; and criticism is envisaged in the light of the Hegelian concept of “determinate negation”, which always remains a fundamental point of reference for the Frankfurt philosopher. The chapter analyses the Adornian concept of “determinate negation”, along with some of the problems and difficulties it entails.

Addressing the issue of the reification of utopia, I argue that, while Liu Cixin’s utopianism should not be understood in any simple sense as Hegelian or Marxist, there are features of his utopianism that still suffer from a similar fatalism towards moral progress. In Three Body, these impulses are not rational but are rather deeply psychological, carrying seemingly Confucian and Daoist undertones, and are therefore inherently distinct to the fatalism that emerged in Western political thought. It is these very underlying tensions, I argue, that made the trilogy so interesting to Western readers in the first place.

This essay examines the notion of shame in Hegel’s writings as a case study to show that an emotion that is generally considered ‘negative’ may nonetheless fulfil important functions in the life of the subject. In none of Hegel’s works the concept of shame is analysed systematically and thoroughly. Therefore, I will start by analysing the encyclopaedic Anthropology to show how feelings always presume, for Hegel, states of physiological arousal and include bodily manifestations. Subsequently, on the basis of the encyclopaedic Psychology, I will show not only that the philosopher attributes considerable importance to sensations and feelings in general but also considers the emotional dimension of the subject in continuity with rational thinking. Eventually, I will examine some relevant passages of the Encyclopaedia Logic and the Aesthetic and I will show how, for Hegel, shame plays a relevant role in the process of development of the human being. Indeed, shame is considered by the philosopher as the constitutive place of self-consciousness. Contextually, I will try to retrieve the relations, by way of comparison and contrast, between the Hegelian understanding of shame and the most recent psychological and neuroscientific findings.

This chapter will be devoted to the itinerary of classical German thought, and especially Hegel, in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. I begin by examining Merleau-Ponty’s initial use of Hegel’s systematic and metaphysical ideas in phenomenological analyses of behavior (comportement) and perception. Next, I examine Merleau-Ponty’s role in controversies regarding the existentialists’ interpretation and objections to Hegel’s system. I trace his attempts to surmount antinomies between subjectivity and system that emerged in the existentialist’s anthropological reading of Hegel. Here Merleau-Ponty focused on linguistics and more general analyses of institution and expression. Finally, I will view the renewed role that classical German philosophy, including Schelling and Hegel, played in his final works. Still reflecting these interests, his writings and lectures engaged in a wide-ranging dialogue with contemporary aesthetics, science, and philosophy, culminating in an attempt to formulate a new ontology.

This chapter explores the concept of sedimentation in Hegel’s account of absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s 1954–55 course notes on institution and passivity. The chapter first identifies the notion of sedimentation that informs Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on institution. Such a sedimentation involves a non-egoic modality of retention that activates critical thinking. The chapter then explains why absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit rests on a process of sedimentation that is very much in line with Merleau-Ponty’s analysis. My argument revolves on the aspects of self-appropriation and ownership that characterize Hegel’s account of absolute spirit, which are integral to a Hegelian-inspired view of ethical memory.

Using a methodology that allows for pluralistic interpretation of historical reality, we examine the revolutionary paradigm as a return to centuries-old Russian history. This pluralism also applies to various interpretations of the role of individuals in history. We present two typical personality features that manifested during Russia’s Decembrist Revolt (1825) and the October Revolution (1917), aristocratism and artistry. We also analyze a variety of concepts for treating historical reality: the rational (G.W.F. Hegel) and the irrational (W. Windelband). The latter perspective is based on the argument that the “realized value is the irrational fact of history” (S.I. Hessen), which no science can explain. The pluralism of methodologies and worldviews also includes F.M. Dostoevsky’s “believed-in meaning of history.” We address the problem of relationship between historical events by interpreting history through a typologization of personalities. A pluralism of historical theories allows the individual to act not from the position of the best possible (aristos), but from the position of the creative, artistic “many-souledness” of the bohemian (F.A. Stepun).

Gabriel Marcel, the first French existentialist, was influenced by the idealism of Hegel, Fichte, and Schopenhauer. Though Marcel ultimately rejected idealism because he believed it deconstructed unified systems only to replace them with others, he admitted throughout his career that his own views were often a response to idealism or his early commitment to it. Especially important was the idealist relationship between existence and the self’s knowledge of the self as an object in the world. That epistemic moment grounded Marcel’s “ethical self,” the self that can break free of the limits of facticity and primary reflection to create and sustain existential meaning. This essay explores Marcel’s philosophical evolution, the “ethical self,” and strengthens its ideological debt to German Idealism.

What does it mean to act in the light of a norm? According to Robert Pippin, despite promising overtures, and in contrast to Hegel, Heidegger has no coherent answer to this question. Steven Crowell disagrees. In responding to Pippin’s challenge, Crowell develops a sophisticated reading of Heidegger-on-norms that exploits and expands Heidegger’s inheritance of German Idealist thought around the topic of self-legislation. This chapter has two principal aims. Firstly, it argues that Crowell’s argument fails as a defense of Heidegger. Secondly, it develops a reading of Heidegger to provide an alternative response to Pippin’s challenge.

Hegel is known for coining the word “phenomenology” as a description of the methodological approach that he pursues in the famous work that bears this title. It has long been an open question the degree to which the later philosophical school of phenomenology in fact follows the actual method developed by Hegel or if it merely co-opted the name and applied the term in a new context. While Husserl was dismissive of Hegel, the French phenomenologists were generally receptive to Hegel’s conception of phenomenology. This chapter argues that there are in fact some important points of continuity and that the French phenomenological school’s understanding of Hegel as a forerunner of their movement is quite legitimate.

In this chapter I explore the tie between the notion of ‘vulnerability’ and the critique of the sovereign subject in Judith Butler’s later thought, tracing its connections with G. W. F. Hegel and the critical reception of the German thinker by other authors like Slavoj Žižek or Jean-Luc Nancy. I will develop this issue in three stages. First, I will explore Butler’s approach to the question of the subject, which she receives under the influence of Adorno and Foucault as an ‘opaque subject’, and analyse the connection between vulnerability and the critique of the sovereign subject. Secondly, I will try to develop this notion of subject which Butler portrays, as present in the Hegel reception by Nancy, Malabou or Žižek. Lastly, I will outline how Butler tries to develop a ‘double-edged’ concept of vulnerability which is politically useful, by understanding that vulnerability is both that which enables us to establish ‘sexual, social, and ethical modes of relationality’ and, at the same time, that by which we might ‘become subject to exploitation’. I will also try to sketch the critical approach to binary thought, of Hegelian heritage, assumed by Butler in her political-philosophical considerations.

This chapter presents Marx’s life from his university years up to the revolution of 1848, while also providing an overview of the development of his thought during that period. Through tracing the theoretical development that began from his days as a Young Hegelian, the chapter clearly shows the significance of the “new materialism” and “materialistic view of history” that Marx established through his Theses on Feuerbach and German Ideology. This chapter focuses in particular on the development of his critique of the Enlightenment.

Science has become the new worldview. When we look up, we do not see heaven, we see galaxies, supernovas, the edge of black holes, an infinite expanding universe. When we are ill, we see a medical doctor, not a priest. The rational-scientific worldview is replacing world religions as a way to perceive the universe and ourselves in it. Because of the decline of the religious worldview—globally—secular humanism has emerged to ensure the rights and safety of human individuals. The United Nations bill of human rights, the American Bill of Rights and the humanistic organizations and humanistic philosophies have begun to fill the gap left by the absence of religion, and, the non-moral aspect of science—which is rational but contains no ethics, no value judgments. Together, science and humanism could become the new “zeitgeist” for the modern world. As Hegel put it, human self-consciousness has reached a new peak—this as we embark on flights to space, which Hegel never envisioned.

With the events in Hong Kong in 2019 to 2020, it is clear that the “one-country-two-system” is no longer working as it should. Under the sovereignty of the largest remaining totalitarian state, this chapter will first argue that, apart from the undermining of freedom, rule of law and basic human right, the biggest danger of totalitarianism to Hong Kong is the jeopardizing or even destruction of the mutual trust in the civil society. It then moves on to show that totalitarianism, communism in particular, is a form of nihilism in the Nietzschean sense that “the highest value devalues itself, the question ‘why?’ finds no answer”, and will go through texts from Karl Marx and Sergey Nechaev to Hannah Arendt to illustrate this point. It will then analyse how this process of destruction is happening in Hong Kong in the form of what we may call, in Harvel’s term, “post-totalitarianism”. Finally, using Hegel’s theory, it will argue that the civil society can act as a bulwark against totalitarian state by championing arete as the common good.

As is well known, the renowned Hegel scholar, Franz Rosenzweig, had a dramatic break with Hegel in particular and German Idealism more broadly, as strikingly evidenced in his magnum opus, The Star of Redemption. In the third or 1815 draft of Die Weltalter, Schelling writes that while “all thinking must begin the dialectic, it cannot end in the dialectic.” Schelling continued his turn toward what he called “positive philosophy,” which emerges “toto caelo” differently than from the “universality” and “indeterminacy” of negative thought (as he first characterized it in the 1809 Freedom essay). What is this new mode of thought, born—both for Schelling and for his unexpected admirer Rosenzweig—from the limitations of negative thought? How does one characterize this rupture within Idealism itself?

This paper explores Simone de Beauvoir’s response to G. W. F. Hegel’s formulation of freedom. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes freedom as a twofold, negative movement of dissolution and construction. Beauvoir takes up this distinction in terms of revolution and creative transformation, additionally describing two empty articulations of freedom found in “complaint” and “resignation.” In complaint, the existent is unable to transform the situation in a positive sense and simply reacts against it; in resignation, the existent merely submits to the given. Through this analysis, Beauvoir moves beyond Hegelian optimism by naming modalities of ineffectual freedom requiring attention before the realization of social transformation and revolution.

Ricoeur’s readers usually assume they understand his view of Hegel, since he talks about Hegel often and likes to characterize various aspects of his work as “Hegelian.” What often goes unnoticed is that Ricoeur does not always use this term in the same way. This chapter argues that Ricoeur uses the term “Hegelian” in three distinct senses: a methodological, an ontological, and a metaphilosophical sense. These senses overlap, but they are also in tension, and this fact greatly complicates the task of identifying Ricoeur’s attitude toward German Idealism—especially his claim in Time and Narrative that contemporary philosophers should “renounce Hegel.”

The organic mode of production meant the unhindered access of the human species to nature, a metabolism, by which the species could appropriate in order to consume. In order to meet the needs of sustenance, Communism in Marx was modeled on the organic mode of production. In The Philosophy of Right Hegel wrote of a “System of Needs,” of the mutual interconnection of abilities and needs. Hegel recognized that it was the ethical responsibility of the state to meet the needs of all members of society. In a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle Marx demonstrated a continuity with Hegel and wrote that the principle “from each according to their ability to each according to their needs” was the calculus of communism. Aristotle was one of the first to speculate on the calculus of abilities and needs and when Marx adopted this concept he again illustrated his continuity with the ethics of Classical Greek Humanism. Marxism was a rebellion against the eighteenth-century Enlightenment because it focused on Natural Rights, Natural Law, John Locke, and Eighteenth Century Political Economy which emphasized the need for private acquisition as a means to advance social prosperity. Marx replaced Enlightenment Materialism and Individualism with the morality of community, or civil society.

Apart from the Marx for whom ‘the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future’ there is a ‘late Marx’ who begins to engage with what we now call underdevelopment. In the section Beyond Stages we show how Marx, in the last decade of his life, engaged closely with events in Russia and broke with his earlier sometimes schematic vision of unilinear development. Marx now fully accepted that there was no unilinear path of human development and that the stages of development could be ‘skipped’ so to speak thus opening the way to a multilinear conception of capitalist development. Overall, we find that it is a question of Politics in Command when Marx and Engels deal with the world beyond Europe, for example in relation to Ireland and Latin America, where political criteria prevail in the way in which they analyse development prospects. The criteria for supporting or not national development paths is still, to a degree bound up with the Hegelian concept of historic and non- historic peoples that Engels, in particular, took up and accepted. Finally, we turn to the way in which Marx sought to account for the dynamics of the global economy, conscious of the fact that he never wrote the planned volume on the World Economy. We thus explore the issue of ‘Unequal Exchange’ between the various regions of the world, developed and underdeveloped as we would say today. We see here a line of continuity between Marx’s incipient theory of the global economy and the contemporary theory of dependency that posits a structural condition of inter-national domination.

Marx’s method of historical explanation derived from logical categories bequeathed to him by Aristotle and Hegel. The Aristotelian logical categories influencing Marx were: subject-object, predication-attribution, actual-potential, substance-essence, immanence, theory-practice, dialectic-syllogism. The following Hegelian logical categories, some a continuity from Aristotle, also flowed into Marx’s method of historical explanation: appropriation-consumption, actual-potential, subject-object, substance-essence, form-content, realization, teleology. Continuing the logical apparatus of Aristotle and Hegel Marx’s method of historical explanation consisted of the following categories: subject-object, actual potential, substance-essence, appropriation-consumption, alienation-self-estrangement. On the basis of these logical categories Marx critiqued eighteenth-century political economy and the theories of natural law and natural rights. Marx did not understand history as a linear development, but as the historiography of the modes of production. Marx was not an economic determinist, but rather analyzed the succession of modes of production: not a dialectician, but a syllogist.

This chapter explores the relationship Hegel holds to Wolff’s two psychologies. Hegel’s comments on empirical psychology and rational psychology in general and on Christian Wolff’s contributions in particular are rare and dispersed throughout his work, but his thoughts on the objective, substantial, and methodological problems associated with those philosophical sciences can mainly be found in his Science of Logic and in his Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. In the wake of Kant’s critical analysis, classical questions about simplicity, substantiality, immateriality, and immortality, which formerly belonged to psychology, were abolished, together with traditional metaphysics. Hegel focused his attention once again on those subjects. In his eyes, such questions could only arise as problems if the meaning of the underlying concept of the soul presupposed it to be a “thing.” In order to keep his distance from such problems, he introduced into the science of the soul a new comprehension he called the “speculative manner” or “the concept.”

This chapter clarifies the ways Engels coined the term “dialectics” in his Dialectics of Nature from the perspective of the Plan 1878. Engels largely works with two parameters of opposition: metaphysics versus dialectics and idealism versus materialism. The theoretical arena in which he defended dialectics and materialism against metaphysics and idealism is shaped by a third pair of opposites which he tried to overcome: natural sciences versus philosophy. In proposing to distinguish three larger and four smaller projects that make up Engels’s philosophical enterprise, this chapter argues that what is commonly regarded as the plan of Dialectics of Nature was actually planned to be the plan of Engels’s second project. Furthermore, while Engels seems to owe much to Hegel in reconfiguring the conception of dialectics in the Plan 1878, he plays off, contra Hegel, dialectics against metaphysics by positing both terms as opposites rather than compatibles.

This chapter draws on Fredric Jameson’s concept of the hysterical sublime originally coined in his writing on postmodernism. Moving between the concept of the sublime in Kant and Hegel, as a way to approach the subject’s relation to nature and to reality, and the hysterical sublime, which relates the subject to products of its own making, such as technological objects and machinery, a Lacanian approach to the twin dilemmas of climate change and automation is proposed. Here, the role of the hysteric is leveraged as an agent central to the production of knowledge. The hysteric’s discourse is posited as a medium for approaching the historical conjuncture that intersects the end of nature and the end of humanity.

The purpose of this essay is to provide an account of Max Scheler’s notion of history and the growing influence that idealism had on its development. For much of this development, Scheler had sought to chart a middle course between Hegel and Marx, or as he expresses it in his later works, a course between idealism and realism. As my argument demonstrates, idealism comes to have an increasing impact on Scheler’s notion of history when he begins in his later work to reflect on the end (or beginning) of history and in particular when he seeks to articulate a “new cosmopolitanism” and “balancing” of cultures at this end.

The utopian concept, emancipatory idealism is introduced in this chapter. Emancipatory idealists argue that the protection of individuals and groups from modes of oppression, such as war or crimes against humanity, is of paramount importance for the sake of civilisational development, be it on a technological or societal level. Ultimately, emancipatory idealism is an umbrella concept that provides a justification as to why other idealist concepts such as human rights and human dignity should be sought after. Using the works of Hegel, Critical Theorists, Phillip Allot and Anne Peters the substance of emancipatory idealism is explored in order to suggest that when the central aims of the concepts have been sought after, the international legal system has undergone some of its most positive developments.

This chapter discusses two of Ilyin’s major philosophical works (the only two available in English translation): The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity (1918) and The Essence of Legal Consciousness (1956). Both are placed against the background of defining events in the often-difficult circumstances of Ilyin’s life. Ilyin provided a substantial exposition, interpretation, and critique of the whole of Hegel’s philosophy. While many elements of that exposition and interpretation deserve commendation, his critique fails in fundamental respects. Ilyin was formally educated in the Faculty of Law of Moscow University (between 1901 and 1910), with special concentration on the history of philosophy and philosophy of law. The writing of his major work on legal philosophy stretched over much of his adult life, and was published only after his death. It focused on the concept of pravosoznanie (Rechtsbewusstsein in the nineteenth-century German original), loosely translatable as “legal consciousness.” The work is a passionate defense of the necessity for the rule of law in any genuine state, and a detailed account of the likely consequences in practice of any corruption of that ideal—with historical examples drawn mainly from his own lifetime.

In this chapter I introduce the first of two definitions that this volume attributes to the revolutionary documentary work of the Russian Jew David Abelevich Kaufman, better known as Dziga Vertov (1896–1954), canonically acknowledged as the leading documentary forerunner in Soviet Union film history. The chapter abides by the rule of thumb that any historical reading—and, conversely, any contextual analysis and/or philosophical evaluation of Vertov’s mega-project—applies. Specifically, one should never assume or attempt to encompass his entire praxis in one breath. In that vein, the chapter modestly focuses on a rich paragraph from his exceptionally astute debut proclamation “WE: Variant of a Manifesto.” In examining Vertov’s early-career definition of documentary at close range, and through the lens of his neologism (one among many) “Kinochestvo,” I argue that nothing less than an aggressive hermeneutic gesture is required in order to unpack Vertov’s combustive definitional thrust that translates into a complex philosophical line of argumentation. In this context I present the case that Vertov’s early definition relies on and responds to the logic and structure of Hegelian Aufhebung in order to establish his space-time matrix for documentary.

This chapter investigates Hegel’s impact on nineteenth-century German thought by reference to the question of freedom that so preoccupied nineteenth-century Russian thinkers. The investigation is articulated into three parts, each dealing with a different kind of freedom and a Russian thinker who addressed that kind of freedom extensively by engaging with Hegel’s thought. Thus it deals with Mikhail Bakunin’s attempts to define freedom in the political sphere, Alexander Herzen’s concern with human freedom in relation to nature and Vladimir Soloviev’s broad notion of human emancipation as a process of deification.

The final chapter of the book is centred on the communicative paradigm as the third post-unitary pattern of order. This conception can be traced back to the theory of intersubjectivity sketched in Hegel’s early writings and later resumed by the young Marx. After more than a century of subjectivistic domination in Western philosophy, intersubjectivity was rediscovered by Hannah Arendt and by the American pragmatists. In a second step, then, the authors of the second Frankfurt School, especially Karl-Otto Apel and Jurgen Habermas, further developed the notion of intersubjectivity by formulating an ambitious concept of communicative rationality. The result is a complex and multilayered vision, in which the clearly expressed preference for democratic legitimacy at any level of governance is reconciled with the necessity of global inclusion. Furthermore, the recognition of diversity as a value—shared with the other post-unitary understandings—is here linked, much stronger than in postmodernism or in systems theory, to the high normative standards that characterized the most distinguished achievements of Western modern individualism.

Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is important to phenomenology for a number of reasons. One chief reason is that Gadamer describes his philosophical hermeneutics as an attempt to advance beyond the early Heidegger’s introduction of a “hermeneutics of facticity” that would break from the transcendental idealism of Husserl’s phenomenology. This chapter argues that Gadamer attempts to clarify his advance beyond Heidegger’s hermeneutical turn in phenomenology, at least in part, in reference to Hegel’s philosophy. While Gadamer remains critical of German Idealism generally and Hegel’s notion of “absolute” spirit in particular, Gadamer nevertheless embraces Hegel’s approach to “objective” spirit in order to elucidate historical and linguistic conditions of facticity that the early Heidegger appears to discount.

In Being and Time Heidegger gives preference to Hegel’s ontology of time over earlier conceptions of time (including Aristotle’s and Kant’s), on account of his insight that time is in some sense neither subjective nor objective. However, he objects to Hegel’s method of unfolding the concept of time, which according to him relapses into a “vulgar” conception of presence as an empty point. Heidegger confuses Hegel’s method with an object-level claim about the ontology of time and, therefore, misses—among other things—the crucial Hegelian insight from the philosophy of nature and subjective spirit that time has to be embodied by thinkers. Historical time is not an automated, ontotheological process of absolute spirit’s self-revelation, but rather a conception of the human being as free agent.

In democratic welfare states, a growing number of immigrants form a permanent part of the citizenry but are not recognized as full members of the demos as they fail to meet the demands set for full political membership. For instance, states may demand work and economic self-support as proof of integration. This paper aims to show that the theory of recognition developed by G.W.F. Hegel could further the contemporary demos-debates concerning legitimate justifications of in- and exclusion substantially. Hegel articulated theories of recognition, freedom, and social recognition of great relevance for evaluating contemporary policies of integration such as demands of work and self-support as a prerequisite for naturalization. Normative political theoretical debates about policies of in- and exclusion of immigrants seldom confront whether work could be understood as a relevant driver and marker of integration. Much can be learned from Hegel’s attempt to describe what he took to be a realistic utopia of integrated citizens reproducing freedom through recognition. This analytical model asks whether policies of integration help linking individual and communal identities and types of freedom in ways that promote rather than undermine the freedom of the individuals and the community. The central motor of integration is here taken to be recognition once this takes institutional forms that promote both individual and communal freedom, while transforming both in manners that allow them to link.

Slavery appears as an ambivalent concept in Hegel’s work which at once objectivizes the principles of the rational state and goes against them. The aim of this chapter is twofold: (i) to adumbrate Hegel’s dialectic and teleological narratives of world history and (ii) to explore Fanon’s critique of Hegel. Fanon lays bare the ethnocentrism inherent in the dialectic. In Black Skin, White Masks, he shows that color is a factor in the dialectic. In The Wretched of the Earth, he discounts the teleological narratives of progress for their complicity in Europe’s colonial project. Fanon identifies an otherness which is not situated within the dialectic, a difference which cannot be synthesized and digested by world history and which Hegel uses to justify historical slavery.

Marx’s theory of capitalism was significantly influenced by Aristotle’s and Hegel’s theory of the syllogism. In Hegel the formula of the syllogism was: Universal-Particular-Individual, or the Universal was not dialectically negated by the Particular, rather they fused and originated a distinct and newly created Individual. As a measure of continuity Marx understood capitalism in terms of the syllogism, Money-Commodity-Money, or Money incrementalize. Capitalism was the production of commodities for the sole purpose of selling them for profit and the acquisition of Money. Another area of continuity between Marx and Aristotle concerned the ethical principles of distributive justice, reciprocity, equivalence, the commensurate. All these Aristotelian principles were the ethical foundations of Marx’s theory of communism. A major discontinuity between Aristotle/Hegel and Marx concerned the state. Neither Aristotle nor Hegel called for the abolition of the state. Aristotle recognized the distinction between government and state. Although there was a discontinuity between Marx and Aristotle and Hegel over the state there was also a continuity between Marx and Aristotle regarding the preservation of government, or Marx maintained that the government, the commune, would continue after the overthrow of the state.

The aim of my contribution is to outline three points of overlap between Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Durkheim’s sociology of morality in their respective views on social ethics: I will start by characterizing their shared conviction that the foundation of any form of morality cannot be found in some abstract principles but in actually existing, institutionalized normative rules that inform us about our role-obligations (i). In the second step I will show that Hegel and Durkheim also share the social-theoretical conviction that we should differentiate modern societies into three different spheres (family—civil society/market—state) all entailing different sorts of role-obligations; a part of this step will also specifically deal with the question of how both thinkers conceive of the problems raised by the modern, capitalist market economy (ii). In the third part of my contribution I will consider the question of whether we find in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right a placeholder for what Durkheim refers to as a kind of cosmopolitan ethics, a standpoint beyond the role-obligations connected to membership in individual states (iii). In my conclusion I will raise the question of the relevance of Hegel’s and Durkheim’s shared views on the basis for social ethics for contemporary discussions in political and social philosophy.

Supporters of agency research in archaeology are currently divided into two groups: those who remain somewhat faithful to classical social theories that define agency as a manifestation of individual and/or collective intentions, and those who have embraced object agency and perceive it as a dynamic force distributed among human and non-human objects. This chapter argues that agency according to the view of these two groups is too labile, contradictory, and counterproductive, and suggests a notion of agency based on G.W.F. Hegel’s practical philosophy—a notion of agency based on ethical normativism. For Hegel, agency concerns the normative conditions that allow agents to experience and claim actions as their own. Ownership over actions imply assuming responsibility for those same actions. From these ideas, it becomes clear that agency is not a property of human individuals nor of social collectives, as suggested by theorists such as Roy Bhaskar and Anthony Giddens, but rather a historical product enacted by social institutions. Rather than the causal descriptions in which most of archaeological science is embedded, social archaeology concerns the understanding (Verstehen) of human action under intentional descriptions. Social archaeology is the de facto study of agency in past societies, an archaeology built around historical content that contextualizes the intentional/ethical actions of past peoples.

This chapter articulates the contours of a fourth approach to sociology, Multiplitism. In doing so, it traces the shift from Hegelian and Marxist, but also Structuralist triadism, to the quadruple or squared logic of Badiou. The chapter explains how Badiou’s translation of the mathematical set theory includes all other scientific bases such as those of previous sociological paradigms, and grounds a new direction to sociology of multiplicities based on the notion of the void. This evasion of the One (and the other, Two), as anti-social foundation that pervades previous social paradigms and approaches, leads to the new materialist, scientific and critical thinking of the social.

Following the positivist, biological and dualistic basis of sociology, this chapter explores the reactions against it from the second sociological paradigm of Conflictualism. Although its beginning with Marx preceded Positivism, it was only linked to sociology as a reaction against the latter and an attempt to revive the negative, critical reasoning of social science. Unlike Positivism’s relation with Kantian philosophy and biological science, the diverse conflictual paradigm is based on history and therefore appeals to Hegel. While Marx is the most identified with this paradigm, he is accompanied by surprising thinkers such as French structuralists given their shared adherence to triadic logic.

The article examines a corpus of works of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin with the intention of reconstructing the contributions of both authors to a critical theory of the intellectual. Placed between the fronts, both essayists tried to bring together the social and political commitment and the search of a politicization of the intellectuals with the reluctance to accept and reproduce the dictations of a dogmatic party organization. Term of comparison for the context of production of both authors is the Paris of the Restaurationszeit, in which a group of exiled German thinkers and writers constituted themselves as the first modern intellectuals, identified with the figure of the torn consciousness (zerrissenes Bewustsein), as it was formulated by Hegel.

Aristotle’s essay “The Soul” was an attempt to account for the origins of human motivation. Aristotle divided the soul into three parts, sensation, nutrition, and mind, and the unity of these three parts was the source of human intervention into the external world and Aristotle branded the human as a “constitutive subject.” Aristotle was a naturalist and his theory of the “constitutive subject” passed into Hegel and Marx. Both continuities and discontinuities existed between Aristotle, Hegel, and Marx. As a moment of transition, in The Phenomenology of Labor Hegel adopted the principle of the “ constitutive subject,” but changed the substance, or the source of human motivation was mind. In terms of continuity Marx was also influenced by the concept of the “constitutive subject.” In terms of discontinuity from both Aristotle and Hegel Marx saw the substance of human motivation as labor. Marx portrayed history as evolving out of the pneumatology of labor. It is only by understanding the continuities and discontinuities between these three geniuses that an accurate understanding or the singularity of Marx can be attained.