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Copyright of Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

For over a century, Hegel’s view of war is seen as controversial that results in mutually exclusive interpretations. To reach a proper evaluation of Hegel’s views, it is necessary to consider both Hegel’s initial states of philosophical doctrine about war and peace, and the development of his understanding of war from early works to mature ones. In the first part of the paper, I characterize Kant’s position on war, since it was the starting point for Hegel. Contrary to popular representations about Kant as an exclusive pacifist, the philosopher of Koenigsberg had a philosophical-historical treatment of war, in which the war appeared as something sublime. However, both legal-ethical peace understanding and veto of war from the point of practical reason were not dominant in Kant’s philosophy, subordinating the sublime treatment of war. Kant’s next contemporaries could not already keep this position, emphasizing either one or the other side of war interpretation. Starting from the early writings (the paper “On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law” or manuscripts “System of Ethical Life” and “The German Constitution”), Hegel stresses an ethical aspect of war and its necessity, so that the shield is arranged on the way of systems isolation and individuals atomization, and the unity in its ethical health is saved. Perpetual peace, on the contrary, leads to diseases. The statement about equality of claims and the same truthfulness of warring parties’ rights is the originality of Hegel’s view. It makes absolutely impossible the war evaluation from the point of its justice and injustice.

According to Hegel, the public misery caused by poverty and pandemic is a reality that individuals must face in order to sustain their livelihoods; moreover, it constitutes an important reference in the governance of different types of communities. In the context of Hegel’s philosophy of right, the public misery of the individual undergoes a transformation from the theological concept of “destiny”, to the philosophical one of “spirit”, which Hegel then constructed as a unique system for “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit). After he has formed the concept of ethical life, Hegel used it as a means to refine three governance approaches for the salvation (emancipation) of the individual; namely the governance of the church, the governance of civil society and the governance of the state. This article shows the logic of the evolution of Hegel’s three governance approaches in the process of change as he shaped the concept of ethical life. This not only reveals the inner structure of the relations and inferences of the categories in logic, but also reveals the dynamic mechanism of the proposition about “entity as subject” in phenomenology, so as to dialectically interpret Hegel’s way of salvation and his three governance approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Praktyka Teoretyczna is the property of University of Wroclaw and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Hegel believed the Antigone tragedy not only revealed the national spirit of ancient Greece but was indeed the greatest artwork of all time. displaying the “Logic of History”, was the critical role Antigone tragedy played in the phenomenology of spirit from the standpoint of Hegel. This article will attempt to answer how Hegel reads Antigone's tragedy and how he observes the “Logic of History” in it. Ancient Greek society, In Hegel’s point of view, has constantly been the symbol of “unity of life”. however, Hegel believes that at certain times in history, this unity of ethical life and its state of joy in Greece has been destroyed. Since Hegel believes literary works have historical-cultural implications and considers art and literature as the first medium by which the spirit becomes self-conscious, in the section “True Spirit, ethical Life” from the book Phenomenology of Spirit, he describes the fall of the ethical life of Greek society by reading of the Antigone tragedy. What Hegel understood from the Antigone tragedy was a series of painful conflicts that ensued as a consequence of a contradiction between ethical powers within Greek society. powers that had heretofore been in unreflected unity, but now that their contradictions revealed, the ethical life of society collapsed and the spirit moved to a more rational and liberated stage. These stages are in fact very much the irreversible final course of history toward achieving freedom.

The purpose of this article is to question Adorno's moral thought. Although Adorno constantly articulates morality with the social context, and although the object of his analyses is the way in which moral issues are mediated by social practices, morals and customs, his explicit privileged interlocutor in the elaboration of his moral reflection is Kant and not Hegel. Adorno intends to develop a moral theory, not an ethics. But given his presuppositions - one cannot think of a good life in a false context - he is indirectly confronted with the Hegelian concept of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) and tries to respond to the difficulties it raises. He thus deploys an inverted reading of Hegel, in which it is the impossibility of relying on morals, customs, or even institutions that compels us to redefine morality. Finally, Adorno proposes a notion of the inadequacy to the world of all moral life, due to the irremediable gap between custom and morality, which generates the need for an additional step to clear a path out of the existing order. On this path, it seems that Kant "is right where he is wrong", since by defending the individual, his moral philosophy contributes to a critical theory of society. The whole question is to know how our moral practices contribute to the shaping of this world for which we are responsible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the intersection in Hegel’s political thought between Aristotelianism – with its ideas of custom, the ethical life of the polis – and constitutional modernity. It shows how Hegel appropriated the classical issue of tyranny as well as Rousseau’s legislator, Machiavelli and Spinoza to evolve a unique concept of constituent power. Ethical life, in Hegel’s hands, was bent to political modernity. This resulted in a doctrine of the substance of the political that was simultaneously constituent and constituted power. The article argues that this led to a system of law that was also a metaphysic of spirit, which linked a given constitutional order perpetually to its organising form. The ontological status of political authority and its relation to law is a core problem of modern constitutionalism, which often reverts to a founding event, a regulative (normative) order or existential agency to justify itself. Through placing the notion of constituent power in a broader historical continuum, this study shows how Hegel’s political thought reveals how constitutions are neither a mere creature of law nor of sovereign decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the core of the principle of democracy is the claim that all individuals, or as many as possible, should decide for themselves and that they must be included in collective governance of the community in which the majority rules. However, drawing upon Hegel's theory of the state, I will show in this paper that in a democracy, the emphasis on individual rights, at the expense of developing the notion of universal good, is not only problematic, but dangerous because in the absence of rational authority of the state, people rely mainly on public opinion for guidance, which results in what Hegel may call the tyranny of the majority. As a consequence, democracy, which purports itself to be the champion of freedom, tends to be exclusivist and totalitarian as dissenting ideas are silenced by the "ruling majority" in actual democratic processes. In fact, the notion of "legitimacy" (i.e., legitimated by the majority) conduces to the assault on the inner will to resist rendering individuals in a democracy as "conformists." The paper concludes that, for Hegel, freedom can be realized not through democracy as espoused by the liberal theorists, but through his theory of the state the state being not only a guarantor of basic rights and liberties, but as a dimension of freedom which commits itself to a substantive vision of the universal good as the paramount object of human aspiration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interprets Hegel's engagement with tragedy and especially tragic action as an interpretive model for understanding ethical life in complex societies in which independent value spheres collide. Tragic recognition, in contrast to the kind of recognition introduced in the master and slave dialectic, is not based on desire, but arises from the suffering deriving from clashing value spheres. As a coming to terms with one's finitude, tragic recognition presents an important corrective to the account of mutual recognition that has been the reference point of contemporary interpretations of Hegel's social and political philosophy. The paper concludes by pointing to some of the limits of tragedy as a universal interpretive framework for modern societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to demonstrate that works of art and literature can provide important insights in law and justice that are hard to grasp by one-sidedly rationalist methods of academic analysis. It takes Sophocles’Antigone– perhaps the most classical text of law and literature’s familiar catalogue – as a case in point, drawing attention to some important aspects of that play’s legal epistemic relevance that are still largely overlooked. Arguing that the widespread view on the confrontation between Antigone and Creon as a clash between ‘divine’ and ‘human’ law is mistaken, the article builds on Hegel’s view that the positions of both protagonists are likewise incomplete, denying elements of law and justice that are equally essential, the one being no less divine than the other. However, it departs from Hegel’s analysis in maintaining that the play does not entail the promise of ‘ethical life’ (Sittlichkeit) as some synthesis that recognizes the specific value of both Antigone’s and Creon’s stances on law and justice but takes away their incompatibility. Instead, it is argued that the play teaches us that such harmonization is unattainable – a no less valuable lesson indeed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper concerns the question of the relationship between emotions and justice which has been increasingly found in the literature in the past years. Having in view empirically informed works on the role of emotive and affective contents on social practices, decision-making processes and on the constitution of moral judgments as background, the core idea we find in this debate is that the descriptive validity of a social theory depends on the analyses of the constitutive role of emotions and affects on social spheres. On the other hand, I want to suggest that Hegel can contribute towards a normative potential of those analyses through the approach of an articulation of the formative character of institutions, oriented by what can be understood as the institutional mediation of individual freedom through the idea of socially inclusive, “decentralized will”. Regarding this nexus between emotions and justice I will, in this paper, focus on the discussion of these ideas regarding the civil society, where I will briefly develop my argument in three short steps. Firstly, I will briefly suggest in what sense Hegel could help us in discussing the role of emotions for a social theory. In a second step I will point out a specific, emotional component in the sphere of civil society, namely, the relationship between passions and interests. Finally, I will connect this idea to a peculiarity based on Hegel’s concept of solidarity related to his idea of the formation of Will (“Willensbildung”), arguing that the concept of social justice depends not only on rational guided actions, but also in how far an institutional framework enables a volitional dimension that is justified, on one hand, by the satisfaction of individual needs and, on the other, by the sentiment of cooperation.

In addition to Axel Honneth’s thesis on the therapeutic function of the concept of ethical life in Hegel’s philosophy, I want to underline two moments which, to my mind, show Hegel’s views on the therapeutic dimension of both philosophy and the war against the pathology of civil society more clearly. In this context, (a) philosophy performs a corrective function by fostering the individual’s virtue conceived as an ethical duty of care both for oneself and for others. The main aim of Hegel’s practical philosophy is hence to return the individual from abstract subjective concepts to his concrete everyday intersubjective practices, and to show him the way to understand himself and the social world as originally related to each other; (b) one of the main problems for the moral development of individuals consists in their propensity to perceive the good in particularist and selfish terms: in this context events such as natural disasters or wars can be seen as performing a therapeutic function by teaching individuals to view the good in more principled and general terms. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 179049]

Copyright of Filozofski Vestnik is the property of Scientific Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences & Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay concentrates on the ideal dialogue that Hegel engages with Montesquieu in his Philosophy of Right focusing in particular on the relevance for Hegel of concepts such as the "spirit of a people" and of "manners" and customs discussed in the Esprit des Lois. According to Hegel, Montesquieu provided a real philosophical understanding of the history of people's laws and institutions considering them as necessary relationships within a historically determined society, that is as the whole set of its objective ways of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel is important because Kierkegaard was concerned with radical subjectivity as a value in itself. This is interesting because radical subjectivity detached from social institutions is such a prominent part of global society. Kierkegaard’s objection to Hegel is that Hegel makes subjectivity a moment in the political system and the person merely becomes a moment in the state. Kierkegaard believes that the unique thing about the individual as a moral creature is brushed aside by a more general morality in the form of the Ethical Life in the institutions of civil society of the state.

The article discusses Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Philosophy of Right focusing on habit. It is stated that Sittlichkeit, the concept of ethical of life is Philosophy of Right's third element that also include freedom and morality. It is the author's view that Hegel is convinced that Kantian moral theory is without self-realization, problems in Kantian ethics is also discussed.

The starting point in this article is Hegel's mature understanding of civil society as the birthplace of the modern meaning of the concept. Since this understanding is primarily the consequence of Hegel's coming to terms with political economy, the author problematizes Hegel's first attempt at incorporating modern economic topics into ethical totality in the 1802 Article on Natural Law. It is shown how the fundamental paradox of the first variety of Hegel's science of the state is his effort to renew the classical natural law framework in circumstances of modern economic and political life. It is for this reason that Hegel fails to see the full extent of the emancipatory potential and the specifically modern character of the system of economic and private-legal interdependence of individuals, thus, on the one hand, interpreting these as the consequence of the disintegration of antique ethical life while, on the other hand, in the construction of ethical totality, placing its members in the estate of the unfree. It is precisely due to this historical point of origin of these systems and the ways they incorporate into ethical totality that the article on natural law, concludes the author, cannot be seen as the place where Hegel finally formulated his theory of civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]