Hegel's Dialectic in Historical Philosophy

Philosophy ◽  
1940 ◽  
Vol 15 (59) ◽  
pp. 243-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. O. Wisdom
Keyword(s):  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Necessary Truth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Interesting Correlation ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Psychological Truth ◽  
A Chain

Conflicting Systems in the History of Philosophy. Hegel's logic consists, as is well known, in a chain of categories, connected by a relation of dialectic, which proceeded from the featureless Being, Nothing, and Becoming through more important ones such as Substance, Cause, and Reciprocity to the highest category of all, the Absolute Idea. Now Hegel also pointed to an interesting correlation between the categories of his logic and the dominant concepts of those philosophies that preceded his own: that is to say, the logical order of categories given by him corresponded to the temporal order of the history of philosophy. Such connexion was not, however, to be regarded as an accident but as a necessary truth: for the Absolute manifested itself temporally in the form of the history of philosophy. Seeing that this contention probably contains some psychological truth and is probably assumed in Marxian interpretations of Hegel, it may be of some interest to see how far it can be substantiated.

Carthage—Rome—Milan

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Therese Fuhrer
Keyword(s):  
Real Space ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Henri Lefebvre ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Abstract Spaces

In the autobiographical narrative of Confessions 3 to 9, Augustine stages his early years in the urban spaces of Carthage, Rome, and Milan, which are among the most important cities of the late antique world. Each of these cities is assigned the role of a transit point on the way to moral and theological purification, associated with events and experiences that are subsequently assigned a particular significance which is transferred onto the place. Augustine’s Bildungsroman is thus also a kind of travel novel in a landscape defined by emotions and intellectual achievements; that is, in a psychogeography that leads ever further into the ‘inner person’, and reveals what is often interpreted in the history of philosophy as the discovery of subjectivity and interiority. Augustine’s narrative thus produces a series of imaginary or—according to Henri Lefebvre—‘abstract spaces’ which overlay, but do not erase, the ‘absolute’ or ‘real space’.

Philosophy in Italy

Philosophy ◽  
1928 ◽  
Vol 3 (10) ◽  
pp. 223-227
Author(s):  
Guido De Ruggiero
Keyword(s):  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Process Change ◽  
English Reader ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Absolute

Among the studies on the history of philosophy recently published in Italy, one that may be of some interest to the English reader is by DR. Abbagnano, a young pupil of Aliotta, and is devoted to the new English idealism.1 Truthfully speaking, the term ‘ new ’ is inappropriate, or partly so, because Abbagnano dedicates the greater part of his study to what we might call the ‘ old ’ idealism in England, represented by Stirling, the two Cairds, Wallace, Green, and Bradley. However, he does also pass in review the more recent doctrines, particularly those of J. H. Muirhead, G. H. Howison, D. G. Richtie, J. E. Creighton, J. B. Baillie, J. S. Mackenzie, H. Jones, W. E. Hocking, A. S. Pringle Pattison, and G. P. Adams. Abbagnano regards as a distinctive trait of English idealism inspired by Hegel as opposed to Hegel himself, this, that “for Hegel the absolute is essentially process, change and becoming; it is thought which differentiates itself and becomes articulate in a life of its own, in the threefold rhythm of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, in which each moment passes into the next. For Green, Bradley, and Royce, the absolute is on the other hand immutability, completeness, static perfection, in which each process and becoming is overcome and resolved.” At any rate, Abbagnano is equally unsympathetic towards Hegel and towards his followers, against whom he opposes, not without scholastic ingenuity, his own irrationalistic views, set out in another book whose contents are sufficiently expressed in the title.1

Transitions to and from Nature in Hegel and Plato

1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (02) ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary K Browning
Keyword(s):  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Material World ◽  
Absolute Idealism ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Organic Community ◽  
Explanatory Priority ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

The philosophical understanding of nature is a key concern of both Plato and Hegel. Their elaborations of the identity and status of nature within their respective philosophies exhibit significant affinities to which Hegel himself draws attention in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Hegel and Plato, indeed, are fundamentally at one in theorizing nature as both displaying and obscuring the principles of reason which they take as providing the foundations of a coherent explanation of reality. In his lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel takes great pains to emphasize the profundity of Plato's idealism as residing in its identification of the objectively real with the rational. Plato, according to Hegel, is to be revered, above all, for having “… grasped in all its truth Socrates' great principle that ultimate reality lies in consciousness, since according to him the absolute is in thought and all reality is thought.” The Timaeus, for Hegel, articulates how the world of nature is necessarily structured by reason, just as the Republic is seen by Hegel as providing a philosophical explanation of the rationality of the traditional, organic community of the Greek polis. Hegel's recognition of the Platonic foundations of his own version of “absolute” idealism in which the universality of thought assumes an explanatory priority over the material phenomena of nature as well as informing the spiritual activities of human beings has been noted, rightly, by a number of subsequent commentators. Michael Rosen, for instance, in his book, Hegel's Dialectic and Its Criticism, while carefully distinguishing between aspects of Hegel's and Plato's conceptions of nature, intimates the continuity of Hegel's idealism with Plato's by observing how Hegel's language in effecting a transition from the categories of pure thought in the Logic to the material world of nature constitutes an “… echo of Plato's Timaeus.” Certainly, Hegel's cryptic account of the transition from the Absolute Idea, the categorial terminus of the Logic's interrogation of the determinations of pure thought, to the externality and materiality of nature evokes Plato's construal of the construction of the world in the Timaeus, both by the indeterminate character of the God which is invoked, as well as by the clear subordination of material phenomena to a separately articulable order of reason. In the account of the construction of the world developed in the Timaeus, Plato deploys the image of the divine demiurge imparting order to the world by referring to a pre-existing pattern of ideas. Hegel conceives of the Absolute Idea which at the outset of the Philosophy of Nature he likens to God, as, “… freely releasing itself…” into the externality of space and time, in which movement the Idea is seen as suffering neither a transition within nor a deepening of its character such as the mediated categories of the Logic incur in the process of their integration within the Absolute Idea.

The ‘Oriental’ Character of Islamic Philosophy in Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Lorella Ventura
Keyword(s):  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
General View ◽  
Islamic Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel characterizes Arabic/Islamic philosophy as ‘Oriental’. The meaning and motivation of this characterization are not obvious. In this paper, I address his treatment and outline the key ideas that lead Hegel to describe Islamic philosophy as ‘Oriental’. By highlighting similarities and differences in relation to Oriental philosophy, I shed light on Hegel's approach to Islamic philosophy, which is connected to his view of Oriental philosophy, the East and Islam in its various aspects, and to his more general view of the history of philosophy and of the Absolute as spirit.

Philosophy, Religion, and the End of Hegel

2003 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 61-72
Author(s):  
John Walker
Keyword(s):  
World History ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Objective Reality ◽  
Objective World ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
As If

I want to begin with two of Hegel's endings, one well known, the other less so. First, some words from the closing paragraphs of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy:A new epoch has arisen in the world. It seems as if the world spirit has succeeded in casting off everything in objective reality which is alien to itself, in order to comprehend itself as absolute spirit: to produce its own objective world from itself and to keep that world serenely in its own power. The struggle of the finite self-consciousness with the absolute self-consciousness, which once appeared as an alien reality, is now coming to an end. The finite self-consciousness has ceased to be finite; and, by the same token, the absolute self-consciousness has achieved the reality which it formerly lacked. The whole of world history and especially the history of philosophy is the representation of this conflict. History now seems to have achieved its goal, when the absolute self-consciousness is no longer something alien; when the spirit is real as spirit. For spirit is this only when it knows itself to be absolute spirit; and this it knows in speculative science (Wissemchaft).

Self-Evidence And Proof

Philosophy ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 33 (127) ◽  
pp. 289-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. H. Perelman
Keyword(s):  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Chain ◽  
Evidence And Proof

There is an argument, well known in the history of philosophy, which makes all knowledge ultimately depend on some kind of intuitive or sensory immediacy. According to this argument, either the proposition itself is self–evident;2 or else it can be shown to follow, with the help of a chain of intermediate links, from other propositions which are self–evident. Moreover, it is this self–evidence of immediate knowledge and only this which, again speaking traditionally, sufficiently guarantees the truth of the affirmations of a science as opposed to those of various and fluctuating opinions.

scholarly journals «Ein Spielen der Liebe mit sich selbst». Hegel e la teoria spinoziana dell’amor Dei intellectualis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salvatore Carannante
Keyword(s):  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
Palabras Clave ◽  
Philosophical Account ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Different Levels

Resumen: Nella parte quinta dell’Etica, Spinoza descrive l’«amore intellettuale verso Dio» - che nasce nella mente che ha raggiunto la scientia intuitiva - come una «parte dell’amore infinito con il quale Dio ama se stesso». Scopo del saggio è gettare luce sui rilevanti, ma scarsamente considerati, riferimenti di Hegel alla teoria dell’amor dei intellectualis, tentando di ricostruirne il significato a due livelli differenti: anzitutto, esaminando le Lezioni sulla storia della filosofia, dove la descrizione dell’amore intellettuale è inserito in una disamina storico-filosofica del pensiero spinoziano; in secondo luogo, analizzando alcuni passaggi della Fenomenologia dello spirito e della Scienza della logica, opere in cui Hegel richiama l’amor dei intellectualis per esprimere metaforicamente la convinzione che l’Assoluto va concepito in termini dialettici, come soggetto e spirito.  Palabras clave: Hegel - Spinoza - Amor dei intellectualisAbstract: In the fifth part of the Ethica Spinoza describes the «intellectual love toward God» – arising in the mind that has achieved the scientia intuitiva – as a «part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself». The aim of the essay is to cast light, at two different levels, on the interesting but rarely studied Hegel’s references to the theory of amor dei intellectualis: firstly, focusing on the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, where the description of intellectual love is included in an historico-philosophical account of Spinoza’s thought; secondly, dealing with the Phenomenology of Spirit and in the Science of Logic, works in which Hegel mentions the amor dei intellectualis in order to express the idea that the Absolute has to be conceived in dialectical terms, as subject and spirit.Key words: Hegel - Spinoza - Amor dei intellectualis

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document