Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

The preface to the second edition of Hegel’s Science of Logic is crucial for understanding the idea of Hegel’s logic. It is an important text because what Hegel writes is not an idiosyncratic view about logic, but rather something universally true about the object, scope, and nature of logic. Something that can genuinely dialogue with more recent, and perhaps more sophisticated, accounts of logic. One central aspect of Hegel’s argumentation in the preface is the idea that logic is natural. In this paper, I focus precisely on this aspect, addressing…

It is argued that one of Hegel’s main strategies in overcoming the opposition between nature and spirit is to recognize a realm of “spiritualized nature” that has a distinctive ontological character of its own, one that, though it is rooted in nature, must be understood in essentially historical terms. It is argued that for Hegel the activity of work is premised upon a commitment to the independent standing of such spiritualized nature and its historical character, and a detailed reading of Hegel’s account of the slave’s work in the Phenomenology…

In this paper I attempt to move the discussion of Hegel’s naturalism past what I present as an impasse between the soft naturalist interpretation of Hegel’s notion of Geist, in which Geist is continuous with nature, and the opposing claim that Geist is essentially normative and self-legislating. In order to do so I suggest we look to the question of value which underlies this dispute. While soft naturalists seek to make sense of value as arising from material nature, those who support the autonomy thesis propose that value is something…

Most contemporary accounts of naturalism specify, as one of its necessary conditions, a community within which agents can take themselves to be adequately answerable for and responsible to the norms of autonomous practical reason. But what would it mean to succeed in giving an account of naturalism, absent such social conditions? What does it mean to think about naturalism from a position of relative alienation? My contention is that this incongruity between philosophy and the form of life sustaining it is already present within Hegel’s thought, and that it should…

This paper shows how Hegel transforms Kant’s Fact of Reason argument for freedom, and in particular how Hegel takes over the role of experience and death in Kant’s “Gallows Man” illustration of the Fact. I reconstruct a central thread of the Phenomenology of Spirit in which Hegel develops his view of freedom and practical rationality through a series of life and death experiences undergone by “shapes of consciousness”. While Hegel views his fact of reason as a result of a developmental process rather than as an immediate brute fact, the…

For two hundred years, people have been trying to make sense of Hegel’s so-called “dialectical method”. Helpfully, Hegel frequently compares this method with the idea of life, or the organic (cf., e.g., PhG 2, 34, 56). This comparison has become very popular in the literature (in, e.g., Pippin, Beiser, and Ng). Typically, scholars who invoke the idea of life also note that the comparison has limits and that no organic analogy can completely explain the nature of the dialectical method. To my knowledge, however, no scholar has attempted to explain…

Hans Reichenbach’s pragmatic treatment of the problem of induction in his later works on inductive inference was, and still is, of great interest. However, it has been dismissed as a pseudo-solution and it has been regarded as problematically obscure. This is, in large part, due to the difficulty in understanding exactly what Reichenbach’s solution is supposed to amount to, especially as it appears to offer no response to the inductive skeptic. For entirely different reasons, the significance of Bertrand Russell’s classic attempt to solve Hume’s problem is also both obscure…

I argue that the account I gave of Derek Parfit’s dividing self-case in “Can the Self Divide?” does not depend on a dubious four-dimensionalist metaphysics as claimed by Eric Olson (2006). I explain my metaphysics of time, and then re-describe my solution in “Can the Self Divide?” comparing it to treatments of the dividing selves by Parfit and Lewis.

Derek Parfit takes the central principle of his discussions of personal identity to be “reductionism”: that our existence and persistence are not basic facts, but consist in something else. A number of striking claims, including the famous unimportance of identity, are supposed to follow from it. But they don’t follow. The main principle in Parfit’s arguments is something far more contentious that is never mentioned: a capacious ontology of material things. But the capacious ontology makes trouble for Parfit: it weakens his claim about the unimportance of identity and undermines…