Hegel: Arguments Philosophers

599 Pages·1983·2.47 MB·English

by  Inwood

HEGEL
The Arguments of
the Philosophers
EDITOR: TED HONDERICH
Professor of Philosophy, University College, London
The group of books of which this is one will include an
essentially analytic and critical account of each of the
considerable number of the great and the influential
philosophers. The group of books taken together will
comprise a contemporary assessment and history of the
entire course of philosophical thought.

Already published in the series
Plato J.C.B.Gosling
Meinong Reinhardt Grossman
Santayana Timothy L.S.Sprigge
Wittgenstein Robert J.Fogelin
Hume Barry Stroud
Descartes Margaret Dauler Wilson
Berkeley George Pitcher
Kant Ralph C.S.Walker
The Presocratic Philosophers (2 vols) Jonathan Barnes
Russell R.M.Sainsbury
Socrates Gerasimos Xenophon Santas
Sartre Peter Caws
Karl Popper Anthony O’Hear
Gottlob Frege Hans D.Sluga
Schopenhauer D.W.Hamlyn
Karl Marx Allen Wood
Nietzsche Richard Schacht
HEGEL
M.J.Inwood
Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford

Routledge & Kegan Paul
London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley
First published in 1983
by Routledge & Kegan Paul plc
39 Store Street, London WC1E 7DD,
9 Park Street, Boston, Mass. 02108, USA,
464 St Kilda Road, Melbourne,
Victoria 3004, Australia, and
Broadway House, Newtown Road,
Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG9 1EN

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis
e-Library, 2003.
© M.J.Inwood 1983
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the
publisher, except for the quotation of brief
passages in criticism.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Inwood, M .J., 1944–
Hegel.
(The Arguments of the philosophers)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831.
I. Title. II. Series.
B2948.156 1983 193 83–10904
ISBN 0-203-44219-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-75043-8 (A dobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-7100-9509 -0 (Print Edition)
For Christiana
When you start out on the way to Ithaca,
you should wish the journey long,
full of adventures and of knowledge.
The Laestrygonians, the Cyclopes,
angry Poseidon you shouldn’t fear,
such things on your way you ‘ll never find
if you keep high your thoughts, and if exquisite
emotions touch your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygonians, the Cyclopes,
wild Poseidon you will never meet
if you are not carrying them inside, within your soul,
and if your soul does not erect them there before you.
C.P.Cavafy, ‘Ithaca’
(tr.C.Sourvinou-Inwood)

How very strange he is! I don’t know whether he’s brilliant or
crazy. He didn’t seem to me to be a very clear thinker (Ottilie von
Goethe, on Hegel; from Goethe: Conversations and Encounters,
tr.D.Luke and R.Pick, London, 1966, p. 170).
Contents

Abbreviations pagexi
Chronological Table xiii
Introduction 1
Part One PRELUDE 7
I Perception, Conception and Thought 9
1 The sensuous 9
2 Concepts and conceptions 10
3 The acquisition of thoughts 16
4 Pure thoughts 17
5 A mathematical analogy 19
6 Non-empirical conceptions 22
7 Grammar and metaphor 24
II Thinking and the Self 26
1 Form, content and object 26
2 The subject as thinker 30
3 The subject as thoughts 34
4 The growth of self-consciousness 42
III Experience, Meta-thinking and Objectivity 46
1 Science and commonsense 46
2 Empirical science 51
3 Science and thought 55
4 Explanation 59
5 The defects of empirical science 64
6 Objectivity and science 73
7 Varieties of objectivity 78
8 Thought and essence 80
9 Self and world 87
vii
CONTENTS
Part Two PROBLEMS 91
IV Philosophy and the Fall of Man 93
1 Problems and the fall 94
2 Evil 97
3 The fall from innocence 99
4 The restoration of unity 103
5 Philosophy and problems 107
V Knowledge and Assumptions 113
1 The rejection of epistemology 114
2 Knowledge and reality 118
3 Refutation and self-refutation 125
4 Completeness and necessity 128
5 Scepticism and diversity 134
6 Limits and intelligibility 139
7 The problem of the beginning 141
8 Language and meta-language 144
9 Fiction and meta-fiction 148
10 Circles and infinity 149
VI Infinite Objects and Finite Cognition 155
1 Metaphysics and opposition 157
2 Infinity and description 165
3 Concepts and truth 170
4 Wholes, parts and falsity 173
5 From the concept of infinity to the
infinite concept 176
6 Truth and predication 180
7 Propositions and assumptions 184
8 The superfluity of the propositional form 186
9 Concepts and logic 188
10 Dogmatism and antinomy 190
VII Faith, Proofs and Infinity 193
1 The defects of cognition 193
2 Faith and its objects 196
3 The variety of faith 199
4 The Unknown God 201
5 Religion and consensus 202
6 The vacuity of immediacy 205
7 The mediated and the immediate 209
8 The conditions of certainty 210
9 Hegel’s debt to Jacobi 213
10 Proofs, grammar and physiology 215
11 The traditional conception of the proofs 216
12 Concept and properties 218
viii
CONTENTS
13 Perfection and abstraction 220
14 Theology and geometry 222
15 Hegel’s reply to Kant 224
16 Criticisms of the traditional view 227
17 Finitude and deduction 228
18 Grounds and dependence 229
19 Identity, difference and Spinoza 232
20 The rise to God 234
21 Philosophical arguments 237
22 The traditional ontological proof 239
23 Hegel’s ontological proof 242
24 God as spirit 246
25 Minds, machines and organisms 251
26 Substance and subject 256
Part Three THE SYSTEM 259
VIII Logic: Thinking about Thinking 261
1 The structure of logic 261
2 Form and content 265
3 The point of logic 269
4 Thought and reflexivity 271
5 The advance of thinking 276
6 Meaning and metaphor 279
7 The construction of meaning 282
8 Complexity and transcendence 287
9 Progress and contradictions 292
10 Hegel’s triads 294
11 The ambiguity of the triad 297
12 Contradictions and organisms 299
13 Criticism and self-criticism 302
14 Thoughts, thinking and the ego 308
15 Thought and individuals 311
16 Hegel’s circles 317
17 From logic to logic 321
18 ‘A tale that tells itself’’ 326
19 Maps, infinity and self-reference 331
20 The standpoint of the concept 332
21 Concepts and the concept 336
22 Reciprocity and purpose 338
23 Teleology and concepts 342
24 The concept vindicated 345
IX Thought and Things: the Transition to Nature 348
1 An ambiguous transition 348
2 Nature and contingency 355
ix