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Teleology and Basic Actions: A reading of the chapter on Teleology in Hegel's Subjective Logic in the terms of action theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2022

Maximilian Scholz Open the ORCID record for Maximilian Scholz [Opens in a new window]
Maximilian Scholz*
Affiliation:
Munich School of Philosophy, Germany maximilian_scholz@gmx.de
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Abstract

In this paper I argue that there is textual evidence that the chapter on Teleology in Hegel's Science of Logic, read under certain premises, also discusses something that in contemporary analytic philosophy is called a ‘basic action’. The three moments of Teleology—(a) ‘The Subjective Purpose’, (b) ‘The Means’ and (c) ‘The Realized Purpose’—can be interpreted as (a) a certain intentional content in the mind of a subject, which can be expressed in the form of an imperative, (b) the immediate taking in possession of the body, which can be described as a basic action, and (c) the description of the relation of the event brought about by the basic action with other events in the world, which can be described in the terms of event-causality. This reading reveals an astonishing parallel to Donald Davidson's distinction between proper basic actions and their different descriptions in the form of events. In this way we can make Hegel's, at first glance, confusing identification of subjective purpose (intention), means (basic action) and realized purpose (event) comprehensible. Through that, the actual aim is to show that what I call basic actions are in fact an example of a more general thought that Hegel calls a teleological relation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hegel Bulletin , Volume 44 , Special Issue 1: Hegel and Teleology , April 2023 , pp. 74 - 98
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Hegel Society of Great Britain

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