Hegel is widely recognized as the preeminent philosopher of the history of philosophy. His Lectures on the History of Philosophy are designed in large measure to answer questions about philosophy's apparent futility by reformulating the presentation of the seemingly pointless succession of forms of philosophy so as to show its organic development (Hegel, 1994, 24). To reveal the proper shape of the history of philosophy, what is extraneous to it had to be omitted. Much that had previously been regarded as philosophy was now to be treated under the heading of religion. The distinction between philosophy and religion, the decision as to what was philosophy and what was religion, took on an importance it had previously lacked. Although subsequent historians of philosophy did not always share Hegel's concern to show the organic development of the history of philosophy, his decisions about what was to be included and what excluded from philosophy proved particularly important in respect of the question of the place subsequently given to Indian philosophy. For this reason Hegel deservedly holds a central place in current discussions about the philosophical canon.

Thus did Irenaeus of Lyons initiate his treatise on the Refutation and Overthrow of the Knowledge Falsely So-called, commonly called Adversus Haereses. The targets of his polemic were the Gnostics: Valentinus, Marcion, Cerinthus and Basilides; among whom, for our purposes, we shall concentrate simply on Valentinus. According to Irenaeus, the Valentinians held that “neither was the Word made flesh, nor Christ, nor the Saviour who was made out of all the Aeons. For they allege that the Word and Christ never came into this world, and that the Saviour was neither incarnate nor suffered, but that he descended as a dove [that is, at his baptism] upon that Jesus who was made by dispensation, and when he has proclaimed the unknown Father ascended again into the Pleroma [that is, when Jesus said, ‘Into thy hands I commend my spirit.’] It is important to notice the distinction Valentinus draws between Christ, the divine Son (who simply appropriates the human Jesus for a time), and the Jesus who was born of Mary and died on Calvary. They are not to be simply identified.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” As a critique of Feuerbach, which is what it primarily is, this verdict of Marx's seems to me fair enough. But to what extent does it also apply to that other great philosopher with whom Marx is preoccupied: Hegel?

Superficially, it might appear that Hegel too is only an ‘interpreter’ of the world. Does he not, after all, repudiate any ambition to ‘give instruction as to what the world ought to be’ in his Preface to the Philosophy of Right? And does he not then famously go on to argue that

Well, yes. But the particular sort of ‘instruction’ in question here is the devising of political Utopias, or the drafting of detailed programmes of government. And this is by no means the only way in which thinking may move beyond simple ‘interpretation’ to become strategically effective in worldly terms.

“Is there a way the world is regardless of how we think about it? If so, can we know the way the world is? Is knowledge a socio-historical phenomenon?” With these questions, Kenneth Westphal begins a study that explicitly aims at connecting Hegel's theory of knowledge to main stream epistemology. The project I am proposing here examines the connection between epistemological and religious issues. It will show how Hegel's strategy for an examination of knowledge changes the fundamental orientation of the epistemological project, transforms the questions we usually associate with it, and demonstrates an inseparable connection between epistemology and religion. Throughout the discussion, Westphal's questions will represent the concerns of contemporary epistemology. The project begins with an account of Hegel's strategy for a critical examination of knowledge.

Hegel defines his relation to epistemology in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. It seems natural to assume, Hegel says, that we must first come to an understanding about cognition — its different forms, their nature and limits — before we use cognition to know what truly is. Hegel describes this assumption as “a certain uneasiness,” “a mistrust,” a “fear of error,” which “seems justified.” If we do not determine precisely what cognition can and cannot know, if we do not identify which form of cognition is appropriate for knowing reality as it truly is, we might accept as true of reality itself what is only cognition's way of knowing it.

Hegel's relation to Kant is often portrayed in terms of epistemic impatience. For W.H. Walsh, for example, whereas Kant seeks to ‘demonstrate that certain kinds of thing [cannot] be objects of human knowledge’, and thus that there are ‘limits to men's cognitive aspirations’, Hegel issues the ‘demand that thought be free to range unchecked wherever it chooses’ and claims the ‘Absolute’ as an object of human knowledge. There are two flaws in this standard account. First, it underestimates the cognitive confidence of Kant's project of a critique of pure reason. Central to this project is the idea that reason has the resources to adjudicate its own claims and thus to know itself. Second, it neglects Hegel's conception of dialectic as the inner discipline of thought. I shall deal with each of these issues in turn. The first part of the paper examines the intellectual commitments entailed by the very idea of a critique of pure reason; the second part addresses the boundary-determining function of dialectic. A fuller understanding of what is meant by ‘critique’ and ‘dialectic’ should enable us not only to re-assess Hegel's relation to Kant, but also to retrieve their shared conception of philosophical reflection as rational self-knowledge. The aim of this paper therefore is to highlight the common ground between the two projects, rather than to emphasise their critical distance. I seek to show that Hegel shares Kant's conviction that ‘philosophy consists in knowing its bounds’ (seine Grenzen zu kennen), even though he accords such knowledge a different status from Kant.

Above all else, Hegel can be said to be the master of context, the philosopher who insisted that properly understanding anything involves putting it in its full context, reconstructing its development and its relation to all that is around it. From the beginning of his career, Hegel did not hesitate to put into its place the work of his fellow philosophers; his analysis, critique, and supersession of them occurred all at once, and culminated when he located them within his Phenomenology of Spirit and the final system of his Encyclopedia. Long after Hegel's own era, and even after the sharp decline in the appeal of his specific system and of ambitious systematic philosophy in general, a looser form of Hegel's contextual approach remains very popular, and with good reason. Without giving in entirely to this approach, it is hard to resist the temptation to turn the tables on Hegel himself a bit. Hence, in casting a philosophical glance at the specific phenomenon of Hegel's own aesthetics, in an attempt to begin to evaluate just a few of its most distinctive characteristics (in part 2), I will proceed by first offering a sketch of how I believe his philosophy as a whole should be situated in the context of its own age and the development of German philosophy in general (in part 1).

Of course, my own interpretive perspective has its own context, external and internal. The external context is furnished by two other accounts providing slants on Hegel's aesthetics, slants that I believe are very understandable but in the end inadequate. The first of these slants is given by what I will call the “standard account,” which buys into most of Hegel's own characterization of his aesthetics (like his philosophy in general) as largely a welcome “objective” corrective to the supposedly “subjective” approach of Kant and the allegedly even more radically “subjectivistic” and arbitrary approach of the German Romantics. The second slant is to be found in Jean-Marie Schaeffer's recent book, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger. Schaeffer accepts much of the standard account, but he goes on to argue in an original way that the main aesthetic tradition of Germany — after Kant, from the early Romantics to Hegel and others until Heidegger — shares a large set of influential and highly questionable “speculative” presumptions, and that the sharing of this speculative approach is far more significant — and unfortunate — than whatever incidental differences can be found between various figures within this tradition.

In 1970, the Italian feminist Carla Lonzi published her now-classic polemic urging women to “spit on Hegel”. Disregarding her advice, many subsequent feminist theorists and philosophers have engaged substantially with Hegel's thought, and a wide variety of feminist readings of Hegel have sprung up. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of these different feminist criticisms and interpretations of Hegel. In introducing these various interpretations, I will show how they reflect a range of divergent feminist approaches to the history of philosophy as a whole. My aim is not only to describe but also to evaluate these approaches, with respect to their capacity to generate insightful and productive readings of Hegel's philosophy. I shall argue that what I will call the “essentialist” feminist approach to Hegel is the most fruitful, doing most to illuminate the contours of his thought and to open up new and creative ways of reading his works.

To anticipate, in surveying the various feminist interpretations of Hegel, I will classify them as reflecting four different types of feminist approach to the history of philosophy. The first, “extensionist” approach draws upon the history of philosophy for conceptual resources to understand and explain women's social situation. The second approach is more critical, tracing the pervasiveness of “masculinist” assumptions and biases in the history of philosophy. To call views “masculinist” is to say that they uphold systematic and hierarchical contrasts between masculinity and femininity, contrasts which need not be explicit but may be sustained through contrasts between other ostensibly neutral concepts which actually have tacit gender connotations. This critical approach generates an overwhelmingly negative picture of the philosophical tradition. The third, “essentialist” approach complicates this picture, recovering and highlighting the strands within historical texts which revalorise concepts or items that are given feminine connotations. These often overlooked strands oppose the dominant masculinist tendencies in texts by assigning equal importance and value to “symbolically feminine” concepts. However, proponents of the fourth, “deconstructive” approach object that essentialist readings of philosophical texts accept and reinforce patterns of gender symbolism which feminists ought to challenge. Deconstructive feminists seek to expose and exacerbate the instability within these patterns of gender symbolism by tracing how philosophical texts continuously undermine the gender contrasts present within them.

Famously, by launching analytic philosophy Moore and Russell revolted against British Idealism, with Hegel tossed in for good measure. In 1923 Russell declared:

To Russell, the philosophical headmaster of the Eighteenth Century was Hume, not Kant. Russell sought to dispatch rationalism with his logically sophisticated empiricism, based on ‘knowledge by acquaintance’: the non-conceptual apprehension of simples. He sought to dispatch Hegel in particular by condemning his alleged conflation of the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication.

The battle lines thus drawn between analytic philosophy and (especially) Hegel's philosophy have had deep, lasting and very unfortunate consequences in the field. Hence it is all the more tragic that neither of Russell's criticisms of Hegel is sound. Sense Certainty presumes that the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication are the same, or rather, that it can dispense with predication and hence with any predicative use of ‘is’. Hegel accepts Sense Certainty's presumption as a premise in his reductio ad absurdum argument against sense certainty. Thus Hegel shares rather than denies Russell's thesis about the two senses of ‘is’. However, Hegel further argues that predication is required in order to identify any particular one presumes to know. In this way, Hegel refutes Russell's ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ just over a century in advance.