The Return of Hegel: History, Dialectics and the Weak: Introduction (original) (raw)
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Praktyka teoretyczna - 1(43)/2022 – The Return of Hegel: History, Dialectics and the Weak
Praktyka teoretyczna - 1(43)/2022 – The Return of Hegel: History, Dialectics and the Weak, 2022
This volume is a post-conference publication to follow up the debates celebrating the 250th Anniversary of Hegel, The Return of Philosophy of Hegel. History, Universality and the dimensions of Weakness,co-organized by the Goethe-Institute Warschau and the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science in October 2020. If it seems that the daunting task of celebrating Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s 250th bir-thday cannot be achieved in just one volume, we assure you that volume 2 of our issue will also be published. We believe that, after more than two hundred years, Hegel’s thought still addresses us, and maybe we should repeat after Slavoj Žižek: “Un jour, peut-être, le siècle sera hégélien”—if the twentieth century was Marxian, the twenty-first will be Hegelian (Žižek 2020, 1).
CfP 1/2022 -The Return of Hegel. History, Dialectics and the Weak Editors
CfP 1/2022 -The Return of Hegel. History, Dialectics and the Weak Editors, 2020
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born 250 years ago. His philosophy is most commonly seen as an effort to build an all-encompassing theoretical system aimed at building notions embracing all aspects and elements of human reality, while at the same time explaining the ultimate reason behind and purpose of history. It therefore has been accused of being a totalitarian effort to submit the world to a merciless logic. The supposed failure of Hegel's system to recognize the constitutive role of freedom, contingency and matter in life and history became one of the central themes of post-war philosophy. Such claims particularly resonated in the “critique of the grand narratives”, so popular in the last century.
Telos, 2014
This is an extremely important and timely book that makes a number of bold claims. Some of these claims are, in my view, too boldly formulated and they thereby overly restrict Cole's focus. But to the extent that this restricted focus has allowed him to bring out aspects of Hegel's thought that have been underilluminated and are of relevance to discussions in Marxist and other contemporary theories, even the overstatements turn out to be productive. The theses: • Hegel's dialectic is fundamentally that of identity/difference. • Hegel derives this dialectic from the Middle Ages, when "philosophers start talking about dialectic as almost exclusively the province of these two logical categories" (26). • More broadly, then: "without the Middle Ages as a generic and hermeneutic resource, there is no dialectic, period" (127).
Hegel’s Thought in Europe: Currents, Crosscurrents, Countercurrents
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
It is not clear what the intellectual history of the last 200 years would have looked like without the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, but it is clear that it would have looked different. His vast intellectual system was taken up by thinkers from left to right, and from very different philosophical schools. This volume brings together accessible, concise essays from leading scholars that present important currents of Hegelian thought in different European countries, including pre-revolutionary Russia, from the 19th to the 21st century. It unites a range of very different forms of (Non-Marxian) Hegelianisms and Anti-Hegelianisms, showing similarities as well as differences. Embedding them in their cultural and intellectual contexts, it demonstrates the various encounters between philosophy, politics and personal lives that Hegel's philosophy inspired.
Hegel A dialectics of encounter À
Hegel ou Spinoza first appeared in 1979 after an eight-year near hiatus in Pierre Macherey's work. It marked, as Warren Montag argues, a divergence in the philosophical paths of Macherey and his mentor and (by then) colleague Louis Althusser, each responding in their own way to the violent misreading of their work as a so-called structuralism and the resurgence of humanism (or, perhaps more correctly, an antiantihumanism) in France at the time. Montag suggests that Hegel ou Spinoza begaǹ`a new phase in Macherey's work'', one which could be viewed as``a displacement, neither a rejection of nor a return to the past, but instead the attempt to discover new points of application from which one might speak about certain problems without being drowned out by a chorus of commentators'' (Montag, 1998, page 13). Although long known to readers of French continental philosophy, and indirectly known to an English audience through the writings of the many scholars it has inspired, this work will appear in its English translation for the first time in 2011 with University of Minnesota Press. The first chapterö``Hegel reads Spinoza''öwhich is included in this issue, sets up Hegel's reading of Spinoza, which is for Hegel an arrested development, a moment of stasis in thinking that is at the same time a beginning of philosophy. But Macherey focuses his attention on this reading in order to uncover in subsequent chapters what is indigestible for Hegel in Spinoza's work, a kernel on which philosophy is made to move again, but this time in a renewal of Spinoza's thinking on three critical points: the problem of demonstration, the role of the attributes, and the role of the negative.
Hegel at the Abyss – The Fall of the Speculative Dialectic and the Plunge into the Crisis
2020
Does Hegel offer us some means of philosophically analysing contemporary crises, such as the prospect of an environmental catastrophe? Do the categories related to Hegelian dialectics offer a philosophical outlook on contemporary antagonisms, such as the, apparently, severed relationship between man and nature, the critical present and an uncertain future? In order for us to approach these questions, as well as the initial question about the end of all questions that Hegelianism seems to put forward, we need to carefully watch, observe and expose, from within its workings, how Hegelian thinking develops such questions, from what place Hegel thinks and begins to think these questions, and consider the implications and possible shortcomings of his speculative thinking in our present and future contexts. In order for us to carve a path towards these various questions, in order to prepare a thorough theoretical engagement with Hegel’s contemporary relevance, we first have to aptly and excessively analyse Hegel’s philosophical thinking. This latter requirement will be the purpose of this study. What is Hegelian thinking, how does it operate, from what place does it speak? Tracing the origin of the speculative dialectic back to Hegel’s early theological ideas, we will slowly unravel, against the backdrop of Kant and Schelling, how, for Hegel, the Fall, the most radical negativity, unhappiness, catastrophe, crisis or abandonment, is always already the expression of its Aufhebung, sublation, elevation and redemption. It is this eschatological core of his thinking which we will focus on in this study and, tentatively, push towards its limits. We will then critically consider the aptitude of Hegelianism as a contemporary philosophical paradigm. In a present which sees the future through uncertain eyes, which can still only half-imagine a looming crisis so apocalyptic that it radically ungrounds prior assumptions of progress, knowledge and historical direction, can Hegel offer us a future, that is, a future that is other than the one we have, collectively, like a Spirit blind to its own actions, set in motion?
HEGEL AND RELIGION: SOME RECENT WRITINGS*
The Heythrop Journal, 1985
Although frequently pronounced to have no further influence, Hegel, God and religion are alike in that they simply seem unwilling to lie down and accept their fate. It was Hegel who first proclaimed the death of God to the modern world, and some of Hegel's better-known discipleschief among them Feuerbach and Marxwho considered his work to have hastened the demise of religion. God dead, and religion passing, it was not long before Hegel too was largely in eclipse. In this century it is not too unfair to suggest that all three have made something of a come-back. Certainly Hegel has. One hundred and fifty years after his death we are on the crest of a whole 'new wave' of Hegel studies, and, interestingly, a large number of them are concerned with his views on religion and the impact of those views on theology. It is my task here to describe some of the most recent of these books.