Petrified Intelligence offers the first comprehensive treatment of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, exploring its central place within his system, including its relation to his Logic, Philosophy of Mind, and moral and political thought. It highlights the contemporary relevance of Hegel's approach to nature, particularly with respect to environmental issues. Challenging the standard view that Hegel devalues nature relative to mind and culture, Alison Stone reveals the deep concern to re-enchant the natural world that pervades his entire philosophical project. Written in clear and nontechnical language, the book also provides a critical introduction to Hegel's metaphysics.
Wes Furlotte critically evaluates Hegel's philosophy of human freedom in terms of his often-disregarded conception of nature. In doing so, he gives us a new portrait of Hegel's final system that is surprisingly relevant for our contemporary world, connecting it with recent work in speculative realism and new materialism.
Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature is an important new study of Hegel's profound philosophical account of the natural world. It examines Hegel's alleged idealism, his concepts of space and time, the conception of speculative geometry, his critical engagement with Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, his critique of Newtonian science, his concept of evolution, the notion of Aufhebung, and his infamous theory of planetary objects. The book confirms that, far from being surpassed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific developments, Hegel's philosophy of nature continues to have great significance for our understanding of the natural world.
Can philosophy conceive of a perfect animal? Can it think of the animal as anything other than an imperfect human? The book attempts to rethink the Hegelian dialectic so as to render it capable of assigning a proper place to the animal, and in particular the beautiful animal, and to rework the philosophy of nature so as to encompass the fossil. The fossil itself teaches philosophy and in particular the dialectic how it must modify itself in order to encompass the beautiful animal, in the form of what we term the fossilised dialectic, resistant to the spiritualisation which will always leave the animal behind. If philosophy can admit the animal in this way, we might then ask what philosophy can learn from this animal that will have taken up residence in its home? What does a specifically domestic animal teach us? At the very least, it shows us that the function we give to the furnishings of the house is not the only one and perhaps therefore that there is no single unique function. In this way, animals teach us the most philosophical lesson there is: to see the world as it is in itself.
In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of G.W.F. Hegel, Slavoj Žižek gives us a reading of the philosophical giant that changes our way of thinking about our new posthuman era. No ordinary study of Hegel, Hegel in a Wired Brain investigates what he might have had to say about the idea of the 'wired brain' – what happens when a direct link between our mental processes and a digital machine emerges. Žižek explores the phenomenon of a wired brain effect, and what might happen when we can share our thoughts directly with others. He hones in on the key question of how it shapes our experience and status as 'free' individuals and asks what it means to be human when a machine can read our minds. With characteristic verve and enjoyment of the unexpected, Žižek connects Hegel to the world we live in now, shows why he is much more fun than anyone gives him credit for, and why the 21st century might just be Hegelian.
Clark Butler presents an innovative analysis of Hegel's most challenging work in Hegel's Logic—the first major English-language treatment of Hegel's Science of Logic to appear in nearly fifteen years. Although earlier commentators on the Logic have considered standard analytical philosophy-and with it modern logic-in opposition to Hegel. Butler views it as a legitimate approach in terms of which Hegel needs to be understood. This interpretation allows him to address the rigor of Hegel's thought on several levels as at once an exercise in purely conceptual redefinition and a full-bodied work in metaphysical ontology and even theology. The result is an account of the Logic intelligible to analytical philosophers as well as non-specialists.
The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism offers a wide-ranging dialogue between theory and German Idealism, joining up the various lines of influence connecting German Idealist and Romantic philosophies in all their variety to post-'68 European philosophies, from Derrida and Deleuze to Žižek and Malabou. Key features: Provides in-depth reflections on the various conversations between German Idealism and theory, including an expanded canon of Idealist philosophers and a wide range of contemporary anti-foundationalist thinkers. Includes marginalized voices and concepts that reflect both contemporary concerns as well as the sheer abundance of readings of German Idealism undertaken by European theorists over the last fifty years. Expands the existing scholarship by focusing on new, future directions emerging out of the idealism-theory relationship. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism is essential reading for researchers and students of all levels — from senior scholars to advanced undergraduates — working on the legacy of German Idealist philosophers within philosophy departments, as well as all those interested in theory from across the humanities.
This volume provides a scientific justification for the optimal formula of social justice through a critical analysis of the basic principles of Marxism. While interest in Marxism is particularly prevalent in China today, the theory developed here concerning the origins and evolution of man will be of interest to everyone, and will help to contextualise questions of social justice within a scientific framework. By providing a new interpretation of Hegelian thought, alongside a synthesis of the thinking of Darwin and Marx, the book details a law of the development of society, using notable events from world history, particularly the collapse of the USSR, to verify it.
A theorization of habit that emphasizes its excessive and unsettling qualities rather than its mediating, adaptive, and stabilizing functions. Subject Matter offers a bold counterpoint to prevalent conceptions of habit characterized by bodily fluidity and ease, as the stabilizing foundation of an emerging subjectivity, or, more negatively, as a numbing and deadening force. Instead of facilitating the coordination of action with goal and self with environment, habit appears here as a disruptively recursive operation with extreme ontological implications that are often more quotidian than exceptional. Vinegar theorizes habit’s more perturbing aspects, from repetition compulsion to kenosis to breakdown, through an encounter between Hegel’s philosophy (of habit), psychoanalytic dimensions of repetition, Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, and Omer Fast’s feature-length film interpretation of the novel. Vinegar starts with the premise that habit is an “unhappy mediator,” a disturbance of the very medium and milieu that is constitutive of the subject. Subject Matter pays close attention to those aspects of habit that are usually considered deviations from, or potential threats to, habit proper and that generate a logic of breakdown: automaticity, mechanization, thingness, inertia, and fixity. By plotting a topology of habit’s unbearability through detailed accounts of its manifestation in writing, art, aesthetics, and visuality—and through an attentiveness to the unbalanced nonrelations between mediation and immediacy, being and having, fixity and fluidity, vanishing and overflowing, abbreviation and excess, beginning and ending—Vinegar exposes habit’s failure to mediate and inhabit. In doing so, he offers new and counterintuitive insights into how habit generates the unruly grounds it is supposed to settle, thus allowing us to ask how we might break down differently.
This book develops an original interpretation of the relationship between F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel. It argues that the difference between these philosophers should be understood in light of their shared commitment to the philosophy of nature and the idea that spirit, or humanity, emerges from the natural world. The author makes a case for the contemporary relevance of German idealist philosophy of nature by walking the reader through its major themes, motivations, and arguments. Along the way, Schelling and Hegel are shown to develop key insights about the structure of reality and the dependence of living things and human beings upon inorganic natural processes. In elucidating the details of Schelling’s and Hegel’s respective philosophies of nature, the book challenges some of our most basic assumptions about the scope of philosophical inquiry and the relationship between matter, life, and human existence. Schelling, Hegel, and the Philosophy of Nature will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on German idealism, as well as those interested in contemporary philosophies of nature and the topic of emergence.
