Philosophy is a discipline which, perhaps more than any other, is preoccupied with its history. At the same time, this preoccupation has as much to do with maintaining and reclaiming traditions as with critiquing and transforming them. Some figures leave indelible marks on schools of thought, even while attributing credit to their forebears on whose shoulders they in turn innovate and critique. The legacy of these figures is instantiated through the generative role they play in inspiring new schools of thought. Such reception is by no means inherently positive. In fact, it is often disagreement rather than affirmation that sustains the lasting impact of an original thinker.

I reconfigure Hegel’s distinction between Tat (deed) and Handlung (action) to illuminate Oedipus’s enigmatic formula: ‘I suffered my deeds more than I acted them’. Most interpreters hold that Oedipus mistook his Tat for a Handlung and wrongly took responsibility for parricide and incest. I argue against the merely causal reading of Tat presupposed by this view that the tragic Tat also has an intentional structure. On the Restrictive Intentionalism about Action (RIA) which underlies Handlung, what counts as my action is only the realization of a conscious intention, accomplished with reasonable knowledge of the relevant circumstances and foreseeable consequences of realizing my intention. On RIA, Oedipus killed the charioteer and married Iocasta: parricide and incest happened to him. By contrast, on the Inclusive Intentionalism about Action (IIA) which underlies the tragic Tat, what counts as my action is everything I bring about in realizing a conscious intention, regardless of reasonable expectations about knowledge of the circumstances or foreseeable consequences of realizing my intention. On IIA, parricide and incest are part of the ‘whole compass’ of Oedipus’s deeds. I argue that Oedipus is right to take responsibility for his deeds and draw on Tony Honoré’s conception of ‘outcome responsibility’ to characterize the responsibility at stake as blameless liability. Where Oedipus errs is in taking ethical responsibility for his deeds. I show that in Oedipus at Colonus the older Oedipus reverses his position and holds, somewhat surprisingly, that he is innocent and ‘did nothing’. I argue that this reversal presupposes an implicit shift from IIA to RIA, and that this shift helps to finally make sense of Oedipus’s enigmatic formula: Oedipus suffered his deeds (on RIA) more than he acted them (on IIA). I conclude by widening the perspective beyond ancient Greece and engage with Bernard Williams’s interpretation of the same formula.

This paper compares the views of Hegel and Schelling regarding the problem of individuation, i.e. the question of what makes an individual (a) numerically distinct from others and (b) the very individual it is. My focus is on how Hegel approaches this problem in his metaphysics and how that relates to Schelling’s views as articulated in his ‘negative philosophy’. While Hegelians like Robert Stern and Karen Ng are optimistic that Hegel can solve the problem of individuation, I argue that Schelling puts forward an objection that both challenges Hegel’s account and provides a rationale for taking seriously Schelling’s own insistence on a pre-logical dimension of being.

Kierkegaard presents his critique of a Hegelian philosophy of history in the works of his Climacus pseudonym, the Philosophical Fragments and the corresponding Concluding Unscientific Postscript. It has been contested whether he addressed his arguments toward Hegel directly. In this paper, I argue that these arguments are systematically pertinent to central issues both of Hegel’s as well as any other philosophical engagement with history. To make this point I proceed in three steps. First, the basic outlines of Hegel’s philosophy of history are given concerning its exact subject matter, what the aim of history is, and whether the reason inherent in it allows us to conceive of historical events as necessary. Second, I will show that, though agreeing with Hegel on some points, Climacus holds that we can ascribe neither a determinist nor a conceptual kind of necessity to historical events. Finally, I will expand on Climacus’s account of radical metaphysical contingency and its ethical implications which prompt some objections against philosophy of history in general.

This article explores an episode in the reception of Hegel's philosophy of history and historiography of philosophy with reference to the question of the possibility of non-Western philosophy, in particular African philosophy. Section I briefly outlines the contents of the Hatäta Zär'a Ya‛ǝqob and the controversy over its authorship, focusing in particular on the argument of the Ethiopianist and scholar of Semitic languages Carlo Conti Rossini that ‘rationalistic’ philosophy was impossible in Ethiopia. In section II I suggest that a major component of the intellectual background to this notion of the impossibility of philosophy in Africa can be traced to Hegel's philosophy of history. To substantiate this claim I begin by providing an account of the broader historiographical shift between 1780 and 1830, in which Africa and Asia came to be excluded from the history of philosophy, and I suggest that Hegel's philosophy of history was decisive in this process. I examine how Hegel's account of history as the realization and actualization of freedom goes together with the development of cultural production culminating in philosophy, and how both of these processes (if they are really separate processes at all), can be mapped onto particular historical-geographical populations and cultures. I suggest that, even though this was not Hegel's intention, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this served as a cultural justification for political domination: those who are unfree are unfree because they are unthinking (unphilosophical), and those who are unthinking cannot be free. Finally in section III I connect this Hegelian conception to Conti Rossini's work, both his article on the Hatäta and as apologist for Italian imperialism. I conclude by reflecting on what this underexplored connection between Hegel and early twentieth-century theorists of culture might mean for attempts to construct global histories of philosophy.

In this essay, I explore possibilities for phenomenology beyond Hegel with respect to questions of conscience, guilt, and ethics. In the first section, I briefly introduce Heidegger’s phenomenology. The next section provides an interpretation of conscience in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Like Hegel, Heidegger claims that conscience states my guilt prior to any specific wrongdoings; Heidegger’s ideas around the ‘call of conscience’ are thus considered next. Building on differences and connections between Hegel’s and Heidegger’s phenomenologies of conscience, the final section outlines implications for a phenomenologically responsive ethics.

This contribution aims to relate an important topic of the Hegelian philosophy, that of second nature, to the gender question developed by Simone de Beauvoir. The core of the emancipation process described in The Second Sex lies in Beauvoir’s revolutionary idea of the artificial character of gender: the latter belongs to the culturally constructed sphere of social norms and not to mere fixed nature. In this assumption the French philosopher seems to recover the Hegelian theory of second nature: Hegel believes that through an individual and social Bildungsprozess, subjects liberate themselves from the immediate level of natural necessity and reach the free horizon of spiritual existence, in which they become self-conscious actors. Beauvoir accepts in her own existentialist view this extra-natural becoming and realizes that also gender participates in it: women are not by nature ‘immanent’ creatures that lack ‘transcendence’. Hegel, however, does not recognize the second nature of gender and falls into that same essentialism, denounced by Beauvoir, which relegates the woman to the biological plane, thus excluding her from the dialectic of second nature and self-consciousness. For this reason, Hegel’s understanding of freedom through second nature will initially be introduced, and then, employing this concept against Hegel himself, the path of emancipation from gender essentialism in Beauvoir’s account of biology and culture will be addressed. In the second part of the paper it will be shown how gender, in acting as a second nature, replays the same ambiguity of Hegel’s theory: are second nature and gender something that we individuals freely shape or are we victims of an externally imposed necessity just like in first nature? A dialectical solution will be presented in both thinkers, whose work aims to conciliate spirit and nature beyond any Cartesian dualism.

This article argues that Derrida’s critique of Hegel in Glas should be understood as a modified Neoplatonic critique. Specifically, Derrida claims that Hegel’s systematic philosophical account of the speculative identity of Thought and Being is in fact conditioned by the prior unconditional gift of Being, which necessarily lies outside the Hegelian system. I argue that this gift of Being should be understood in terms of the Neoplatonic conception of the One, which likewise gives the gift of Being, while itself remaining beyond Being. After reconstructing Derrida’s critique, I consider and evaluate possible Hegelian responses, drawing on Hegel’s own reading of Neoplatonism.

For both Hegel and Badiou, love is one vehicle through which the transition from substance to subject concretely occurs, despite their respective conceptions of this transition differing drastically. Although (amicably) critical of Hegel’s Logic, Badiou—the first systematic continental philosopher since Hegel—never expressly reproaches Hegel’s conception of love, as outlined in both the Logic and the Realphilosophie lectures, but it is not Hegelian love which Badiou champions. His possible criticisms of Hegelian love can only be discerned through his explicit critiques of the Logic, in which he faults Hegel’s denial of absolute difference. Given that Badiouian love is conceived precisely as the subjective experience of absolute difference, his critique of Hegel must play a more significant role in his conceptual rehabilitation of love than is immediately evident. This paper teases out Badiou’s critique of Hegel and examines what it illuminates regarding his conception of love, as well as Hegel’s. I conclude that Badiou’s conception highlights an aspect of Hegelian love which Hegel himself does not sufficiently emphasize, but it remains too one-sided on its own and thus forces one to continue to decide in favour of Hegel.

The aim of this article is to show that Hegel’s understanding of ontological dependence can solve what Jonathan Schaffer calls the ‘problem of heterogeneity’. While a solution to this problem is crucial to ensure the plausibility of any monist theory, canonical versions of monism in the history of Western philosophy have struggled to provide such a solution. First, the paper argues that the solutions offered by contemporary monist theorists such as Michael Della Rocca, Terry Horgan, Mathjasz Potrč and Jonathan Schaffer, are also inadequate. While acknowledging the promise of Schaffer’s revision of traditional understandings of ontological dependence, the paper argues that the understanding of dependence as priority, which Schaffer proposes as an alternative, is indeed insufficient to solve the problem of heterogeneity effectively. Secondly, the paper considers Hegel’s relevance to this debate. Offering a monist interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysics, the paper shows that Hegel identified the problem of heterogeneity as a central challenge for his philosophy. Finally, the paper argues that, while building on a criticism of traditional understandings of ontological dependence similar to Schaffer’s, Hegel’s notion of ‘reflection’, or ‘absolute negativity’, provides a better alternative understanding of ontological dependence than Schaffer’s priority, overcoming the shortcomings of traditional understandings of dependence while also not incurring the problems weighing on Schaffer’s notion of priority.