Michael Allen (Saint Louis University)
Structural Domination and Intersubjective Recognition in the Modern State: Hegel and the Distinctive Value of Freedom
While he can be read as a republican thinker concerned with realizing the distinctive value of freedom from domination, Hegel does not succeed in realizing this value in his theory of modern society and the state. The difficulty here can be attributed to his view that non-domination entails mutual recognition, as enabled by inclusion in modernity's system of rules and accountability. Using Hegel's texts, I show that the modern state produces relations of structural domination that place some actors outside the sphere of mutual recognition. For these actors, the distinctive value of republican freedom cannot be realized.
Andrew Buchwalter (University of North Florida)
Hegel and Eurocentrism
While not disputing a Eurocentric dimension to Hegelian philosophy, this paper challenges its Eurochauvinist readings. It: (1) notes the degree to which Hegel is contructively Eurocentric, focusing on the centrality of the concept of freedom to European modernity; (2) explicates Hegel's claim that freedom represents the thematized expression of norms implicit in all cultures; (3) clarifies the degree to which Hegel's championing freedom jettisons any easy juxtaposition of Western to non-Western cultures; and (4) indicates how the meaning and validity of "universal" norms are tied to globally diverse conditions for their articulation.
Ernesto V. Garcia (Columbia University)
Hegel's Critique of Kant's Transcendental Idealism in the 1807 Phenomenology: The Untold Story
This paper offers a fundamental reappraisal of Hegel's criticisms of Kant's transcendental idealism in his early Jena writings and the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. I argue for three main claims: (1) Hegel's main argument against Kant's "transcendental idealism" in the Phenomenology is not to be found, as often claimed, in, e.g., "Perception", "Force and the Understanding", etc., but rather in the "Introduction" itself; (2) contra recent Kant scholarship who accuse Hegel of advancing merely external critiques of Kant, Hegel is best understood as exploiting a fundamental tension which Kant himself struggled with concerning the relationship between the "thing-in-itself" and the so-called "transcendental object = x" of our experience; and (3) most radically, if this reading is correct, the vast majority of Hegel scholars fail to recognize that the first dialectical stage of the Phenomenology in fact occurs not in "Sense Certainty", but rather in the "Introduction" in terms of what I label Hegel's widely-overlooked "Dialectic of Experience."
Chair: Aaron Bunch (Loyola University Chicago)