Hegel’s Idealism (Departmental Seminar)

Abstract:

For Hegel, idealism is not so much the belief in a supersensible world (as it is for Plato or Kant), nor the denial of the existence of matter, but rather the idea that nothing can be assumed as a self-subsistent and definitive reality; that is, as he writes in the Science of Logic, the recognition that the finite is not. Yet the non-being of the finite does not mean for Hegel that the infinite is something static and immobile, as in the case of the Platonic Idea. On the contrary, it means that the infinite—and consequently the ideal—is essentially becoming, transformation, that is, a transition into another. From this there also emerges an important difference between the way Kant and Hegel conceive the Idea, as a normative or emancipatory element of the real.

Delivered in English.
All are welcome.