Hegel round-table discussion

Daniel Lopez (La Trobe University), Andrew Gilbert (La Trobe University)

Daniel Lopez - Spirit as Humanity: Hegel and the Philosophy of Praxis 

In this talk, I will present a reading of The Phenomenology of Spirit which casts it in a humanist light. The famous dialectic of mastery and servitude will be used as a specific case in point, and it will be argued that this section produces a principle which becomes concretised and actualised in the work as a whole. This said, previous discussions on Hegel in this stream have raised the question of speculative philosophy as such. Therefore, I will seek to present a brief summary of the philosophy of praxis, whose chief exponents are Marx and Lukacs, and its ambiguous relation to speculative philosophy. The intent here is not to side with either tradition, but to explore common points, as well as how they might critically react to each other.  

Andrew Gilbert - Hegel: Onlooker to the French Revolution

Hegel constructed his mature philosophical system under the immediate historical shadow of the French Revolution. Such was the importance of the revolution to Hegel that in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right he famously announced his philosophy was only taking up conceptual questions that the revolution had already posed in practice. Yet Hegel’s judgement of the revolution can appear ambivalent and enigmatic. While always remaining supportive of the revolution’s historical achievements, he was also damning of the revolution’s problematic and dangerous self-understanding and its murderous slide into terror. This talk will attempt to unpack Hegel’s account of the French Revolution as one of a revolutionary onlooker. It will argue that Hegel employs multiple observational perspectives on revolutionary events, which when understood within his system as a whole form a necessary and consistent unity.