Hegel's phenomenological method allows and requires him to justify his own positive views only by thorough internal critique of the views he opposes; Hegel calls this ‘determinate negation’ (§1). Hegel's transcendental-pragmatic epistemology is sharply opposed to empiricism. One key tenet of Modern empiricism is aconceptual ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ of particulars. This view is deeply embedded in Hume's official ‘copy theory’ of sensory impressions and ideas. Both of these views are required by Hume's account of abstract general ideas. Both of these views saw widespread revival in twentieth-century empiricism. Can these views be criticised on strictly internal grounds, as Hegel requires? This paper answers in the affirmative. More thoroughly than any other philosopher, Hume attempted to analyse our conceptual, propositionally-structured thought solely in terms of our ultimate awareness of nothing but objects, whether they be sensory impressions or their copies, ‘ideas’. In this context, Hume's account of our ideas of space and time have long been regarded as anomalies in, if not exceptions to, his account of the generality of thought. I argue that these ideas are not anomalous, but rather are typical of Hume's account of the generality of thought, an account that ultimately undermines Hume's official empiricist account of the generality of thought, based on his copy theory. I reexamine Hume's ‘idea of existence’ to identify some key equivocations between ‘ideas’ as objects and ‘ideas’ as concepts that are crucial to Hume's attempt to account for the generality of thought. The main issue is clarified by placing it within its Modern context (§2). The key issues are then specified by considering Hume's idea of existence (§3). The fundamental role played in Hume's account by his equivocations are then developed in detail by examining Hume's accounts of abstract ideas (§4), of distinctions of reason (§5), of the idea of equality (§6), and of the ideas of space and time (§7). On this basis I contend that Hume's account of the generality of thought is fundamentally linguistic, and is rooted in judgmental discriminations of kinds that cannot be accounted for by appeal to impressions of sensation or reflection, nor their corresponding idea-objects. These conclusions are reinforced and extended by critical evaluation of Garrett's analysis and defence of Hume's account of abstract ideas (§8). Hume is thus not only the great Modern exponent of the copy theory of impressions and ideas, he is also its first and still one of its most profound critics (§9). To this considerable extent, not only are the most basic principles of Hume's empiricism subject to internal critique, as Hegel requires, but Hume himself provides all the essentials of such a critique. These results serve to substantiate and highlight the philosophical significance of Hegel's critique of ‘Sense Certainty’ (§10).

It was only ever with great reluctance that R.G. Collingwood accepted any philosophical label, whether ‘idealist’ or ‘Hegelian’: he always preferred to think of himself as beating his own philosophical path. This paper examines his relationship with the legacy of Hegel as mediated by the British Hegelians and the Italian idealists and suggests that An Essay on Philosophical Method marks the point at which his struggle to come to terms with legacy in the form of a reasoned statement of his own philosophical method and principles was resolved.

This piece presents some motifs concerning fluidity and multiplicity that arise from the Contingency chapters of Hegel's Science of Logic. I do not present it as a microcosm of an overall interpretation of Hegel. Still, emphasising Hegel's categories of fluidity and dissolution, and of multiplicity and its marks, obviously intensifies a certain version of the dialectic. One might call this ‘far left Hegelianism’. If it were to be generalised as a reading of Hegel, it might share something with Jean-Luc Nancy's polemical little book, Hegel: L'inquiétude du négatif (Paris: Hachette, 1997). A reading like this one is unlikely to have been written prior to Deleuze's ontology of multiplicity.

In undialectical philosophies, contingency, like desire, suggests themes of arbitrariness, unsystematic events, isolated moments of chance, and so on. In Hegel, of course, the roles played by desire and contingency are quite the contrary. Desire is part of Hegel's account of how a subject can in the movement of life find itself as part of the truth of objects, at the same time as it finds objects as part of its own truth — the direct contrary of arbitrary subjective preference. Contingency is part of Hegel's account of how the mark of a necessary totality is visible in every free actualisation of a possibility — the direct contrary of isolated events. The clue to the dialectic is the way the desubstantialising categories of fluidity and multiplicity are generated precisely through the apparently substantialising categories of actuality and necessity.