This paper investigates Hegel’s thesis that we are, in our practical relation to the world, inherently committed to certain aspects of idealistic metaphysics. For Hegel, our practical attitude is fundamentally at odds with a naïve realism that would take the world to consist ultimately of self-contained, self-sufficient individuals whose relations to one another are fundamentally external to their identities. Hegel contends that our practical attitude is premised upon an overcoming of this mutual externality, and especially the externality which is supposed to hold between individual agent and world. It is shown that his argument hinges on conceiving of external things as inadequately individuated, as compared to living agents, and that it is precisely this ontological deficiency that conditions and motivates our action. Hegel’s discussions of morality and property ownership are appealed to in order to illustrate how we might better understand the nature and practical role of this purported deficiency.

This article is a discussion of Hegel’s conception of the principle ‘omnis determinatio est negatio’, which he attributes to Spinoza. It is argued, however, that Spinoza understood this principle in a very different way from Hegel, which then sets up an interpretative puzzle: if this is so, why did he credit Spinoza with formulating it? This puzzle is resolved by paying attention to the context in which those attributions are made, while it is also shown that the British Idealists (unlike many contemporary commentators) were aware of the complexities in the Spinoza–Hegel relation on this issue. The paper also addresses some of the philosophical debates raised by this question, and the light it sheds on Hegel’s critique of Spinoza as a monist.

Hegel draws a distinction between ‘judgements’ (Urteile) and ‘posits’ (Sätze). Judgements serve to explicate a unified subject matter, while posits do not. Because different forms of judgement are marked by specific combinations of logical constants with certain types of predicates, statements combining logical constants with predicates not ‘suited’ for each other cannot express judgements, but only posits. Current accounts of Hegel’s concept of judgement tend either to ignore or reject his conception of posits. This article shows that Hegel’s exclusion of a vast variety of well-formed statements from the realm of judgements contains a valuable insight rather than a flaw. It demonstrates that certain statements, even if correct, cannot contribute to the explication of a non-arbitrarily unified subject matter. Doing justice to Hegel’s notion of posit thus serves to motivate his general conception of judgement as well as his classification of particular types of judgement.

Hegel famously criticizes Kant’s resolution of the antinomies. According to Sedgwick, Hegel primarily chastises Kant’s resolution for presupposing that concepts are ‘one-sided’, rather than identical to their opposites. If Kant had accepted the dialectical nature of concepts, then (according to Sedgwick) Kant would not have needed to resolve the antinomies. However, as Ameriks has noted, any such interpretation faces a serious challenge. Namely, Kant’s first antinomy concerns the universe’s physical dimensions. Even if we grant that the concept of the finite is necessarily related to that of the infinite, the physical universe cannot both have and lack a temporal beginning. I argue that Hegel neither adopts Sedgwick’s view that Kant’s antinomies require no resolution nor absurdly accepts that the physical universe both has and lacks a temporal beginning. Instead, Hegel proposes a sophisticated resolution of Kant’s first antinomy (including its physical aspect) that depends on Hegel’s theory of the Absolute.

According to Hegel, true freedom consists not just in arbitrariness, but in the free willing of right. Right in turn is fully realised in the laws and institutions of ethical life. The ethical subject, for Hegel, is a practical subject that acts in accordance with ethical laws; yet it is also a theoretical, cognitive subject that recognizes the laws and institutions of ethical life as embodiments of right. Such recognition can be self-conscious and reflective; but it can, and indeed must, also be a felt recognition and as such it takes the form of trust. In Hegel’s view, therefore, the proper stance to adopt towards ethical institutions is that of trust; moreover, there is a distinctive freedom to be found in trust itself. Trust is appropriate, however, only when the institutions of ethical life are themselves worthy of it. Hegel is well aware that not all states and their institutions merit trust, but in his view a life without trust in institutions is a life without true freedom.

Stephen Engstrom has recently offered an excellent account of morality as practical cognition. He emphasizes the formal conditions of practical knowledge, which he finds in Kant. Engstrom also aligns his account with constructivism, claiming that value is constructed through these formal conditions, chiefly universalisability. In this paper, I employ a variant of Hegel’s empty-formalism objection to challenge the moral significance of the mere form of practical knowledge. I hope to show that Engstrom’s constructivism is neither philosophically compelling, nor required by the rest of his position. In its place, I propose a realist understanding of the value of practical knowledge.