Scholars have recently argued that Hegel posited international recognition as a necessary feature of international relations. My main effort in this article is to disprove this point. Specifically, I show that since Hegel rejected the notion of an international legal system, he must hold that international recognition depends on the arbitrary will of individual states. To pinpoint Hegel’s position, I offer a close reading of Hegel’s intricate formulations from the final paragraphs of the Philosophy of Right—formulations that are easy to quote out of context just as they are transparent when considered in due context.
In his Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel affirms that truth is ‘usually’ understood as the agreement of thought with the object, but that in the ‘deeper, i.e. philosophical sense’, truth is the agreement of a content with itself or of an object with its concept. Hegel then provides illustrations of this second sort of truth: a ‘true friend’, a ‘true state’, a ‘true work of art’. Robert Stern has argued that Hegel's ‘deeper’ or ‘philosophical’ truth is close to what Heidegger labelled ‘material’ truth, namely a property attributed to a thing on the basis of the accordance of that thing with its essence. It has since been common to think of Hegel's concept of ‘philosophical’ truth as ‘ontological’, ‘objective’ or ‘material’ in contrast to ‘epistemological’ or ‘propositional’ definitions. In this paper, I wish to add an important nuance to the existing literature on this subject: even though things have a truth-value for Hegel, the latter is always negative. I argue that Hegel's criterion of ‘philosophical’ truth, which is best formulated as ‘agreement with self’, is first and foremost intended to examine the truth-value of thought-determinations. I then argue that even though this criterion may also be applied to examine the truth-value of things (namely, even though things have a truth-value), things never fall under this definition. After reviewing several of Hegel's explicit remarks on the matter, I provide an alternative explanation to those features of Hegel's ‘philosophical’ truth which have led scholars to view it as a truth in things. Especially, I argue that what are generally seen as Hegel's examples (‘true friend’, ‘true state’, ‘true work of art’) are not intended as examples but only as imperfect illustrations of ‘philosophical’ truth.
Please cite the published versionStudents who looked at the announcements posted in the hallways of the Hebrew University's Givat Ram campus in 1959/60 may have noticed posters inviting them to lectures on philosophical themes. There were two main types of such lectures. At meetings organized by the Philosophical Society, talks were delivered on oriental philosophy and the West (E.W. Tomlin), the philosophy of literature and the image of man (Maurice Feldman), a new book by Nathan Rotenstreich, Spirit and Man (Rotenstreich and Eugène Jacob Fleischmann), and Plato's Timaeus (Joseph Liebes). 1 At meetings of the Israel Society for Logic and the Philosophy of Science, there were talks on finite automata (Michael Rabin), the mechanization of mathematical thought (Abraham Robinson), innovations in combinatorial grammar (Yehoshua Bar-Hillel) and using the WEIZAC computer for statistical sampling (Raphael Bar-On). 2From these examples, it is apparent that the lecture-going public and philosophy students at the Hebrew University were implicitly being called upon to deliberate the merits of, or choose between, two distinct philosophical paths of demarcating the realm of philosophy. Schematically speaking, they were presented with a choice between philosophy conceived as a discipline contiguous with the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, and philosophy conceived
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