Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution, (Stanford University Press, 2010)
Author: Rebecca Comay (University of Toronto)
Critic: Andrew Cutrofello (Loyola University Chicago)
Critic: Chad Kautzer (University of Colorado Denver)
Critic: John McCumber (University of California, Los Angeles)
Chair: J. M. Fritzman (Lewis & Clark College)
Jason J. Howard (Viterbo University)
Emotional Life and Subjective Spirit
My paper explores Hegel's account of emotion as this is developed in his philosophy of subjective spirit. It is my contention that despite some vernacular confusion in terminology, Hegel does have a developed theory of the emotions, and one that is considerably innovative. I argue that Hegel's account explains not only the origin and typical features of emotions, providing a taxonomy of emotion-types, but also makes clear how emotions are indispensible to the realization of subjective spirit.
Commentator: Oliva Blanchette (Boston College)
Liesbet Vanhaute (Universiteit Antwerpen)
Systematic Classification or a Teleology of Moralization? Why Teleological Judgment Is Not the (Only) Key to Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View
Several Kant scholars have recently suggested that Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of Viewshould be understood as an essentially teleological work. This presentation is intended to place this suggestion in the right perspective by showing that Kant does indeed make use of teleological judgments in his anthropology, but that this form of judgment does not provide an exhaustive characterization of the work. The assumption that it does unduly stretches Kant's concept of teleological judgment and overlooks another form of judgment that also plays a role in the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.
Commentator: Eric v.d. Luft (SUNY Upstate Medical University)
RocĂo Zambrana (University of Oregon)
Hegel's Logic of Finitude
This paper argues that Hegel's notion of true infinity articulates ideality as a question of precarious normative authority. Against Stephen Houlgate's influential reading, I argue that true infinity is the consistent thinking of finitude rather than the rational selfdetermination of being. In the Seinslogik, Hegel undermines oppositional understandings of finitude and infinity. True infinity thematizes that they depend on their inseparability, thus establishing them as impure. This impurity shows the inseparability of reality and ideality, crucial for Hegel's rejection of accounts of finitude that deny the ideality of reality and of infinity that establish it as beyond being.
Commentator: Martin Donougho (University of South Carolina-Columbia)
Chair: Aaron Bunch (Washington State University)
Updated on 25 May 2013