Freedom and Reflection Hegel and the Logic of Agency

by Yeomans, Christopher

• ISBN13: 9780199794522
• ISBN10: 0199794529
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-14
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

There are many insightful discussions of Hegel's practical philosophy that emphasize the uniqueness of his expressivist and social theory of agency, but few recognize that these two aspects of Hegel's theory of the will are insufficient to avoid the traditional problem of free will. In fact, the problem can easily be shown to recur in the very language used to express why Hegel's theory is a theory of freedom at all. In part, this lack of recognition results from the fact that there has not yet been a study of Hegel's theory of the will that has formulated the problem against the background of the contemporary literature on free will, where basic concerns about the explicability of action loom large. By using the continuity between the contemporary concerns and those of Hegel's predecessors (particularly Kant), Yeomans shows the necessity of reference to the Logic in order to supplement Hegel's own practical philosophy and the scholarship based on it. In addition to adding significantly to our understanding of Hegel's theory of agency and recapturing its significance with respect to continuing modern reflection on free will, this study also shows that Hegel's Logic can do some real philosophical work on a specific problem. Though Hegel's logical terminology is notorious for its impenetrability, Yeomans translates Hegel's jargon into a more easily comprehensible vocabulary. He further helps the reader by providing introductory discussions framing the central issues of each chapter both in terms of the problem of free will and in terms of the development of Hegel's argument to that point in the Logic. Presenting the reader with frequent use of examples, Yeomans leavens the abstractness of Hegel's presentation and makes the topic accessible to readers new to Hegel as well as those well versed in his work.

Author Biography

Christopher Yeomans is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. He works on Hegel and late modern philosophy, and in the philosophy of action.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction
Hegel and Free Will	p. 3
Hegel and the Traditional Problem of Free Will	p. 6
Hegel's Theory of Free Will	p. 23
The Problem of Expression as the Problem of Reflection	p. 36
Introduction	p. 36
Internal and External Determination in the Doctrine of Being	p. 38
Internal and External Determination in the Concept of Reflection	p. 45
Elements of the Theory of Reflection in Hegel's Moral Psychology	p. 58
The Shape of the Project	p. 64
Agency as Self-Explanation
The Externality of Explanations and the Problem of an Infinite Regress	p. 69
Self-Explanation as the Basic Form of Explanation	p. 75
Ground as Expression	p. 75
Internal and External Determination in Explanations	p. 83
The Argument for Explanation as a Three-Term Relation	p. 86
The Role of Conditions as the Third Term in Explanation	p. 100
The Infection of Internality by the Conditions	p. 109
Holism About Explanation	p. 113
The Agent as a Locus of Self-Explanation	p. 118
Agency as True Necessity
The Necessity of Action and the Problem of Alternate Possibilities	p. 131
Modality in Hegel's Logic	p. 139
Modality as the Structure of Self-Expression	p. 139
Contingency as a Unity of Actuality and Possibility	p. 144
The Modal Continuum	p. 150
The Necessity of Alternate Possibilities	p. 158
Agency as True Necessity	p. 167
Willkür and Wile	p. 167
The Modal Argument for Hegel's Conception of the Free Will	p. 175
Agency as Teleological Reciprocal Interaction
The Mechanistic Challenge and the Problem of Passivity	p. 183
Teleology, Mechanism, and Causation	p. 189
The Question of Priority	p. 189
Productivity as Expression	p. 192
Freedom as Substance-Causation	p. 197
The Passivity of Mechanical Causation	p. 206
Causation as Reciprocal Interaction	p. 216
Reciprocal Interaction as Freedom	p. 221
The Teleological Form of Reciprocal Self-Determination	p. 224
Teleological Agency	p. 235
Arguments Against Determinism	p. 235
A Teleological Philosophy of Action	p. 237
Conclusion	p. 258
Bibliography	p. 263
Index	p. 269
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