Published Dec.27, 2000 ISSN 1209-0689 

Editors: F.L.Jackson (Memorial), David Peddle (Sir Wilfred Grenfell), James Doull (Dalhousie)

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PREFACE

The theme of the 2000 issue of Animus is the Hegelian philosophy. Few philosophers since Plato or Aristotle have exerted such a profound, pervasive and palpable influence on later thinking as has G.W.F. Hegel; and as few have seen their central ideas and arguments so thoroughly muddied, compromised and controverted over two centuries of ideological cooption and hostile or thoughtless interpretation, mostly from points of view alien to Hegel's own.

In line with the general mandate of Animus, the editors have selected from many proffered submissions nine articles whose common merit is that they seek to recover the original letter and spirit of the Hegelian argument on its own terms. They may be grouped in three categories: (a) reflections on Hegel's relation to philosophical history, (b) essays of exposition, (c) assessments of later uses/abuses of the Hegelian text. We are especially pleased to include in this issue two pieces by James A. Doull, known to many as perhaps the most exacting interpreter of the Hegelian mind in this century.

a) In this first group, Doull's Hegel's Phenomenology and Postmodern Thought meets a long-standing need for a study, faithful to Hegel's intention, of the signicance for cultural history of the argument of this much-misunderstood work, showing how, by its own account, it makes the transition from a modern to a post-modern philosophical standpoint. Then in Hegel's Presentation of the Cartesian Philosophy Floy E. Andrews examines Hegel's reading of the Cartesian philosophy and his appreciation of the historical importance of its key principle, the unity of thought and being in the idea of God. James Doull's second contribution questions a common prejudice regarding Hegel's alleged 'anti-liberalism' for which the latter's popular essay on the English Reform Bill is often cited as evidence. In Death on the Grand Scale, Graeme Nicholson artfully traces the theme of 'death' throughout the course of Hegel's system, in terms of its logical meaning, in its natural sense as a principle of organic genesis and mortality and again in the historical context of the birth and decline of civilizations.

b) The next two papers are chiefly expository. F. L. Jackson's Hegel's Psychology of Freedom, explicates the core argument of Hegel's psychology of mental life, a neglected work in which the all-important concept of 'spirit' finds its initial definition and justification. David Peddle's Hegel's Political Ideal takes up the theme of the Hegelian Sittlichkeit, or political spirit, clarifying Hegel's actual account of civil society and its relation to the state in counter-distinction to later interpretations of the same on the part of Marx, Taylor and Rawls.

c) The final three essays deal with how Hegel has been understood and misunderstood in later times. In Hegel's Lutheranism and Contemporary Theology, Gary Badcock examines how Hegel's account of the Trinity has been appropriated in the service of a later Christ-of-faith theological humanism, a view that fails to appreciate Hegel's own adherence to a strict Lutheran emphasis on the priority of divinity. In Taylor on Phenomenological Method. Keith Hewitt takes Charles Taylor's well-known re-interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology decisively to task on the basis of the original text. Finally, in The Discursivity of the Negative Daniel J. Selcer documents the emergence of one major school of later 'Hegelianism' in Alexandre Kojève's 'thirties lectures on Hegel which made a profound impact on a whole generation of French-existentialist thinkers.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

James Doull, Hegel's Phenomenology and Postmodern Thought

Floy E.Andrews, Hegel's Presentation of the Cartesian Philosophy in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy

James Doull, Hegel on the English Reform Bill

Graeme Nicholson, Death on the Grand Scale

F. L. Jackson, Hegel's Psychology of Freedom

David Peddle, Hegel's Political Ideal: Civil Society, History and Sittlichkeit

Gary D. Badcock, Hegel, Lutheranism and Contemporary Theology

Keith Hewitt, Taylor on Phenomenological Method: an Hegelian Refutation

Daniel J. Selcer, The Discursivity of the Negative: Kojève on Language in Hegel

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