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Life and Mind in Hegel’s Logic and Subjective Spirit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2016

Karen Ng
Karen Ng*
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, USAkaren.ng@vanderbilt.edu
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Abstract

This paper aims to understand Hegel’s claim in the introduction to his Philosophy of Mind that mind is an actualization of the Idea and argues that this claim provides us with a novel and defensible way of understanding Hegel’s naturalism. I suggest that Hegel’s approach to naturalism should be understood as ‘formal’, and argue that Hegel’s Logic, particularly the section on the ‘Idea’, provides us with a method for this approach. In the first part of the paper, I present an interpretation of Hegel’s method in which life plays a central role. In the second part of the paper, I develop Hegel’s method by providing a reading of Hegel’s Subjective Spirit, focusing on the sections ‘Anthropology’ and ‘Phenomenology’ in particular, arguing that they display the dialectic between life and cognition outlined by Hegel’s Idea.

Type
Articles
Information
Hegel Bulletin , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , May 2018 , pp. 23 - 44
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Copyright
© The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2016 

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