Hegel remains of great importance to understand ourselves, but essentially because we have all grown out of a reaction against Hegel..

All the spookiness comes from giving a contemporary anachronistic sense to terms whose historical meaning is lost to us..

The romantics were reacting against a modern culture that divided individuals from themselves (through specialisation in the division of labor), from….

The idea of romanticising the world goes back to the idea of creating a harmonious whole where the individual will feel at one with himself, others a….

The connection between romantic politics and aesthetics is plain in Schiller's and Novalis's concept of the aesthetic or poetic state..

The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i.e., that we know nothing mo….

Schiller never wanted to replace the moral with the aesthetic but he did want the moral to be one part of the aesthetic. He rightly notes the aesthet….

The romantics really did want to romanticise the world itself, and that meant re-creating the state, society and even nature so that it became a work….

To live well is to live in harmony with ourselves, others and nature, and that idea of harmony is, of course, an aesthetic one..

Since substance is infinite, the universe as a whole, i.e., god, Hegel is telling us that philosophy is knowledge of the infinite, of the universe as….

There is no comfortable middle path where we get to provide a rational justification for our basic moral, religious and common sense beliefs..

No one nowadays talks about the absolute, not even people with firm and deep religious convictions. The whole Hegelian project has no resonance for u….

There is a sinister anachronistic interpretation of the aesthetic state as some kind of totalitarian regime that puts aesthetic over moral standards;….

The aesthetic dimension of the ideal state comes out in the idea of harmony, which is the classical idea of beauty as "concinnitas" or "unity-in-vari….

There was no Prussian bastion to stop the Scotsman's swift conquest of the territory once claimed by reason..

Royce is the father of the thesis that German idealism is a story about the discovery and development of the Kantian transcendental ego - the "I" tha….

You only have to talk to artists to see that they work according to rules, and that they know all too well that they can employ only certain means to….

That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy..

When Hume insists that taste is a matter of delicacy, that it is a matter of having a sensitivity to features of an object itself, he is very close t….

The years 1781 to 1793 are crucial for many reasons, but chiefly because they pose in an especially clear way the main problem of German philosophy f….

Liberals and leftists are not wrong in describing romanticism as reactionary, because it did indeed become that after 1810. The problem is that they ….