I. Naturalism and conceptual realism

When interpreters describe Hegel's metaphysics as ‘naturalistic’ they are unlikely to have in mind the type of naturalism that has become the default metaphysical position of much analytic philosophy in the past half-century—scientific naturalism.Footnote ² Rather, it is more likely that they have in mind what has come to be termed the ‘liberal naturalism’ that has developed as a type of reaction against scientifically reductionist naturalism. Such liberal naturalism thus attempts to protect our understanding of ourselves as ‘persons’, say, or broadly ‘intentional’ beings, capable of reason and freedom, from a scientistic perspective which seems not to accommodate such entities. But the liberal naturalist nevertheless wants to maintain scientific naturalism's opposition to supernaturalism (De Caro and Macarthur Reference De Caro and Macarthur2004, Reference De Caro and Macarthur2010). She wants to account for intentional human beings without reference to ‘the supernatural, whether in the form of entities (such as God, spirits, entelechies, or Cartesian minds), events (such as miracles or magic), or epistemic faculties (such as mystical insight or spiritual intuition)’ (De Caro and Macarthur Reference De Caro and Macarthur2010: 3).

As indicated earlier, qua ways of construing Hegel's idealism I see actualism and liberal naturalism as closely related in this respect. It may even be the case that they eventually come down to different ways of describing the same position.Footnote ³ Even were this to be so, however, I think there are advantages in this generally modal way of approaching this issue compared to being faced with the problem of qualifying ‘naturalism’ and ‘nature’ so as to accommodate the idea of the mind in nature. This was the problem facing earlier advocates of the Geisteswissenschaften, like Wilhelm Dilthey (Reference Dilthey and Rickman1976), who wanted to establish an epistemological alternative to natural science to accommodate disciplines such as history. Dilthey was motivated by the need to avoid Hegelian idealism because it was assumed to be a supernaturalist doctrine, but if one understands Hegel's idealism in the way advocated here, then an alternative is not needed. It is the non-supernaturalist dimension of actualism that is to the forefront. Its advantage in comparison to a non-natural-scientific or ‘hermeneutic’ form of naturalism is that it does not start with nature and then ask how mind can somehow exist within it. It starts with the actual world which, indexically understood, must already contain us minded beings in it. A shorthand way of describing this is to say that, with it, the mind ‘comes for free’. Moreover, situated on the turf of modal debate, it does not have to do the heavy lifting of establishing itself against a more intuitively plausible natural opponent. There, it is Lewisian possibilism that runs starkly counter to one's initial untutored intuitions.

For her part, the conceptual realist addresses issues facing the naturalist more directly by implicating something we think of as belonging to the sphere of mind—concepts—as actually belonging to reality, but attempts to divest this idea of any taint of supernaturalism. I will argue that this fails, however, and that conceptual realism falls prey to the liberal naturalist's concerns about attributing to ourselves supernatural cognitive capacities. But the conceptual realist might avoid this by weakening her claim from the ‘reality’ of concepts to their ‘actuality’—effectively the position of the actualist.

The actualist starts with the idea that reality is the actual world (with its included alternative possibilities, and with the minded beings it contains—that is, us) and so the claim that ‘concepts’ exist in the real world can be seen as a non-controversial consequence that follows from the fact that we concept users are, by definition, part of the real (that is, ‘actual’) world. Conceptual realists, however, are usually unsatisfied with this deflationary suggestion, and insist that concepts are in some sense ‘mind-independent’.

For example, the ‘reason’ of the title of James Kreines's influential book, Reason in the World (Reference Kreines2015), is indeed meant to be in the world in a stronger sense than would be simply explained by the presence of reasoners: ‘Hegel is interested in reason in the world; but this is not to say that the world is conscious, or reasoning’ (2015: 22–23). I take it that any naturalistically inclined thinker would want to eliminate this counter-intuitive notion of the world itself as some sort of intentional super-subject, but the liberal naturalist and the actualist could both still want to talk of there being ‘consciousness’ and ‘reasoning’ in the world—that is, to hold simultaneously to the view that we human subjects are in the world and that we are capable of both of these traits—without reference to any cosmic super-subjects. This would then be what allusions of ‘reason in the world’ refers to. Kreines, however, intends something stronger than this. For him, there would be ‘reason’ in the world, even without there being any reasoning—that is, reasoning beings, not just that of a cosmic super-subject—in the world. For him, the world would have the ‘structure of thought’ and there would be a ‘logic of these thoughts’, even in the counterfactual situation of us (or any other thinkers) not existing in the world (see 2015: Chs. 9 and 10).

For my part, I can only admit to finding the notions like reason without the activity of reasoning or concepts without the activity of conceptualizing somewhat dark and mysterious. I'm not convinced that the intuitions that Kreines mobilizes here are not satisfied by the idea that, despite his apparent denial, what he has in mind by ‘the world’ of the book's title is what this phrase is likely to mean to the philosophically uncorrupted—the world they intend by uttering the phrase ‘this world’, perhaps accompanied by an arm-waving gesture indicating the world around them. Robert Brandom has a way of putting the conceptual realist's point that avoids talk of reason or concepts as ‘in the world’ without reasoners or conceptualizers, and that might be of help here. He appeals to an idea of the world as being independently thinkable or intelligible.Footnote ⁴

Brandom brings out the strong counterfactual modal claim implicit in the thesis of conceptual realism by describing Hegel's idealism as a

To the ear of the non-supernaturalist, however, this claim may sound dangerously close to relying upon a supernaturalist semantics—a semantics presupposing something like the ‘metaphysical glue’ invoked by Putnam in relation to certain conceptions of reference (Putnam Reference Putnam1980: 477). With this notion Putnam was attempting to bring into focus assumptions about meaning that invoke determinate connections between words and the world that are, on the one hand, not simply causal connections, and, on the other, independent of the human practices within which those words are used. This style of objection had been directed to Brandom's version of conceptual realism by Richard Rorty, for whom naturalism was a dominant consideration. Thus, while sharing the naturalistic outlook of many of his analytic colleagues, he criticized their tendency to elaborate that stance as metaphysical theory, a tendency that he saw not as motivated by a scientific outlook. The underlying view of language as mirroring the structure of the world was ‘a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own’ (Rorty Reference Rorty1989: 7).

In an exchange with Rorty, what Brandom had expressed by the view described earlier in terms of the world's being in ‘conceptual shape’ without conceivers, is described in terms of the existence of ‘facts’ and ‘true claimables’ without the existence of claimings:

Rorty opposed this view, but made it clear that his opposition was nevertheless consistent with the common-sensical acknowledgement that before the human species existing there would have been rocks and trees, bacteria and cockroaches—we simply learn that from evolutionary theory. What he objected to is the part of Brandom's claim not found within the ‘vocabulary’ of evolutionary theory, the claim that besides such things there existed facts or truths about them:

Rorty's criticism of Brandom here might be taken as a prima facie case for the supernaturalistic character of the semantic assumptions behind Brandom's conceptual realism, but Rorty would have been unlikely to accept the meaningfulness of modal claims in general—the claims the actualist wants to treat as genuinely meaningful. Here, however, the actualist might soften the strong claims concerning the ‘conceptual shape’ or ‘thinkability’ of the real to the actual. Rather than think in terms of complete alternative possible worlds without knowers, the actualist considers merely possible variants of this world without knowers. But these islands of alternate possible states of the world are not in themselves ‘complete’, but consist of certain counterfactual general claims. We might say, for example, ‘consider that we humans had never evolved’—and rely for their meaningfulness of those claims against a more general background of the actual world we are in. It is this world that is in ‘conceptual shape’ because it is this world and this world is a world that actually includes us.

Robert Stalnaker captures this type of idea when he argues that for talk about alternative possibilities, we depend on semantic resources we draw from the actual world (Stalnaker Reference Stalnaker2012: 12). I will later be arguing that a similar idea is found in Hegel, but for the moment it should be noted that Stalnaker, like Putnam and Rorty, is trying to avoid the need for some type of ‘metaphysical glue’ in semantics—in his case, glue attaching our words to merely possible entities existing in other ‘possible worlds’.

II. The very idea of a logic that determines its own content

Hegel's Science of Logic, taken at face value, appears to derive substantial metaphysical claims from a purely ‘logical’ point of view in a manner that seems akin to Anselm's famous proof of the existence of God from the mere concept of God (SL: 625/12.127).Footnote ⁵ It would, then, seem to represent that aspect of Hegel's approach least interpretable from the anti-supernaturalist point of view being considered. I will argue, however, that this suggestion disappears when we understand Hegel as an actualist. In fact, attention to exactly where Hegel invokes Anselm will support this actualist interpretation.

In the ‘Objective Logic’ of Volume One of The Science of Logic, Hegel starts from the category or ‘thought-determination’ of ‘being’ and, from problems with its determinacy as a concept (SL: 59/21.69), derives a further concept, ‘becoming’, that purports to correct such problems. While ‘being’ stood in a problematic relation to its apparent opposite, ‘nothing’, ‘becoming’ seems to maintain the distinction between the two while relating them to each other by containing them as its ‘moments’, and with this third category uniting the first two, a new cycle in this process commences. By becoming internally articulated in this way, what had started as the (apparently) simple concept of ‘being’, by the end of the complete work, ends as ‘the Idea’, ‘the adequate concept, the objectively true, or the true as such’ (SL: 670/12.173).

Describing these categories as ‘concepts’, however, can lead to a misunderstanding from the start. In modern philosophy, concepts are standardly treated as mental entities, and so logic tends to be thought of, as Hegel says, as ‘an isolated occupation with thought determinations’ (SL: 36/21.42; emphasis added). But Hegel insists that this cannot be the starting point of logic, for ‘the finite determinateness in which that form is as “I”, as consciousness, must be shed’ and ‘the form, when thought out in its purity, will then have within itself the capacity to determine itself, that is to give itself a content, and to give it as a necessary content—as a system of thought-determinations’ (SL: 42/21.48). It would seem that this investigation of the necessary structure of the thought-determinations is more akin to Aristotle's ‘categories’ in which the categories are as much categories of ‘being’ as they are thoughts about being—an idea made explicit later in Spinoza's idea of thought and being co-existing as determinations of a single substance. Rather than being an ‘isolated’ occupation with thought-determinations, logic ‘takes the place rather of the former metaphysics which was supposed to be the scientific edifice of the world as constructed by thoughts alone’ (SL: 42/21.48).

This suggests conceptual realism. The thought-determinations trace a conceptual structure that is there in being, and although we actual thinkers can give this structure a subjective context, the structure would be there regardless of whether or not we were there to think about it. The modern antithesis to this position is that of Kant, for whom the categories are in the first instance subjective. Giving up the project of thinking the world in terms of those structures it has ‘in itself’, Kant had radically transformed Aristotle's project of the categories into one that is about thought abstracted from being, and then rather than try to move from thought to being, he was concerned with the type of thought that is adequate to an ‘objective’ knowledge of subject-relative appearances.

In response to the question of Hegel's relation to these antithetically opposed views, one would like to say something like ‘Hegel overcomes this antithetical opposition, by a move in which each side is aufgehoben!’, but by itself this is little more than a slogan. The task is to show exactly what would amount to this manoeuvre. One possible way forward here is to treat the Objective Logic as expressing a conceptual realism stretching from Aristotle to Spinoza, such that the categories are understood as categories-of-being first and then of the thinking of finite subjects, and then seeing what becomes of this after the transition to the Subjective Logic, where a clearly Kantian point of view seems to be adopted.Footnote ⁶

A significant difference separating Aristotle and Kant is that while Aristotle had seemed to think that his original categorial investigation could be carried out independently of a consideration of the logic of judgments and inferences, this assumption was reversed in Kant. For him, the categories could be deduced only on the basis of an investigation of the forms of judgments we make about the world (Kant Reference Kant, Guyer and Wood1998: A79–80/B105). It is not surprising, then, given the generally Kantian perspective with which the Subjective Logic starts, that it leads directly into an investigation of the logical forms of judgments and syllogisms. Where Hegel will depart from Kant, however, is that Hegel will endeavour to show how the questions of a judgment's conceptual form cannot be kept isolated from questions of a judgment's content. His subjective logic, then, will at the start be ‘formal’ in the familiar sense, but it will come to have ‘content’, such that the theory of syllogisms will end with a passage to the ‘objectivity’ of a type of content that has come about entirely from logical considerations. The original being is now ‘a fact which is in and for itself—objectivity’ (SL: 624/12.126), and this is where Hegel likens the process of this emergent objectivity to the ontological proof (SL: 625/12.127). The logic is now back in ‘objective’ mode, but presumably the objectivity that has emerged from the Subjective Logic will be different to that which preceded it. To use Hegel's shorthand, in this new understanding of objectivity, both Aristotelian-Spinozist and Kantian positions will have been ‘aufgehoben’.

What we see then in the account of judgment and syllogism in the Subjective Logic is what Hegel had initially spoken of as the capacity for thought to ‘determine itself, that is to give itself a content’ (SL: 42/21.48). His account of judgments and syllogisms will thus involve an account of determinate objects with determinate properties and relations coming to exist within those cognitive structures we call judgments and syllogisms, and that are being described in terms of their logical form. But in these accounts of judgment we will see how it is not only determinate objects that are generated, so too will the process described equivalently determine existing subjects or intentional agents.Footnote ⁷ That is, while it is true that, as many interpreters of Hegel's logic point out, Hegel will not ultimately mean by ‘judgment’ and ‘syllogism’ what these terms commonly mean in the history of logic, but rather, something like complex worldly arrangements of things, these complex worldly arrangements will nevertheless necessarily include beings—judging and syllogizing agents—who must be considered as an essential part of this objective reality. This objectivity is, I suggest, the actualist's actuality.

The idea that judgments might have content that includes concrete objects sounds mysterious, but is not as strange to logic, nor as counter-intuitive, as it may first seem. It is only strange against the background of the way logic has been thought of for the last hundred years. Bertrand Russell, for example, in 1904, believed that a judgment made about Mont Blanc actually contained, as a component, Mont Blanc. This sounded outrageous to Frege, for whom what a judgment asserted—its ‘content’—had to be abstract—a ‘proposition’, an abstract object capable of truth or falsity. Russell was confusing, Frege implied, a word's reference (Bedeutung) with its sense (Sinn): what was expressed by a thought contained the concept of Mont Blanc, not Mont Blanc itself (Frege Reference Frege, Gabriel, McGuinness and Kaal1980: 163). Russell himself would soon adopt an approach closer to Frege, establishing the modern paradigm of formal logic, but in 1904 he did not think his proposal an outrage to common sense. The ‘thought’ itself, he granted, was a ‘private psychological matter’, but why should we not think of the ‘object’ of the thought as ‘a certain complex (an objective proposition, one might say) in which Mont Blanc is itself a component part’ (Frege Reference Frege, Gabriel, McGuinness and Kaal1980: 169)? This is something like the sense in which, I propose, Hegel treats some judgments as having concrete content. But Hegel would link these concrete objects to similarly concrete agents doing the judging, and a similar move is found more recently within modal logic in the approach of Robert Stalnaker.

Stalnaker, an advocate of modal actualism, expresses ideas similar to those of the Russell of 1904, and the motives involved include the attempt to avoid supernaturalist assumptions that he sees at work in rival non-actualist conceptions of the semantics of modality. As he puts it, the actualist is committed to finding the basis for talk about non-actual possibilities in the semantic resources found in the actual world (Stalnaker Reference Stalnaker2012: 12). Stalnaker thus argues for the necessity of a type of singular ‘object-dependent’ proposition whose truth conditions ‘essentially involve the individual that the proposition is about’ (Stalnaker Reference Stalnaker2012: 43).Footnote ⁸ Stalnaker's position is roughly this: it is only on the basis of our capacity to form judgments about things in the actual world, broadly things in our ‘here and now’, that we can discuss alternative possible states of the actual world. For example, we learn to talk about primulas in general on the basis of learning to apply the word ‘primula’ to this or that flower, and learn to make general indefinite claims such as ‘all primulas need shade’. We learn to talk about non-actual primulas with counterfactuals such as ‘had primulas been planted here they would not have survived’. But such propositions ‘about’ merely possible things (the primulas that might have been planted here in this primula-free garden plot) must be distinguished from propositions about actual things (say, the roses that in fact are in this plot). Statements about the roses in this plot are, while statements about the primulas that only could have been in it are not, able to be accompanied by singular ‘witness’ statements about specific roses—roses that are witnesses to the truth or falsity of those statements.Footnote ⁹

I can talk about this rose in the plot in question, but not of any equivalently specifiable non-actual primula. But in Stalnaker's account, we get a sense of why Russell had abandoned this view, as for Stalnaker the specificity of the actual rose is matched by the specificity of the type of speaker with the semantic capacity to speak of roses. ‘This rose’ can only be said by a speaker (an agent) located in a specific place and time—broadly, the region of space and time where that very rose is located. Thus, these judgments are also ‘self-locating’. An account of such specific object-dependent and agent-dependent judgments will also be found in Hegel's account of judgment. This type of nexus between objects and agents bound together in Russell's ‘objective propositions’ is, I suggest, the content that is developed through Hegel's account of judgments and syllogisms in the Subjective Logic.

III. Places within the structure of judgments for objects and their judges

In the account of judgment and inference found in Hegel's Subjective Logic, it should be remembered that what is under examination is, as in the earlier Objective Logic, a series of concepts to be assessed in terms of their internal logical coherence—in this case, of concepts specifying what exactly judgments and inferences in fact are. I will be talking of the genesis of content, but in the logic we are still in the ‘realm of shadows, the world of simple essentialities, freed of all sensuous concretion’ (SL: 37/21.43), and the content discussed there is still ‘shadowy’ in as much as it is conceptually specifiable content. We will have to look to the actual world, to which Hegel turns in the rest of the Encyclopaedia, for this content to be fully determinate. But then that world is not determined from logic alone. The content generated by the logic that ‘takes the place of the former metaphysics’ (SL: 42/21.48) will be an entirely conceptually determined one, and this can only come at the cost of this degree of indeterminacy. But this in no way affects the point being made against conceptual realism. If The Science of Logic establishes a realm of ‘being’ with conceptual content, it necessarily includes in it conceptually specified conceptualizers, who will be more concretely determined in the Encyclopaedia's philosophy of spirit, which terminates in ‘World History’—the history of our world. Those conceptualizers may be determined at an abstract and shadowy level, but they are clearly logical determinations of ourselves as beings who make these sorts of judgments.

As with the conceptual triads of the Objective Logic, progress through these conceptions of judgment will typically oscillate between two opposed judgment forms, the opposition between which will be resolved in a third form within which the earlier forms are ‘aufgehoben’, the new form commencing the following cycle. Running through the series of judgments and inferences will be found two alternating underlying judgment forms that Hegel distinguishes by the different conception of predication involved in each, and by the associated form of negation to which each is subject. The first is predication as inherence of the predicate in the subject, while in the second predication is understood as the subsumption of the subject under the predicate (SL: 555/12.58; Redding Reference Redding2014). In the first type of predication, negation is limited to the predicate itself, while in the second it is the entire judgment that is negated.

This type of predicative dualism is in fact not at all unusual in the history of logic. It is found, for example, in Leibniz and in the so-called ‘algebraist’ formal logicians of the late nineteenth century. But it is not found in the ‘classical’ logic of Frege and the post-1904 Russell that came to dominate logic in the twentieth century. In short, classical logic does not recognize the type of ‘de-re’ judgments Hegel calls judgments of inherence: essentially, for classical logic, all judgments are judgments of ‘subsumption’—that is, ‘de-dicto’ judgments with propositional, that is, abstract, contents. But the idea of two fundamentally different logical types re-emerged in modal logic from the 1950s. Stalnaker's distinction between ‘generic’ propositions and the corresponding singular ‘witness’ propositions is, I suggest, a version of this view. Moreover, Hegel's judgments of inherence besides being object-dependent judgments are, at the same time, ‘self-locating’. That is, these are ‘logical’ forms that, in broad terms, specify concrete contents. We might think of them as the object-involving complexes alluded to by Russell in 1904, such that the ‘objects’ so understood are objects for specifically located ‘agents’ who also necessarily belong to those complexes. These complexes are aspects of the objective world in which agents and objects in that world are bound together in those complex but determinate ways Hegel calls ‘judgments’ and ‘syllogisms’. What is built up in the progression through increasingly complex forms of judgments and syllogisms is a conception of the world that contains ‘reason’ in it, and this reason is inseparable from the ‘reasoning’ of reasoners—beings who, among other activities, judge and make inferences.

We see this already in the first instance of an inherence judgment, Hegel's judgment of existence [das Urteil des Dasein] (SL: 557–68/12.59–70).Footnote ¹⁰ Such judgments have some specific individual concrete object occupying the place of the judgment's subject term, and the predicate expresses a simple qualitative property ‘inhering’ in that concrete subject. In Hegel's example, the property ‘red’ or ‘fragrant’ inheres in some specific rose. This is, unsurprisingly, a very limited type of judgment, not a particularly ‘true’—that is, genuine—instance of our concept of a judgment. We need to be able to talk and think in more general and non-specific or ‘abstract’ ways about such things as roses (‘roses are usually in bloom around this time’), and even about roses that don't exist (‘any rose planted here would do well’). Modern classical logic is designed for this type of non-specific, generic talk and some, such as Quine, require it to be entirely free of subject-related indexicals such as ‘this’, ‘here’, ‘now’ and so on, but Stalnaker's suggestion is that that we would not be able to speak meaningfully about roses at all unless this general talk were not able to be accompanied by more specific talk about identifiable roses—this one and that one. Our semantic resources must come from our talk about the actual world, our capacity to talk about possible future roses from our dealings with actual roses in the broad here and now. For Stalnaker, these general propositional contents rely on the existence of ‘witnesses’, while Hegel's way of expressing this type of relation would be to say that these simpler judgment forms are aufgehoben in the more complex general judgments—negated but, nevertheless, somehow incorporated into the higher forms and needed by them.

We see this process of ‘Aufhebung’ in action in a process driven by negation and the abstraction that results from it when Hegel describes a ‘positive’ judgment, ‘The rose is red’, as ‘not true’ but as having its ‘truth’ in the succeeding ‘negative judgment’. A clue as to why such positive judgments are ‘not true’—that is, not true judgments—suggests itself in one particular example: ‘It is daytime now’ (SL: 562/12.65), a version of an example familiar from the Phenomenology of Spirit, ‘The “now” is the night’ (PS: ¶95/62). As Hegel had pointed out there, truth should not be lost by being written down, and, if written down, ‘Now is night’ will become false if read tomorrow at midday. Such overt context-sensitivity—here, time-sensitivity—also applies to other judgments of Dasein, like ‘the rose is fragrant’. Some specific, actual rose existing (sein) here (da) that is fragrant now will be unlikely still to be fragrant in one or two months’ time. But ‘now’ is not simply the ‘objective’ designation of a particular time like ‘4.25 pm’, it is necessarily somebody's now: now is the temporal point from which an actual conscious subject looks out onto and cognizes the world—the ‘origin’ of the Cartesian co-ordinates, as it were, within which things can be located in relation to each other and to the agent's here and now.

Everyday English usage is happy to ascribe truth or falsity to such contextual assertions, and such was apparently the case for Aristotle and ancient philosophical thought generally (Prior Reference Prior1957: Appendix A). However, with the classical logic of Frege and Russell it became conventional to say that such assertions have incomplete contents that need completing by the addition of a temporal ‘index’, specifying, for example, the time at which the judgment is made. This is because the idea of a judgment's content came to be thought of not in terms of specific objects that those judgments were about (this would make them too time-dependent) but rather as the abstract issue of the truth or falsity of the ‘proposition’ expressed. Already by 1906, Russell had given up his idea of ‘objective propositions’, as shown in his arguments against the early modal logician, Hugh MacColl, for whom there were propositions that were ‘sometimes true and sometimes false’, as in the example ‘Mrs. Brown is not at home’ (Russell Reference Russell1906; MacColl Reference MacColl1906). Russell claimed that such expressions did not express propositions and were thereby not proper judgments. They were effectively predicates (Russell called them ‘propositional functions’) predicated of distinct, objectively designated temporal points. The complete judgment had to be expressed as ‘Mrs. Brown is not at home at some specific time, t¹’.Footnote ¹¹ That is, the contents of all judgments have to be thought of as abstract entities, ‘propositions’, with properties of being true or false, and with no concrete ‘components’, but this undermined the everyday sense in which such a judgment was understood as about its subject. From the new perspective, MacColl's judgment was not really about Mrs. Brown but about, in the sense of being true of, some temporal point at which she was, or was not, at home.

Later, Arthur Prior, a modal actualist who invented the modal logic of time-sensitive judgments, ‘tense logic’ (Prior Reference Prior1957, Reference Prior1967), rebelled and argued for the ineliminability of judgments like that of MacColl's example. Prior was motivated by the same anti-Platonist motivations found in Stalnaker, his main point was that such ‘now-centred’ judgments were basic and unable to be reduced to ‘objective’ judgments with seemingly ‘eternal’ truth-values—judgments about entities such as Mrs. Brown rather than ontologically spurious temporal points. In Hegel's treatment of these judgments he at first appears to take the side of Frege and (the post-1904) Russell over Prior and Stalnaker, but he does not argue for the elimination or replacement of such self-locating judgments by ones with properly propositional contents. Rather, just as Stalnaker and others would later claim, for Hegel such ‘self-locating’ de-re judgments could only be eliminated from an agent's cognitive activity on pain of that agent losing semantic touch with the world. Judgments of subsumption without judgments of inherence are incapable of being meaningful and hence cannot be ‘true’ judgments.

The negation of judgments is central to Hegel's method of generating more abstract from initially more concrete forms, and he describes two different stages of negation—a first that applies to specific concrete de-re judgments is followed by a second that established maximally abstract judgments. The first negation of an initial ‘positive’ judgment of existence negates the inhering predicate by a contrary one—think of ‘the rose is yellow’ as the first negation of ‘the rose is red’ (SL: 565/12.68). This type of negation preserves the underlying ‘positive’ object-dependent structure of this judgment type—the subject of the judgment is the same existing rose—and it preserves the assumption that the rose has some colour. However, it in turn becomes subject to a further negation, the output of which will be effectively the type of externally negated judgment type that allows an abstractly propositional content with the property of being either true or false. This becomes apparent from the type of judgment into which the doubly negated judgment transitions: the ‘infinite judgment’. Each negation has produced a more abstract or ‘indefinite’ judgment than that negated, and the ‘infinite’ judgment (the words ‘infinite’ and ‘indefinite’ being synonymous in traditional logic) is maximally indefinite—so indefinite as to be verging on meaninglessness.

Thus, the infinite judgment is a type of anomalous judgment that seems to presuppose some type of category mistake: Hegel's examples include ‘the rose is not an elephant’ and ‘the understanding is not a table’ (SL: 567/12.70). There is a sense in which such judgments can be considered ‘true’, but this type of truth is ‘nonsensical and fatuous’ (SL: 567/12.70). One surely does not learn anything substantial about the understanding by being told that it is ‘not an elephant’.Footnote ¹² Importantly, the reason this type of judgment has arisen is that negation has stripped the subject term of its kind determination—a kind determination that had been only implicit up to this point. The understanding is a human faculty whereas a table is a piece of furniture, but in this juxtaposition of subject and predicate, both the understanding and the table have been abstracted from their kinds. In such ‘subsumptive predication’, the predicate is simply treated as either true or false of the subject simpliciter, this being a consequence of thinking of ‘meaning’ in the Fregean way in terms of propositions that are either true or false, and it is what has introduced the possibility of such category mistakes.

All this is not to say that judgments that can abstract from existing objects and consider indeterminate hypothetical ones, for example, have no role to play in Hegel's account. It is merely to say that this type of de-dicto abstract judgment plays a role in specific contexts and relies upon input from de-re judgments of inherence. Hegel will then attempt to show how these opposed forms of inherence and subsumptive judgments are both in turn aufgehoben in a process that gives rise to a new form of de-re judgment that will start the next cycle. While simple objects such as roses played the role of subjects of inherence predication in the first cycle, it is individual kinds of objects, the kind ‘rose’, for example, that are the subjects of the second cycle. Such judgments would therefore be of a general type, such as ‘roses are plants’.Footnote ¹³

Kinds are meant to be defined in terms of their necessary properties, so this new de-re judgment form—the ‘judgment of necessity’ (SL: 575–81/12.77–83)—is, like the initial judgment of existence, a typical modal judgment. This repeated distinction between judgments of inherence and judgments of subsumption coincides with the general distinction now used by modal logicians between sentences of modal and non-modal languages respectively (Blackburn et al. Reference Blackburn, di Rijke and Venema2001), because in recent times ‘modal’ has come to refer to judgments whose truth values are in some way contextual. Prior's time-sensitive judgments and Hegel's similar judgments of existence were contextual in an obvious way—the question of their truth or falsity is dependent on the time at which they are expressed. But there is a sense in which judgments about kinds are ‘contextual’ as well. They are true in the context of the actual world and in similar ‘worlds’ which have laws of nature like ours. One might imagine some alternative ‘possible world’ (or, a possible alternative way that this world might have been) in which roses were not plants, but perhaps complex colonies of unicellular organisms, like ‘slime moulds’ perhaps. The necessity with which roses are plants is not logical necessity (a rose is not a plant in all logically possible worlds) and there is nothing self-contradictory about talk of roses not being plants in this way. That roses are plants is discovered by examining roses, not by analysing the meaning of the concept ‘rose’.

In his cycles of the forms of judgment, Hegel finally comes to explicitly evaluative judgments—‘the judgment of the concept’—the subject terms of which contain features of both judgments of existence and judgments of necessity. As with judgments of existence, these judgments are about specific individual things, but now those things considered explicitly as instances of kinds, to be evaluated in terms of how well they instantiate those kinds. That is, they carry an ‘ought to which reality may or may not conform’ (SL: 582/12.84). In Hegel's examples, a specific house or act—‘this house’, ‘this act’—is judged according to how good a house or act it is (SL: 583/21.85). Here, take the ‘first’, predicate-negated, form: ‘this house is bad’ (not, ‘this house is not good’, i.e., propositional negation). Like judgments of existence, these judgments are ‘self-locating’, but now in the deeper sense that here a judge is ‘located’ not simply at a time but within what we might think of as a value-system (a system of social ‘Sitten’), in which certain things are evaluated along certain lines defined by prototypical examples.Footnote ¹⁴

Such a judgment will start, he says, as ‘merely subjective’, for initially ‘its credential is only a subjective assurance’ and so this assurance ‘can with right be confronted by an opposing one. When the assurance is given that “this action is good”, the opposite, “this action is bad”, has equal justification’ (SL: 583–84/12.85–86). The judges being ‘located’ here are agents with certain dispositions to respond in ways that may clash—responses that are determined, we might say, by both biological and cultural characteristics. What lifts these judgments out of this type of contingency is that ‘when we say that something is good or bad, etc., we certainly do not mean to say that it is good only in a subjective consciousness’ and it is this that leads conflicting subjects to give reasons for their evaluations. In this way, this assertoric judgment shows itself to be implicitly a syllogism: ‘the house, as so and so constituted, is good’ (SL: 585/12.87).

We started with judgments that presupposed the existence of simple objects with qualities and thereby the existence of judges with capacities to respond differentially to those qualities—to respond to the difference between red and yellow roses, for example. Such a judge thus characterized is concrete—it is not the type of abstract intentional agent as described by Kant, for example, as the ‘I think that must be able to accompany all my representations’ (1998: B131). Kant's is a purely formal logical subject, driven by the norm of having the contents of their uniformly propositional beliefs cohere. The judge of a judgment of existence, in contrast, possesses an eye and a nose, as well as dispositions to respond to sensory stimuli. Hegel's cycles of judgment forms move through phases of abstraction, but in these cycles abstract judgment forms must in turn be made concrete again, such that those abstractions are shown to be abstractions from the properties of more complex objects. But by the same token, the judges of these more complex forms become equally more complex and concrete. The capacity to judge a house as a good one still relies on the immediate assurances that are evinced in a quasi-natural way from an embodied agent, but this agent must also have the capacity to abstract from those immediate assurances and invoke reasons for why the judgment should be accepted. Moreover, the objective syllogisms that emerge from the judgment of the concept will turn out to be complexes within which are included interactions between agents and objects and between agents and opposing agents. We should not be surprised when Hegel invokes the ontological argument as a model for such a logical genesis the system itself (SL: 625/12.127).

This essay started with what I took to be shared motivations between ‘naturalist’, ‘conceptual-realist’ and ‘actualist’ construals of Hegel's metaphysics. All, I suggested, are keen to show that Hegel is not committed to the supernaturalism of traditional interpretations, and of the three, actualism is in the best position for this task. Naturalism faces the hurdles of reconciling Hegelian spirit and nature, but by thinking of metaphysics as about the actual world, the actualist, I suggested, gets the presence of mind in the world ‘for free’, without supernaturalist worries. The conceptual realist wants to avoid supernatural entities like ‘cosmic super-subjects’ but at the cost of presupposing supernatural cognitive abilities—specifically supernatural semantic capacities. Within recent modal metaphysics the task of criticizing such a conception of semantic capacities has fallen to actualists like Prior and Stalnaker, and critiques similar to theirs, I have argued, are to be found in Hegel's account of judgments and syllogisms in which we find those logically generated contents, which turn logic into a ‘replacement of metaphysics’.