Hegel’s first magnum opus, the Phenomenology of Spirit, is one of western philosophy’s richest and most complex intellectual treasure troves. Such is the breadth and depth of its material that there seems to be no end to the companions, guidebooks, guides, critical introductions, and commentaries on Hegel’s most well-known and studied work. The apparent limitless series of scholarly treatments of the Phenomenology will lead some to regard the Phenomenology as a philosophical Hydra, in that just when one may think that it has been successfully understood by a number of monographs or edited collections, another monograph or edited collection springs up for the philosophical community to engage with. For others, though, the apparent limitless series of scholarly treatments of the Phenomenology is an explicit indication of the philosophical worth of Hegel’s Jena period. Without doubt, the Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ edited by Ken Westphal aims to showcase the profound value of the Phenomenology of Spirit. And, as is customary with Westphal, he hopes to achieve this with his refreshingly pugnacious and passionate approach to analytic post-Kantian idealist scholarship.

Though analytic philosophers have gradually softened their traditional contempt for all things Hegelian, when one reads Westphal’s introduction one has the impression that Westphal still feels that the ‘received wisdom’ about Hegel’s views has to be vanquished. As such, there may be concerns about the target of the edited collection: contemporary Hegel scholars and the more enlightened analytic philosophers in some parts of the Anglo-American community may worry that Westphal and the contributors are of the view that Hegel scholarship is still in an era of conflict with analytic philosophy. These philosophers might want to say to Westphal that the war is over and that there seems to be a fair amount of peace between mainstream analytic philosophy and Hegel scholarship. Given that the work of important Hegel commentators in conjunction with analytic philosophy’s self-conscious rapprochement with the traditional bête noire of analytic philosophy have shown the inadequacies of traditional views on Hegel, Westphal’s edited collection would be better directed at helping us understand how Hegel can contribute to contemporary debates, rather than defend Hegel against the usual charges levelled at him.

Having said this, however, there is compelling reason to think that many of the contributions to the Blackwell Guide focus on illustrating how Hegel can enlighten certain debates which contemporary philosophy struggles to satisfactorily resolve. As such, I would like to focus this review on some of the chapters of the collection that do just that.

In Chapter 1 of the edited collection, a paper concerning the Introduction and the three chapters of Consciousness — Sense-Certainty, Perception, and Force and Understanding — Westphal aims to show that Hegel is a major (albeit unrecognised) epistemologist. He focuses on showing how Hegel’s phenomenological method — based on the concept of immanent critique — represents the best way of undermining the Pyrrhonist’s Problem of the Criterion. He argues that Hegel’s resolution of the great sceptical challenge is superior to foundationalist models of epistemic justification and superior to coherentism. According to Westphal, Hegel’s solution to the Problem of the Criterion, unlike foundationalism, is not dogmatic and is not question begging; and unlike coherentism, Hegel’s solution does not fall foul of the charge of vicious circularity. For Westphal, Hegel is able to solve the Problem of the Criterion by having a fallibilist, pragmatic, and socio-historical account of epistemic justification which is consistent with realism about the objects of knowledge. Westphal argues that this highly complex and sophisticated epistemic system is determined by the process of immanent critique and is a discovery made by the phenomenological subject engaging in the practice of philosophical enquiry. Crucially, he argues that Hegel’s criterion for epistemic justification is not dogmatic and not question begging. Westphal then turns his attention to analysing Hegel’s arguments in Sense-Certainty, where he regards Hegel’s target in the opening chapter of the Phenomenology to be a proto-Russellian advocate of knowledge by acquaintance. Moving on to analysing the arguments in Perception and then the arguments in Force and Understanding, Westphal claims that one should take Hegel’s target in Perception to be a concept empiricist.

While there is a lot to praise in Westphal’s contribution, I have a number of concerns with it. Firstly, it seems to cover too much material. As I see it, the various sections of the paper could be developed into papers in their own right. For example, showing how Hegel’s socio-historical-realist-pragmatic theory of epistemic justification is better equipped to solve the Pyrrhonist problematic merits much more extensive and detailed discussion than is offered here. Given that Westphal wants to show that Hegel is a major epistemologist, it perhaps would have been a better strategy to situate Hegel in a direct debate with contemporary coherentists and foundationalists and then see how exactly Hegel comes out on top. There are hints of such a strategy in how Westphal briefly mentions Laurence BonJour on the subject of coherentism, but I think this part of the chapter would have been better suited to a Hegel-BonJour-Chisholm trialectic. Secondly, Westphal’s discussion of Sense-Certainty also should be a paper in its own right, not in the least because Westphal interprets the target of Hegel in a potentially controversial way. Thirdly, in his commentary on Sense-Certainty, Westphal argues that Hegel reconstructs and defends Kant’s semantics of cognitive reference while liberating this semantics from Kant’s transcendental idealism. This is, of course, a huge claim. However, it is not immediately all that clear which part of transcendental idealism Kant’s semantics of cognitive reference is being liberated from and whether Hegel’s aim to liberate Kantianism from transcendental idealism entails that Hegel’s own idealism directly emerges from Kant’s idealism. Matters are made even more complicated when Westphal writes that one of Hegel’s aims in the opening chapters of the Phenomenology is to prove that we can be conscious of objects in the world around us only if we are self-conscious. This claim is effectively concerned with the transcendental unity of apperception, and if Hegel is committed to that, then more work needs to be done to show how Hegel departs from transcendental idealism rather than reaffirms it. Fourthly, I am not convinced by Westphal’s portrayal of Hegel as an unrecognised epistemologist: the project of rehabilitating Hegel as an epistemologist seems to have been satisfactorily completed in the 1990s. Moreover, there are some prominent philosophers who have made explicit use of Hegelian epistemology in their own reflections on knowledge and epistemic justification. I have in mind the work of Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom. Fifthly, some readers who are reading Westphal’s work on Hegel for the first time may initially struggle with certain ideas, namely the realist reading of Hegel’s epistemology, because a fair amount of Westphal’s arguments and interests in this paper appear to borrow heavily from previous work.

In Chapter 4 of the edited collection, Cinzia Ferrini, in the first of her two contributions to the Blackwell Guide, examines the introduction to Observing Reason, one of the less well-known chapters of the Phenomenology. Situating Hegel’s criticisms of Kantian and Fichtean idealism in terms of the debate between subjective idealism and objective idealism, her main argument is that Hegel’s identification of thought with being — the essence of objective idealism — is an idea shared with the idealistic side of certain kinds of empiricism. In other words, Hegel’s commitment to the view that the rational and intelligible structure of nature is intrinsic to nature finds common ground with the kind of empiricism advocated by Bacon. Forging links between Hegel and one of the pillars of the Enlightenment is important for two reasons: firstly, Ferrini’s persuasive interpretation of the connection between Hegel’s conception of idealism and Bacon’s conception of empiricism suggests that Hegel’s fondness for certain features of the Enlightenment extends further than his approval of that tradition’s confidence in the authority and power of reason. Specifically, Ferrini shows that Hegel’s understanding of natural science, despite important differences, is not completely opposed to the Enlightenment’s philosophy of nature. Ferrini’s outstanding scholarly resourcefulness brings out how much of Hegel’s own brand of speculative philosophy of nature, and his thesis of concrete universality, is indebted to Bacon’s proto-speculative philosophy of nature. Secondly, a great merit of Ferrini’s second contribution consists in how we should no longer frame ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ as being diametrically opposed. She emphasises that the idealism that Hegel advocates in Observing Reason and the idealism he finds in Bacon and to some extent Kepler both consider universals and nomological properties to be fundamental to ontology and explanatory models. This idealism, however, has no commitments at all to universals or nomological properties or the formal structure of nature or the idea that the existence of the natural world is dependent on the activity of a perceiving mind.

In Chapter 5 of the edited collection, Ferrini picks up from where she left off in her first contribution. She here discusses how Hegel understood the relationship between natural science and speculative philosophy and why he found certain scientific cultures of his time to be inadequately scientific. The main argument of her second paper is that Hegel’s critique of natural science in Observing Reason is a critique only of a nominalistic and formalistic conception of scientific enquiry and that Hegel, contrary to popular opinion, was in fact very engaged with the debates between biologists, physicists, etc., of his time. Whilst the scholarly work that went into this dense paper is almost breathtakingly thorough, Ferrini perhaps could have done more to situate Hegel’s critique of nominalistic and narrow scientific cultures and theoretic models in contemporary debates on naturalism and scientism, especially since Hegel’s reflections on the relationship between natural science and speculative philosophy are incredibly relevant to one of philosophy’s most contentious issues today. Nonetheless, Ferrini’s second contribution should prove to be invaluably useful to Hegel specialists, historians of science and historians of post-Kantian philosophy.

The final contribution I wish to discuss is Jocelyn Hoy’s examination of contemporary feminist interpretations of Hegel’s account of Antigone. Hoy correctly notes that it is very difficult to argue that Hegel was straightforwardly anti-Antigone and pro-Creon or that Hegel was straightforwardly anti-Creon and pro-Antigone. Traditionally, feminist authors take Hegel’s discussion of Antigone to be a misogynistic and anti-feministic portrayal of women. For example, Hegel appears to essentialise women’s nature and relegates women to a role in the private sphere of family life that has no significant access to the public sphere; Hegel appears to regard women as purely intuitive/sentimental cognisants, who are not endowed with self-conscious reflective rational capacities; Hegel appears to argue that Antigone’s guilt is equal to that of Creon; and Hegel appears to struggle with explaining how Antigone can be a female rebel, given how Hegel defines femininity. Of course, as Hoy notes, these are not the only reasons for thinking Hegel is anti-feminist. However, as Hoy correctly emphasises, the feminist critique of Hegel fails to grasp how Hegel understands that the play brings into sharp and distressing focus the inadequacies of Attic ethical life and its inability to reconcile harmoniously equally valid laws — laws which are respectively embodied by Antigone and Creon.

Hoy then moves on to address a more interesting and compelling feminist critique of Hegel, one which claims that Hegel privileges a masculinist development of Spirit by siding with an individualistic and legalistic overcoming of Attic ethical life that took place in Roman ethical life’s development of laws, rights, and property. The idea here is that women are not regarded by Hegel to play any role in the progression to more rationally self-conscious and reflective forms of consciousness, because women are tied to family life and the private sphere. To put it more simply, feminists criticise Hegel for his apparent claim that Spirit is the province of men. In response to this objection, Hoy makes two points which I find very convincing: firstly, the transition from Attic ethical life to Roman ethical life is not in fact a spiritual improvement, but rather is a historical change that overemphasises a proto-modern conception of autonomy to the extent of alienating Spirit from itself. Secondly, one must always be careful with determining when Hegel is speaking from within a form of consciousness and when he shifts to the voice of the phenomenological subject — one of the pitfalls of the Phenomenology is identifying Hegel’s view with the one he is examining. Hoy concludes by writing that Hegel is certainly no feminist but that the feminist idea that gender and sexuality are socially constructed gets support in the Phenomenology. I agree with Hoy’s claim that feminists can get useful historical support from the text, but I differ from Hoy on the claim that Hegel is no feminist — at least without some qualification. As I see it, one should regard Hegel’s dialectical strategy as designed to be a champion of feminism, because one of Hegel’s aims in his social philosophy is to dissolve certain ways of construing gender and gender relations by showing how these binary categories fail to promote freedom and at homeness in the world.

All the contributions to the Blackwell Guide, not just the ones I have focused on, do great justice to Hegel’s Phenomenology. No one interested in Hegel can properly afford to not consult Westphal’s edited collection. Given the scholarly expertise and the success of discussing (almost all of) the Phenomenology of Spirit — it is perhaps a shame that there is no significant discussion of the Preface — one can be hopeful that more exciting and engaging research on Hegel’s first masterpiece will be inspired by this collection.