"Life and Freedom: Hegel on Reconciling Natural and Historical Teleology.

Colloquium

Speaker: Raoni Padui, St. John’s, Santa Fe

When: Apr 01, 2022 - 03:30pm - 05:00pm

Where: Mitchell 102

 

Description:

One of the major tasks that Hegel undertakes within his philosophy is to reconcile the various dichotomies opened up by modern philosophy, in particular the dichotomy between the domain of nature as investigated by the natural sciences, and the human, historical, and meaningful world. In his terms, this involves a reconciliation between the realm of nature and natural teleology, on the one hand, and Spirit (Geist) understood as the historical actualization of human freedom, on the other. Hegel presents a philosophy that will be sensitive both to the differences between these two domains, and to their higher speculative unification. Crucial to this unification is the concept of Life, and this paper will undertake to reconstruct Hegel’s account of Life in the Science of Logic with a view to how it may serve to reconcile natural and historical teleology, and thereby to answer the challenge of Kant’s antimony between human freedom and natural causality.