Hegel on spirited animals

Schuringa, Christoph (2022) Hegel on spirited animals. Philosophy, 97 (4). pp. 485-508. ISSN 0031-8191

Abstract

Hegel conceives of human beings as both natural and spirited. On Robert Pippin's influential reading, we are natural by being ‘ontologically’ like other animals, but spirited through a ‘social-historical achievement’. I contest both the coherence of this reading and its fidelity to Hegel's texts. For Hegel the human being is the truth of the animal. This means that spirit's self-production is not, as Pippin claims, an achievement that an animal confers on itself, but the realization of what the human being is. I end by specifying Aristotelian features of Hegel's account whose neglect by Pippin can help explain what goes wrong in his reading, and provide the outlines of a reading that is both coherent and faithful to Hegel's texts.

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Official URL:	https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819122000274
Item Type:	Article
Disciplines:	Humanities > Philosophy
Depositing User:	Christoph Schuringa
Date Deposited:	07 Aug 2023 10:55
Last Modified:	01 Nov 2024 10:50
URI:	https://nul.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/475

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