Special Announcement: Hegel's Philosophy of Right
The next Philosophy Portal course starts May 18th
Philosophy Portal has taught five courses in its first 2.5 years of operation. This year we launch our first course of the year focused on Hegel's Philosophy of Right. This course teaching will be extending our Hegelian curriculum, which currently includes the Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic. The Philosophy of Right is important for us today because it represents Hegel's most mature political notion, and specifically his theory of the State as it relates to both World Spirit and Absolute Freedom.
We need to engage our philosophical thinking in relation to Hegel's theory of the State because the world has become so complex, and as a result is producing so many novel tensions, that World Spirit appears to us as completely disorienting. The consequences for the mediation of our freedom are dramatic and problematic.
Moreover, contemporary science is seemingly not capable of taking on this problem. Today, science is obfuscating the problem of free will in a deterministic metaphysics, whether reductionist or emergentist, because it is not starting with the reality that governs the mediation of free will, that is, sociopolitical reality. Hegel's philosophy, and his resulting science of rights, works differently, as it is engaged from the first, with the spiritual reality of world spirit.
Throughout our class, we will be covering each of the three major sections of the Philosophy of Right, including the Preface and Introduction. The three major sections include explications of:
- "Abstract Right" as the immediacy of will
- "Morality" as the world will
- "The Ethical System" as the unity of the two
The Ethical System further breaks open into four more dimensions that are essential for any philosophy or science of right:
- Family as mediation of sexual love and biosocial reproduction
- Civic Community as the local social space of organisation
- State as the mediation of individual freedom and universal substance
- World Spirit as the real space of absolute freedom
The course starts May 18th, and will not only include in-depth presentations covering the totality of the book, as well as discussion spaces, but also exegetical reading spaces led by Dimitri Crooijmans, to help us further sense-make the text for our present. You can find the complete schedule below:
- Saturday May 18th @ 7pm CET: Intro + Preface
- Saturday June 1st @ 7pm CET: Abstract Right
- Wednesday June 5th @ 7pm CET: Exegetical Reading Space 1
- Saturday June 15th @ 7pm CET: Morality
- Thursday June 20th @ 7pm CET: Exegetical Reading Space 2
- Saturday June 22nd @ 7pm CET: The Ethical System (1)
- Saturday June 29th @ 7pm CET: The Ethical System (2)
As is customary at Philosophy Portal, we will also be encouraging your creative engagement with the text. After the course process, we will be opening up conference and anthology processes, similar to how we have operated in the first 2.5 years. These conference and anthology processes will be aiming to create a new community engagement around questions of politics and society, and specifically questions of politics and society as related to World Spirit and Absolute Freedom.
You can watch a trailer preview of the course below:
To learn more, or to register, check the link below:
Philosophy of Right